Secret No More: National Catholic Reporter 11 May 2001

Secret no more

Editors’ note: Arthur Jones recounts here the circumstances leading to Sr. Miriam Therese Winter’s new book, the first biography of the first female Catholic priest. The book, Out Of The Depths: The Story Of Ludmila Javorova, Ordained Roman Catholic Priest, will be published by Crossroad in June. A review of Winter’s book includes a sketch of Javorova’s life and ordination in the underground church of Czechoslovakia some 30 years ago. The review, along with an excerpt from the book, appear on the following pages.

The National Catholic Reporter
May 11, 2001
By ARTHUR JONES | NCR Staff

A quarter-century ago Ludmila Javorova was a secret locked inside another secret. She was an ordained Roman Catholic priest inside the secret underground church in Czechoslovakia.

The underground church, known as Koinotes -- from koinonia, a Greek word for a tightly-knit group of believers -- operated at great risk barely beyond the repressive gaze of the Czech communist authorities.

In the 1970s and ’80s, Javorova’s story was as remote as information buried in a time capsule. In a sense, that’s what the secret was. Javorova did not want it revealed. Yet over the course of one decade, the 1990s, American enterprise and determination -- and chance -- decided otherwise.

In 1990, NCR staffer Tim McCarthy was in the Czech Republic to write about the sweeping changes taking place in Central and Eastern Europe.

In September of that year, in a lengthy article datelined Bratislava, Czechoslovakia; McCarthy revealed that married men had been ordained priests secretly in that country from the 1960s on.

Even more startling, informants told McCarthy that Bishop Felix Maria Davidek had ordained at least one woman. But McCarthy’s sources did not know who or where she was, and their story “could not be confirmed.”

Despite McCarthy’s first twist on the time lock, the secret remained. The woman at the center, Ludmila Javorova, did not want it revealed. She had her reasons, though she had no doubts about her priesthood. She knew she had been legitimately ordained, in part because of the circumstances of the time, by Davidek, a legally instituted and recognized Roman Catholic bishop.

In December 1991, The New York Times picked up on the story and reported that three Czech women had been ordained.

The next twist on the time lock had taken place.

Ruth McDonough Fitzpatrick, then-national coordinator of the U.S. Catholic Women’s Ordination Conference -- WOC -- put together a small delegation to travel to the Czech Republic. Before they left, she learned there was a former Koinotes priest in the United States and contacted him. He knew one of the women: Ludmila Javorova.

Her name was out.

The delegation, which included Quixote Center’s co-director Dolly Pommerlau and others, went to Prague, then Brno. In Brno, 18 local people gathered to listen to the visitors during a discussion about the church in the United States. Javorova, unidentified, was present. Later that evening, Javorova decided to be introduced to the Americans. They urged her to go public with her story. She declined.

Four years later a second delegation went to Brno and invited Javorova to the United States for a private visit. The delegation was co-sponsored by the Women’s Ordination Conference and the Quixote Center, a faith-based social justice center in Washington.

In October 1997, Javorova visited for two weeks. She was accompanied by an ordained woman deacon from Slovakia, the deacon’s sister and an interpreter. Not a word of this visit leaked out.

Among events lined up for Javorova was a gathering of FutureChurch in Cleveland.

Seventy-minutes flying time away, in Hartford, Conn., Sr. Miriam Therese Winter, composer, professor and director of Hartford Seminary’s Women’s Leadership Institute, was invited to the meeting by her friend, St. Joseph Sr. Chris Schenk, the executive director of FutureChurch.

There Winter met Javorova, a tall woman, perhaps 5-foot-7, slender, quiet, “deeply introverted but centered, very present to the moment.” Winter, with her work at Hartford in mind, took some notes, some photographs and flew home. She typed up the notes and put them away.

A week later, Winter rode the Amtrak to Philadelphia. After its New Haven, Conn., stop, the train was packed. Even so, Winter could hear people talking in a language she did not understand, yet recognized -- she’d been listening to it the previous weekend. There, across the aisle in the same car, was Javorova and her traveling companions.

