Word: beran
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Last week the brand-new Czechoslovak government of Premier Josef Lenart announced that Prague's Archbishop Josef Beran and four other prelates would be released from confinement...
...release of the five Czech bishops was the first sign of a thaw between the church and a Stalinist regime that has been tougher on Catholicism longer than any other satellite government. But it had in short (5 ft. 2 in.), cheerful Josef Beran a tough opponent. Son of a schoolteacher, he served 15 years as a parish priest before becoming a teacher at Prague's Charles University in 1927. Beran was arrested by the Nazis in 1942, spent nearly three years at the notorious Dachau concentration camp. Pope Pius XII named him Archbishop of Prague...
Like Hungary's Josef Cardinal Mindszenty, Beran chose to battle his Communist overlords rather than negotiate with them after the Reds took over in 1948. He publicly protested the seizure of church property, forbade his clergy to take an oath of loyalty to the new regime, and eventually was put under house arrest. One day in 1949 Justice Minister Alexei Cepicka visited the archiepiscopal palace, hoping to bully him into submission. In answer, Beran went to a closet, picked up a bundle of ragged clothes that he had worn at Dachau, said "Let's go." He was hustled...
...Vatican official. "It also gives us hope that other negotiations will work out." There is little doubt as to who would be the subjects of other negotiations: Hungary's Josef Cardinal Mindszenty. a political refugee in the U.S. legation at Budapest since the 1956 uprising, and Archbishop Josef Beran of Prague, who was seized by Czech Communists in 1950, has not been heard from since...
Since in pectore appointments are often made for political reasons, when public recognition from Rome might jeopardize a cardinal in his own country, Pope John's announcement touched off a rash of speculation about likely candidates in the Iron Curtain countries. Possibilities: Archbishop Josef Beran of Prague; Monsignor Franjo Seper, former assistant to Yugoslavia's late Cardinal Stepinac...