Norbert Capek

Norbert Fabián Čapek (3 June 1870 – ? October 1942) was the founder of the modern Unitarian Church in the Czech Republic.

Čapek was born into a Roman Catholic family on 3 June 1870, in Radomyšl, a village in Strakonice District in southern Bohemia. As a boy he wanted to join the priesthood, but soon became disillusioned with the church. At the age of 18 he left Catholicism for the Baptist church and was ordained a minister.

Čapek traveled widely as a Baptist evangelist, from Saxony in the west to the Ukraine in the east. In Moravia he was influenced by the free Christianity and the Moravian Brotherhood, and his religious convictions became progressively more liberal and anti-clerical. He wrote for and edited a number of journals. His articles on topics ranging from psychology to politics attracted unfavorable attention from the German authorities, and in 1914 he and his wife, Marie, and their eight children fled to the United States.

In the United States, Norbert became editor of a Czech language newspaper and served as pastor of the First Slovak Baptist Church in Newark, New Jersey. Widowed shortly after his arrival in US, Čapek met and married another Czech expatriate, Mája Oktavec, in 1917. She had been born in Chomutov in Western Bohemia in 1888 and moved to the U.S. at the age of 19. She was a graduate of the School of Library Science at Columbia University and worked in the New York Public Library.

While in the United States, Čapek faced two heresy trials at the accusation of Slovak Baptist ministers, in attempts to expel him from the Baptist association. Pursuing an increasingly liberal religious perspective, Norbert resigned as a Baptist minister in 1919. Norbert and Maja discovered Unitarianism, and in 1921 they joined the First Unitarian Church of Essex County (in Orange, New Jersey). Together, they decided to bring Unitarianism back to their homeland, newly independent after World War I. The couple returned to Prague in 1921.

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