“Ludmila shrieked in delight, she was so grateful to see a familiar face,” said Winter. “They were on their way to Washington, but they wanted to make a quick stop in New York, just to see it. They were babes in the wilderness. They had bags and purses and coats, and I said, ‘Omigod, getting off in New York you’re going to be dog meat.’ So I got off with them, got their gear into lockers, but couldn’t stay.”

Winter went on to Philadelphia. Not longer after, in Detroit for the Call to Action meeting, Winter was talking to the then-executive director of the Women’s Ordination Conference, Andrea Johnson, who said she’d been trying to convince Javorova to tell her story. They were pressing, but not too hard. The American women tried to convince Javorova to at least put her story down on paper. They explained that if she did not, after her death it would all disappear as if it had never happened.

Winter advised Johnson to contact Crossroad, the publishing house that publishes Winter’s books. “The one thing I believe absolutely essential,” Winter said, “is that when Ludmila tells her story, she needs to tell it to someone who receives it in such a way they treat it as sacred.

As Winter candidly said to NCR later, “Look, I had a concern about our feminist agenda. I’m a feminist. Honestly and sincerely, if you’re about your task, you try to do it objectively. Even though there’s a certain feminist filter, you try to watch over it. I also think, even without manipulation, you hear things differently if your primary objective is to lift up or pursue women’s ordination -- which is, of course, critically important.

“But sometimes,” Winter said, “how you ask the question determines how you get the information.

“When I’d been with Ludmila [in Cleveland],” she said, “I’d sensed something very deep there. I couldn’t put it into words. I simply said she can’t just go ahead with one European male writer who’s close to the Czech Republic who comes in and says tell me your story. I’m so used to women’s work. You need to have a safe circle of supporters as you tell the story.”

Winter returned to her duties, but the task she’d laid out stayed with her. A couple of days later she woke up in the middle of the night and said, “I have to do this story.”

That morning she called Michael Leach (then at Crossroad, now at Orbis), and told him, “You won’t believe want happened last night.” He replied, “You won’t believe what happened this morning.” At their meeting they’d said, “If only we could get M.T. Winter to write this book.”

In August 1999, during six days of conversation conducted through two interpreters, Winter learned a little of what it meant to be a secret locked inside a secret.

“When you’ve lived 40 years under totalitarian rule, World War II Nazis and then the communists, everything is secret,” Winter said. “Then you have this underground church movement. It has to be very guarded. You don’t tell anybody anything they don’t need to know.

“And these are life patterns,” said Winter. “Even when your psyche wants to override it. There were so many things in her life she’d never talked about, never said aloud even to herself. There was no sense of now we start at the beginning and go on to the end. Her recounting was all over the place. Many times I’d asked evocative questions to try to get to the narrative, and not just theory. Even dates. I had to do a lot of external work on the time line: ‘If German bombs fell on Brno this year, Ludmila was a little girl and probably that age.”

In March 2000, Winter was back in Brno again. She decided to write the first draft while living and working in the culture. In May 2000, she was in Brno for a five-week writing stint. Halfway through came word that Winter’s mother was dying. She made it home just in time, but could not return to the Czech Republic.

“Thank God for e-mails, and that we found two wonderful interpreters/translators,” said Winter. In December 2000, Winter was back with Javorova checking the facts. Up until that point Javorova still had not agreed to publication in her lifetime. “I’d sensed in the fall that she might,” said Winter, “and in December she agreed.”

Oddly, that is not the end of the account that leads to Winter’s book, reviewed on this page and excerpted on page 39. In Winter’s view, the process of telling the story changed Winter, changed Javorova, and changed the context in which women’s ordination is discussed.

Winter explains. “It is not easy to put Ludmila in a box, which we’d like to do. A stereotype -- ‘She’s a woman priest, therefore …’ She crosses back and forth. She was doing things that were post-Vatican II way back when, behind the Iron Curtain, it just blows you away. And she has this deep, deep loyalty to the institutional church, and to the importance of fitting within that tradition: not as an exception. She has always understood herself as being within the flow of that full tradition, and that what they did [in ordaining her] was right for the circumstances in which they found themselves.”

