The community of priests that I belonged to operated cautiously, covertly and on the basis of strict secrecy, and this proved to be a prudent strategy. We would all meet together as a group three times a year, but otherwise we only met in twos. Most of the time we celebrated Mass alone very early in the morning, and on Saturdays or special occasions with friends. I celebrated my “first mass” in the Czech lands with my brother priests on the Feast of Christ the King at a country cottage not far from Prague. After that I celebrated Mass fairly regularly in the home of my friends, the Kováříks, a couple whom I had been with in the autumn of 1968 during our brief exile in Britain. The windows of their apartment looked out over the old Jewish cemetery in the heart of Old Prague, and so during Mass I would often think of the chosen people of Israel, God’s first love, and ask forgiveness for all the suffering we Christians had caused the Jews, both in the Prague ghetto and elsewhere in the world. I also liked to celebrate Mass in summer with friends in the open air, at early morning in forests, or in the mountains. We operated according to the principle that we could divulge our priesthood to others only if three conditions were fulfilled—and always under an oath of total secrecy. They had to be people we knew very well, they had to be capable of keeping a secret even in extremis, and they had to require our service as priests for some reason. But as a matter of principle, it was forbidden in our circle to inform our own parents, because apparently in the past carelessness had resulted in a breach of security when someone from the family circle had “let the cat out of the bag.” This could, of course, jeopardize the entire group, and betray the whole network of the “hidden church” that had contacts abroad. Such carelessness could have dire consequences, not only for the clandestinely ordained priest, but also for other people. Priests risked several years’ imprisonment for the “crime of impeding the state supervision of churches and religious societies”—which in our days usually carried a two-year sentence—but they could also be charged with “collaboration with foreign enemies,” and goodness knows what else. However, there was no longer any risk of a death sentence, or imprisonment for life for “spying for the Vatican,” as there had been in the 1950s. So I couldn’t even tell my mother, with whom I lived until her death in 1986, that I was a priest. However, I am sure that a mother’s heart can sense very many things. Although we couldn’t speak about a lot of things specifically, it was obvious toward the end of her life that she knew somehow what my situation was. She respected my secret, however, and I was glad she didn’t know absolutely everything, because it would have been hard for her to live with the knowledge that I could be sent to prison any day. Although she did not profess membership of the church during her adult life, I don’t think she ever abandoned faith as such in her heart. A few years before she died, Fr. Reinsberg, who was fond of both my parents, reconciled her formally with God and the church. From then on, during her lengthy time in hospital, I was able to bring holy communion to her. It rather distressed my mother that I had no family of my own, or close blood relatives. Although she knew I was already a grown man for many years, and “could make my way in the world,” she was also knew I wasn’t a “practical person” and had various other vulnerable features. It was great relief to her just before her death when the family of Dr. Scarlett Vasiluková-Rešlová, who was part of my closest “spiritual family,” and helped me selflessly to take care of my mother, fully “adopted” me and forever afterwards was my calm human support. My mother died peacefully in my arms, reconciled with God and people, on the First of May—the feast of St. Joseph the Worker, to whom she prayed every day for years the prayer she had prayed since childhood: “preserve me from sin and grant me a happy death.” Previously I was unable to imagine what a “happy death” was, and I had feared the day of my mother’s death since I was a child. But when I held my mother by the hand, said a few words of farewell, and gave her holy communion, she immediately closed her eyes, and I felt her passage into eternity as a gift, and I knew her prayer had been heard. “The underground church” or “illegal church structures” were actually what the secret police called us. We never regarded ourselves as some special church “alongside” or even “against” the church that officially functioned in Czechoslovakia. Every baptized person is part of the church. I have always attached importance to Karl Rahner’s assertion that the church is the sign of the unity of humankind, and those who are not formally members of it belong to it in a certain way by the very fact of being human, and particularly by virtue of their yearning for meaning, truth and good. We realized that under a Communist regime, the church could not publicly perform much of what is a natural and inseparable part of its life. We wanted to prevent the church being reduced to the bare minimum of activity permitted by the atheist regime, which was essentially just the liturgy, and the repair of church buildings, a situation to which many members of the laity, and even the clergy, were beginning to become accustomed. In the ranks of the officially active clergy we carefully distinguished between many self-sacrificing priests whom we deeply respected, and with whom we cooperated where possible, and the officials of the regime-sponsored “Association of Catholic Clergy—Pacem in Terris,” who could be seen embracing the Communist bigwigs in front of the TV cameras; we could only pray for the latter. But both the “official” church and the “unofficial” structures were multifaceted, and extremely variegated. I never thought of the Czech church in those days as monochromatic; those of us who were clandestine priests never thought ourselves better than those priests who continued to serve in parishes, and often had to compromise with the regime. As it was later proved, there were heroes and traitors—but above all weak and erring individuals—on both sides. (excerpted from chapter 5)
