Word: josef
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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...
...guilt so easily, nor could he escape blame for the country's current economic woes. In the prevailing mood of cautious destalinization among Czech comrades, Novotny himself might be the next to go. For the first time he had a serious rival. Replacing Siroky as Premier was Josef Lenart, 40, a wartime underground leader with no embarrassing Stalinist history. Moreover, Lenart's diploma came from Moscow's own Central Committee training school, where he studied from 1953 until 1956. Last week when the new Premier took office, he got a congratulatory message from the school...
...cardinals have been given "executive mandate" by the Pope to supervise the debates. One member of the quartet-Gregory Peter Agagianian -is a Curia moderate who favors a measure of church renewal. The other three are among the most vocal "progressive" members of the council-Belgium's Leo Josef Suenens, Julius Dopfner of Munich and Giacomo Ler-caro of Bologna...