Winter continued, “Ludmila says, ‘If the bishop says I do not have faculties,’ ” -- the right to perform priestly functions -- “ ‘then I don’t.’ I pushed her on that. ‘Do you really think they took the priesthood away from you?’ ‘Absolutely not,’ she replied, ‘I am a priest forever.’

“There’s a difference, you see,” said Winter, “between faculties and priesthood. Ludmila has distinguished between the sacramental -- the gift from God, the call, the vocation -- and the canonical, the authoritative. She says the bishops and Rome have the right to rescind her faculties, but they can never take away her priesthood.

“To me, in an age where these distinctions are often lost, it’s kind of refreshing to see,” Winter said. “And also heartbreaking to see that the tradition does not see how fortunate that she’s the one who was ordained. Because she’s been very circumspect.”

In Koinotes, Javorova secretly concelebrated Mass with male Koinotes priests, but never presided. Most Koinotes members did not know she’d been ordained. Secrecy was essential for many reasons. Lives and personal liberties were at stake for all underground Catholics during that time. Today, as for more than a decade, she works as a catechist in her local parish and teaches religion in a local school.

Yet her life has changed. “I sensed a feeling of relief in her once she’d made the decision to publish,” said Winter. Winter’s life has changed, too. The Medical Mission sister, who entered the order in 1955, who published 15 albums of church music since her first, “Joy is Like the Rain,” in 1966, and whose Crossroad books include, Women of the Bible, and The Gospel According to Mary, notes what happened.

“Ludmila’s story for me -- though her priesthood is the entrée -- is in the power of her spirit. In her deep spirituality. I think what she contributes to the dialogue of females being eventually ordained -- you see the male model, male priests, did not, could not work for her -- is the way in which her deep dialogue with God is constant in helping her to discern what is her pact with God.”

“She contributes a real depth to priestly ministry,” Winter said, “a depth we don’t often refer to anymore in our anxieties about delivering the services priests need to deliver, given the diminishing numbers. She brings it right back: What is it but a call from God? A gift. And that God uses whatever you have, whoever you are, with all your limitations. And Ludmila speaks honestly through that. I found that spiritually very stirring.”

With Winter’s book, the secret is out.

National Catholic Reporter, May 11, 2001

Czechoslovakia's Secret Church Receives Herbert Haag Foundation Award: The Tablet, 9 April 2011

by Christa Pongratz-Lippitt
The Tablet - 9 April 2011

Throughout the 41 years of Communist rule in the former Eastern bloc country, an underground network of groups and individuals kept the Catholic faith alive, even to the point of ordaining married men and women. Last week, their achievement was belatedly honoured It was at a moving ceremony at Vienna’s UN-City Church on Saturday last week, 21 years after the fall of the Iron Curtain, that the largest and best-known underground circle in the former Czechoslovakia – called “Koinótés” and founded by the late Bishop Felix Maria Davidek – received the Herbert-Haag-Foundation Award for Freedom in the Church, which is bestowed annually on persons and institutions “for courageous actions within Christianity”.

Although a disputed and controversial figure, Felix Maria Davidek’s charisma and his extraordinary gifts have since been recognised by many Catholic churchmen, including bishops and cardinals. Davidek recognised the signs of the times and his response was prophetic.

Desperate situations, in this case severe persecution by one of the most relentless atheist regimes, merit desperate remedies and Davidek ordained married men and women to the Catholic priesthood. The survival strategies he undertook illuminate the Church’s potential for reform, which never ends with the death of the reformers.

Already before the Communist takeover in 1948, Davidek was fascinated by Teilhard de Chardin’s idea of an evolutionary progression towards greater and greater consciousness. He was convinced that, as well as studying philosophy and theology, seminarians should have a broad university education and also study the humanities and sciences.

