Obituary: Cardinal Miloslav Vlk, priest who hid ministry from communists

Cardinal Miloslav Vlk, who has died at the age of 84. Picture: AP

The Vatican said Pope Francis sent condolences on Saturday, praising the emeritus cardinal as a “generous  pastor.”

“I recall with admiration his tenacious fidelity to Christ, despite the deprivations and the persecutions against the Church,” the Pope said in the message to Prague Cardinal Dominik Duka.

Czech Culture Minister Daniel Herman said Vlk died of cancer on Saturday.

The Vatican, in its tribute, noted that Vlk did hard farm work as a child in southern Bohemia. Because the communist regime at the time made theological studies impossible, Vlk worked at a car factory in the early 1950s. In 1968, during the Prague Spring era of liberalising reforms, he was ordained a priest when he was 36 and appointed secretary to the bishop of Ceske Budejovice.

But state authorities, “worried about his influence and pastoral activity, forced him” in 1971 to leave Ceske Budejovice and sent him to isolated parishes in the mountains of the Bohemian forest, the Vatican said.

Then, in 1978, state authorities, “in collaboration with the local communists, revoked his state authorisation to exercise his priestly ministry,” the Vatican said.

“Citizen Miloslav Vlk” was thus forced to live underground in Prague from  October 1978 through the end of 1988, according to the  Vatican.

For most of those years, Vlk worked officially as a  window-cleaner in Prague, while secretly performing his pastoral activity with small groups of lay Catholics.

After Czechoslovakia’s Velvet Revolution, which saw the nation end communist rule and eventually become two countries, the Czech Republic and Slovakia, his pastoral dedication was recognised quickly and openly. Pope John Paul II made him a bishop in Ceske Budejovice in 1990, a year later appointed him archbishop of Prague, and in 1994, elevated him to the rank of cardinal.

In 2009, Vlk greeted Pope Benedict XVI during  his visit to the Czech Republic. Vlk retired a year later.

Czech Prime Minister Bohuslav Sobotka, in a Twitter post, praised Vlk as a “highly respected man who was not afraid to act according to his conscience”.

FRANCES D’EMILIO