Towards the end of May 1945, a car stopped at the gates of the Prague seminar, attracting the curiosity of students who were walking in the park. It got a little man who wore the uniform of the SS - the ones that the Americans gave to the prisoners of the newly liberated Nazi concentration camp of Dachau - but with the Czechoslovak flag pinned on his chest. The little man was Josef Beran (1888-1969), former rector of the seminary and, shortly thereafter, the new archbishop of Prague and leader of the resistance of the Church against the anti-religious persecution.
After the coup of February '48, the communist government led by Gottwald did everything to create divisions within the Czechoslovak Church, the pope and to separate it from society: "We must isolate the church hierarchy - Gottwald said - and prepare the ground for them to inflict the fatal blow. Our tactic has no plans to stop neither bishops nor the individual religious will skip their joints [...]. Will conduct a campaign through the media [...]. You must use the calm, be cautious, avoid slander. "
Beran was not a malleable, and if initially seemed to seek a compromise with the regime so as to contribute to the peaceful reconstruction of the country, soon began to raise his voice repeatedly in defense of religious freedom. The anti-religious
escalation culminated in June 1949 when the regime founded Catholic Action "state" formed by priests and laity "progressives", duly excommunicated by the Vatican and sentenced by local bishops, who responded with the pastoral letter "In ' time of great trial, to be read in all churches at the Corpus Christi State despite the ban. The letter defended the Pope's authority, the right of parents bringing up children, freedom of action of the Church in education and culture, and the importance of state financial support to charities that social activities and charitable. Came the fateful June 19. In Prague, the police blocked the access of the St. Vitus Cathedral, where he celebrated Beran, provocative and filled with plainclothes bothered putting even trying to sing the Internationale. Archbishop Beran was escorted into the palace for him and began a forced internment, there and elsewhere in the province, which lasted until 1965. Erased from history, separated from his people, assisted by a few nuns and guarded by police, Beran was faithful to his episcopal motto, "Eucharist and employment" means daily worship, study of the patron saints of the Czechs and cutting firewood for the winter. A policeman was converted by observing how he lived his days.
In 1962 he was "retired" but he remained a thorn in the side of the regime, which preferred to indulge in those years the Vatican's Ostpolitik soft line, until in February '65 at the Party Central Committee in Prague, someone said, "What if you take well over here is dangerous. " Two weeks after he began his exile in Rome, the result of compromise, and has since worked tirelessly for the good of his country, condemning in no uncertain terms the lack of religious freedom in the communist bloc: whether the Nazi persecution was more brutal - observed - communist one was just more refined and therefore more dangerous. Vatican Council II intervened on religious freedom, calling for the rehabilitation of Jan Hus. Created cardinal by Pope Paul VI, died May 17, 1969. From
disclosure of the political police, declassified and shown in the exhibition staged in recent days at the Theological Faculty in Prague, emerging concerns of the regime that would not accommodate the body of Beran at home because he feared that this act of piety could transform an anti-government demonstration in the wound of the sacrifice of Palach, consumatosi few months earlier, was still open. Pope Paul VI then rested Beran - exceptional privilege - in the Vatican Grottoes, one of the popes.
In 1998, he opened the process of beatification.
introduction Beran's biography published recently in czech Republic, his former secretary in Rome, Monsignor Skarvada, writes: "The took away the freedom and the homeland, but the Tabernacle was for him a source of comfort and joy ... He knew that prayer, that nobody could take away, is stronger than evil and the political police of the communist regime. " Cardinal Vlk, the current archbishop of Prague, called it "a symbol of resistance against totalitarianism to which we must not give bargaining or to compromise the truth."
In November, the month in which culminate on the twentieth anniversary of the "velvet revolution", is opening in Prague a monument to Beran, and at the Strahov Monastery there is a large exhibition on the persecuted Church. (IlSussidiario)
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