While he was a seminarian in Czechoslovakia under German occupation during the Second World War, he dreamed of founding a Catholic university. After ordin­ation in 1945, Davidek continued with his university studies. He read medicine and eventually acquired a doctorate in psychology. At the same time, he founded the “Atheneum”, a preparatory course for young Catholics, men and women, who had not been allowed to attend secondary schools during the German occupation, with the aim of preparing them for matriculation and thus enabling them to study theology.

In 1948, however, the Communists took power. Davidek continued with his Atheneum courses in secret but soon came under police scrutiny and was imprisoned. Fellow prisoners say he was a particularly audacious and trucu­lent prisoner who frequently rebelled and consequently spent long periods in isolation. During his 14 years’ incarceration he jotted down on bits of lavatory paper his meticulous plans for the Church’s survival in an atheistic, Communist dictatorship.

The 1950s were the worst period of church persecution in Czechoslovakia. The theological faculties at universities were closed. Only two Catholic seminaries were allowed to remain open and both were put under state control. The bishops had forbidden seminarians to attend these state-controlled seminaries and soon many of them were imprisoned. One see after another became vacant and the secret police watched all church activities closely.

When he was released in 1964, Davidek immediately began to put his plans into action. He was soon able to gather many committed Catholics around him. They called their group “Koinótés” (derived from koinonia, the Greek word meaning community) and met regularly in secret at night and at the weekends as it was compulsory to have a job in the daytime.

Davidek taught a wide range of subjects and secretly invited prominent churchmen as guest speakers. Thanks to friends who had smuggled them in from abroad, he was also able to study the conclusions of the Second Vatican Council and the works of Karl Rahner, Yves Congar, Henri de Lubac and other well-known theologians of the time with his pupils.

The biggest challenge was to secure a sufficient number of dependable priests who could be relied on not to collaborate with the regime. Up to 1967, candidates were sent abroad to be ordained clandestinely in Germany or Poland. Both Archbishop Karol Wojtyla of Cracow, later to become Pope John Paul II, and Cardinal Joachim Meisner of Cologne, then Bishop of Berlin, clandestinely ordained Czechoslovak priests at that time.

Davidek knew he would never get permission to leave the country, so he sent Jan Blaha, a young chemist who attended conferences abroad and was a member of Koinótés, to Augsburg where he was clandestinely ordained by Bishop Josef Stimpfle. A few months later, in Prague in October 1967, Blaha was consecrated bishop by Bishop Peter Dubovsky, a Slovak Jesuit, who had himself been clandestinely ordained. Bishop Blaha then consecrated Felix Davidek. All these ordinations and consecrations have since been fully recognised and declared valid by the Vatican.

From then on, Koinótés became the nucleus of a clandestine network of committed Catholic groups in Czechoslovakia. Davidek was convinced that the Church could only survive and fulfil its mandate in small entities and that, as in the early Church, each group should have its own bishop, so he soon ordained a considerable number of them. After Soviet tanks destroyed the short-lived Prague Spring of 1968, Davidek lived with the fear that the Communists might at any time attempt to liquidate the Church ­altogether by deporting all clerics to Siberia, and so he consecrated stand-by bishops, in reserve as it were, to take over should such a situation arise.

He also ordained married men, at first for the Greek-Catholic rite, where it is the custom. The Greek-Catholic Church had been dissolved by the Communists and forcibly incorporated into the Orthodox Church and both its bishops imprisoned. Many of its ­members became martyrs but some escaped and went underground. Koinótés worked closely with these.

Later, Davidek also ordained Latin-rite married men as bi-ritual priests who were permitted to celebrate in both rites. He even consecrated one married bishop. One of the chief reasons for these initiatives was that the authorities were highly unlikely to suspect married men of being priests in Latin-rite Catholic Moravia.

