Cardinal Marcelo Semeraro, prefect of the Dicastery for the Causes of Saints, presided on Saturday, August 31, at the beatification Mass of the seminarian Ján Havlík, who died in 1965 after years of imprisonment and torture by the communist regime, in what was then Czechoslovakia.
According to reports Vatican NewsCardinal Semeraro presided over Havlík’s beatification Mass, in the space in front of the Basilica of the Seven Sorrows of the Virgin Mary in Sastin, Slovakia.
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In his words after the Angelus this Sunday at the Vatican, Pope Francis recalled that “this young man was murdered in 1965, during the regime’s persecution against the Church in what was then Czechoslovakia. May his perseverance in the testimony of faith in Christ be an encouragement to those who still suffer similar trials today. A round of applause for the new Blessed!”
Ján Havlík was born on February 12, 1928 and died on December 27, 1965, three years after his release, after having suffered 14 years of physical and psychological abuse and torture, harsh interrogations, long isolation and a sentence to labor. heavy. When he died he was 37 years old.
Cardinal Semerario said in his homily that “the love of Christ is the strength that makes us overcome weakness, the energy that makes us overcome fear, the light that makes us overcome darkness.”
“It was the virtue of hope that made him grow and sustained his vocation. A sign of hope, in fact, is already the choice to be a disciple of Saint Vincent de Paul”, and like him Ján “was truly a ray of sunshine for those who knew him.”
The cardinal highlighted that the new blessed “was a victim of a regime that wanted to destroy the religious phenomenon and, in particular, the Catholic Church and its ministers,” and recalled that in the prison Ján “copied at night, writing with a pencil and also making copies for others, the integral humanism by Jacques Maritain”, about 350 pages.
Faced with the communists’ idea of “keeping the word of God prisoner,” the seminarian “opposed fidelity to God, fidelity to one’s vocation, to one’s own choice of charity toward others.”
“The Church recognizes this and confirmed it recently with the Pope’s words: Ján Havlík ‘was a faithful disciple of the Lord Jesus, to whom he generously offered his life, forgiving his persecutors.'”
Biography of the new blessed Ján Havlík
He was born on February 12, 1928 in Dubovce, a town in western Slovakia. Around the age of 13 he began the discernment to enter the Congregation of the Mission of Saint Vincent de Paul, notes the Vatican agency Fides.
In 1943 he started the Vincentian Apostolic School (minor seminary) in Banská Bystrica. The coup d’état of February 1948 marked the beginning of the communist regime in Czechoslovakia.
In August 1949 he began his novitiate. In April 1950 the ŠtB (Slovak political police) implemented “Akce K”, an operation to eliminate all male religious orders.
Ján and the other novices were arrested and subjected to a “re-education” program for two weeks and then forced to perform hard labor. He was released after three months and continued his theological training clandestinely, while working as a worker in Nitra.
He was arrested on October 29, 1951 with the other Vincentian seminarians. He was detained for 15 months, during which he was subjected to interrogations and torture. In February 1953 he was sentenced to 14 years’ hard labor for high treason, a sentence later reduced to 10 years.
Of his work in prison he wrote: “I feel like I am on a mission, no missionary could wish for a better and more challenging place to work. If only there was more time. If only work didn’t weigh us down so much.’”
He worked in several concentration camps and mined uranium in the Jáchymov mines until the fall of 1958, when he was accused of belonging to a clandestine prisoners’ association. He was admitted to a psychiatric hospital and then transferred to various prisons until October 29, 1962, when he was released.
Two spiritual notebooks that he wrote belong to these last years of his life: “The Way of the Cross of Little Souls” and “Diary.”
He died on December 27, 1965 due to the physical and psychological torture he suffered.
Walter Sanchez Silva
I have been a husband since 2008. My wife and I have three children here and one who went to heaven in 2023, before he was born. Since I joined ACI Prensa in 2005, I have had the opportunity to cover various events of the Catholic Church. Among them, the World Youth Days in Cologne, Madrid and Rio de Janeiro and the apostolic trips of Pope Benedict XVI to Mexico and of Pope Francis to South Korea. I have been sent to the Vatican to cover the Family synods, in 2015; of the Amazon, in 2019 and that of Synodality, in 2023. I closely follow the situation of the Catholic Church in Nicaragua, which suffers persecution from the dictatorship of Daniel Ortega, as well as current ecclesiastical events in the region.