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The Archbishop of Prague, Frantisek Cardinal Tomasek, one of the region's toughest Roman Catholic leaders and a staunch anti-Communist, has retired at 91, the Papal Nuncio said today...

''The people are impatient, waiting so long for their rights,'' the 88-year-old Czechoslovak prelate, Frantisek Cardinal Tomasek, said in an interview. ''I have appealed to the Government again and again but my repeals go without response.'' ''It is remarkable that in this country, where loyalty to the faith is so heavily burdened with sacrifice, we can observe a certain religious revival, particularly among young people,'' Cardinal Tomasek said. But he cautioned against excessive emphasis on numbers, noting a severe shortage of priests. In some parts, ''for 20 or 30 years bishops have been lacking, and young people do not even know what a bishop looks like.'' ''It is not a massed tendency, and it is not connected with politics, but some of our young people are attracted to religion, above all to be accepted in a community, not to be alone,'' the priest said. ''The idea of our Government is to divide people, our society is so atomized. That way, the Government can exercise closer control.''

Years ago, the Pope referred to Cardinal Tomasek as ''the oak of Bohemia.'' Now, Vatican officials make clear that besides wanting to pray with Roman Catholics and salute Czechoslovakia's nascent democracy, [John Paul II] wishes to pay tribute to the aged prelate while, the officials quietly add, time remains. Early last year, when the Government opened a new crackdown on its opponents and the notion of the Communists' downfall seemed a pipe dream, the Cardinal demanded that the Government talk to its citizens. ''The justified yearning of citizens to live in a free environment, something which has become a matter of course in the 20th century, cannot be stifled by crude violence,'' he said. ''It will take years for us to rebuild our church and all the necessary structures,'' Cardinal Tomasek recently told 30 Days, a Catholic monthly magazine. ''But we will succeed.''

Four days later, after the Communist Party shuffled its leadership in an effort to retain power, Cardinal [Tomasek] spoke at the country's first televised Mass, celebrating the canonization of St. Agnes of Bohemia weeks earlier in Rome. \"In this historic moment in the fight for truth and justice,\" he told 250,000 worshipers, \"I and the Catholic Church are on the side of the people.\" Hopes for change were crushed by the Soviet-led invasion in August 1968, and no successor as Archbishop of Prague was named when Cardinal [Beran] died in 1969 because the Vatican feared immediate persecution. Not until 1977 did Pope Paul VI announce that in May 1976 he had secretly elevated Bishop Tomasek to cardinal, and not until 1978 was the new cardinal named Archbishop of Prague and Primate of Czechoslovakia. State Diminished Stature Cardinal Tomasek was the church's oldest active archbishop when he retired on March 27, 1991. In June he was hospitalized after several weeks of illness. When his condition deteriorated last month, Reuters reported today, Cardinal Tomasek said he did not wish to be hospitalized again.

''For long decades, spirit has been chased out from our homeland,'' said Mr. [Vaclav Havel], who has described himself in interviews as a believer in God but an adherent of no particular religion. ''I have the honor to be a witness to the moment when its soil is being kissed by the apostle of spirituality.'' ''This was the predetermined site,'' the Pope said, ''for constructing a new world, a new person, led by the prospect of prosperity, but with an existential program strictly limited only to this earth.'' ''You have been called the church of silence, but your silence was not the silence of sleep or death,'' he said. ''In the spiritual order, silence is the state in which the most precious values are born.''