Davidek also went so far as to ordain a small number of women. For some time now, he had been discussing women’s role in the Church at the Koinótés meetings. He was convinced that as women had baptised, distributed Communion to the sick and had their place as women deacons in the Church’s hierarchy in the first millennium, they were only excluded from the priesthood for historical and not dogmatic reasons. His main reason for ordaining women was pastoral. Women in women’s prisons, especially women Religious who were imprisoned on a large scale and often exposed to horrible sexual torture, had no one to care for their spiritual needs, whereas in men’s prisons there were usually several priests among the male ­prisoners.

In December 1970, he called a special ­“pastoral synod” to discuss women’s role in the Church, but when he put women’s ­ordination to the vote, half of the Koinótés members who attended voted against it. The issue split the community and became a benchmark in its history. A few days later, nevertheless, Davidek ordained Ludmila Javorová, a prominent member of Koinotes, and later made her his vicar general, which she remained until his death in 1988.

I remember discussing Bishop Davidek and his ordination of married men and women with the late Archbishop John Bukovsky in Vienna in the late 1990s. Bukovsky, who had by then retired, told me that the Vatican had sent him on a fact-finding mission to Czechoslovakia in the summer of 1977. He had been able to talk with Bishop Davidek for several hours, he said, and knew that Davidek had ordained both married men and women. “I was most surprised to be welcomed by his woman vicar general dressed in white and wearing a cross,” he added. The ordinations were illicit but valid, he underlined at the time, and said that Rome had been fully informed.

When the Iron Curtain fell in 1989, many clandestinely ordained priests and bishops, especially those from Koinótés, at first had high hopes that Rome would allow them to form a special personal prelature so that they could continue with their work. It took years to sort out their ordination status, as ­clandestine ordinations were rarely set down in writing. Most of them had to agree to be conditionally reordained in case their ­ordinations were not valid. A number of ­married priests were then taken over by the re-established Greek-Catholic Church.

In 1992, those who refused to be re-ordained were forbidden to practise their priestly ministry under threat of excommunication. And all this time, of course, Ludmila Javorová and her women colleagues were completely ignored. At the award ceremony she said: “The work has been begun. Others must continue it. Even if the Vatican considers the matter closed, it is my firm belief that at some point in the future this dossier will be reopened.”

For years after 1989, whenever I met any of these underground priests, which I did and continue to do on a regular basis, they still hoped against hope that Rome would change its mind. They would beg me not to publish interviews and refused to criticise the ­powers-that-be in Rome in any way in case this would damage their cause. Gradually, as the older ones died and their numbers diminished, they realised that they had been left to their fate. And yet they have remained what they were from the beginning – committed, humble and loyal Catholics.

At the prize-giving ceremony in Vienna, Bishop Davidek’s Koinótés was for the first time publicly recognised for what it was – a valiant effort to assure the Church’s survival under persecution. In their laudation, the Swiss theologian Professor Hans Küng of Tübingen University, Professor Hans Jorissen, a former professor of dogmatics at Bonn University and probably the leading connoisseur on the clandestine Church outside the former Czechoslovakia, and Professor Walter Kirchschläger of Lucerne University, all deplored the potential that had been lost. As Professor Jorissen said, “The concept of a missionary re-evangelisation in the Czech Republic, which today is one of Europe’s most secularised countries, could have used the experiences of the clandestine Church, which was, and could still be today, a model for re-evangelisation.”

This message is repeated in a new book on the clandestine Church in the then Czechoslovakia, Die verratene Prophetie (“Betrayed Foresight”), edited by Erwin Koller, Professor Küng and Peter Krizan, and ­published in German by Edition Exodus of Lucerne.

Bishop Dusan Spiner, who was also Davidek’s vicar general, said at the award ­ceremony: “The secular world is not a continent of barbarians and heathens to whom we must take the gospel message. It is our world and our heritage and it is in this world that we must courageously live as a church community.”

Bishop Spiner and Ludmila Javorová came to Vienna to receive the Herbert-Haag Foundation Award on behalf of Koinótés. They received standing ovations, especially when they announced that they would use the money for the birthday celebrations of Bishop Davidek, who would have been 90 this September.

-Christa Pongratz-Lippitt, The Tablet - 9 April 2011