ANASTÁZ OPASEK

Prefatory note

This profile of the late Anastáz Opasek, Abbot of the Benedictine monastery in Břevnov, Prague, is an attempt to pay tribute to a religious leader who came to symbolize, in many ways, much that was best about Czech idealism. He suffered imprisonment and other forms of persecution; but he never wavered in his commitment to integrity of life in person, and to the well-being of his compatriots. In the nineteen-eighties, I had the great privilege of interviewing him, for a Canadian radio program about the modern history of Czech reform movements. The interview took place in the Benedictine monastery of Rohr, near Munich, where Opasek was living in exile. For me, it was a deeply moving encounter: he was a man dedicated to the highest good in all things; and there shone in him a purity of soul and a kindness of heart that was extraordinary. It gave me joy to know, a few years later, that he was able to go home, after the Velvet Revolution, and reclaim Břevnov Abbey for the Benedictines, who had been expelled from it by the Communists.

Included in the profile are two examples of Opasek’s literary work: his poem “Spring in Rohr”, and an excerpt from his poem “Jan Palach’s Monument in Rome”. The English translation of these two poems is by Marie Jeřábková, a Czech émigrée in Montréal, whose family in Prague had a long-standing friendship with the Abbot.

The profile is followed by a poem of my own, written the day after my encounter with Opasek in Rohr.

Profile

Patriotism is a word often misused. It tends to be purloined by jingoists, by the kind of raucous nationalists who despise other countries, sometimes to the point of xenophobia, and who endorse their own country’s actions, even when they are deplorable. True patriots, though, are quite different. They love what is best about their native land, but they are not blind to its flaws.

That clear-eyed love is rooted in devotion to patria in its principal forms: in its landscape, in its history, in its language; these are the ingredients that produce a sense of home. Such a sense can be detected in any country and its people. But it falters when a country is subjugated to a foreign power, especially when that power tries to eradicate the national identity of its subject peoples, by suppressing their language, restricting their freedoms, and reducing their access to economic prosperity. That was what happened to the Czechs of Bohemia and Moravia when they were absorbed, oppressively, into the Austro-Hungarian Empire in the early seventeenth century.

Two centuries later came the Great Awakening. Liberal-minded leaders paved the way for a renaissance of the Czech self. Folk music and folk customs, surviving in obscurity, were accorded a new respect. The language was revived and refined, and became a vehicle for serious literature — this harked back to Jan Hus’s call, half a millennium earlier, to preserve the mother tongue: if it dies, he knew, the nation dies with it. And the nation’s history, its record of rich autonomy and impoverished enslavement, was at long last researched and published by the great Palacký. Simultaneously, the great Smetana honoured that past in operas and in a cycle of symphonic poems; who also enshrined in one of them a loving portrait of his native landscape. All of these elemental facets of patria combined to solidify in the Czech character a self-worth, a perception of what home is, and a loyalty to its ideals, which bore fruit in the sovereign republic founded in 1918.

Born in 1913 on April 20th, Jan Opasek spent his early childhood in the wartime ferment that led up to that founding, and his formative years in the heady atmosphere of a newly democratic and egalitarian society. Like most Czechs of his time, he grew up with a deep regard for the humane policies of Tomáš Garrigue Masaryk, the Founding President, and with a warm appreciation of hopes fulfilled, of a homeland coming into its own. It was a feeling that stayed with him to the end of his life. It endured throughout the sad times of successive despotisms, by the Nazis and the Communists. It endured throughout his twenty-two years of exile, and his stubborn support, in absentia, of the dissidents who kept hope alive. And it was rewarded, in old age, when he came home to a finally liberated Prague. In all of that, Opasek was a patriot of the finest, purest kind.

However, at a deeper level, Opasek was a patriot of an altogether different kind. As a devout Christian, a Benedictine, his real home was elsewhere, in the kingdom of Heaven. That was his ultimate patria, and life in this world was merely an exile from it, to be discontinued at death.

During that terrestrial exile, he led a life of glory to God and goodwill to all, beloved by his fellow religious and admired by his fellow citizens. For some monastics, at various times and in various places, life has been uneventful, except spiritually. Opasek’s life was not. To begin with, it was conventional enough. Graduating from high school in 1932, he entered the Benedictine Order as a postulant in the Břevnov Abbey in Prague, taking Anastáz as his name in religion; it had been the name of the first Abbot, when the monastery was founded in the tenth century. After studies in Prague and Rome, he was ordained priest and became, in due course, Prior of the community. It was a community of profound commitment to spiritual values, but also one very open to the world around it and sensitive to the needs of the people at large. For Opasek and his fellow monks, the war years under the German occupation were a time to mourn, as they grieved over the evils inflicted on their country by wicked men: all they could do was make the abbey a haven for any patriot in need of consolation. This was a turning-point in Opasek’s life. Events had crowded in on him. If he had thought, earlier, that there would be an even tenor to his life, marked by quietude, contemplation, and retirement, he was disabused of any such notion by the impact of Hitler on his homeland. And if, in the immediate postwar years, he thought to lead his community (he was elected Abbot in 1947) into playing a vital and peaceful role in the reconstruction of a healthy land, that was not to be: he did succeed, briefly, in making Břevnov Abbey a shining example of Benedict­ine life, with a special focus on Gregorian chant, and a shining example of outreach as a cultural centre, with a special interest in intellectual conferences; but any such success was short-lived, being doomed by the Communist coup d’état of March 1948.

From then on, an atheist regime bore down heavily on the Church. Religious Orders were suppressed, Břevnov Abbey was sequestered by the state for profane use, and monks and nuns were forced into secular life, usually into menial jobs. Many of them were arrested, tried on trumped-up charges of treason, and imprisoned. Abbot Opasek was singled out for special treatment, perhaps because he represented, more noticeably than any other ecclesiastic, the kind of rock-solid faith-based integrity that stood as a rebuke to the corrupt ethos of the bullies and liars who had seized power. Arrested in 1949, he was sentenced in 1950, after a rigged trial, to life imprisonment. The first part of his sentence was served in solitary confinement. But neither that nor anything else broke his spirit, not the devastation of the community, not his being cut off from the sacraments: throughout he maintained a serenity of soul that was an inspiration to all who knew him.

In 1960, during a mild political thaw, he was granted conditional release — conditional, of course, on good behaviour. That meant there was to be no attempt to reconstitute a monastic community, and he was forbidden to engage in any activities as a priest. He was put to work as a labourer on construction sites; and the official expectation was that he would live out his days as an obedient nobody.

The commissars misjudged. A man like Opasek does not meekly accept an emasculated role as a non-person. Submissiveness like that would run counter to his entrenched belief in the sacredness of the person, in the rights of the individual. There was nothing Opasek could do to reclaim his abbey, or to re-engage openly in the priestly life, or to organize meetings of his dispersed confrères. But as their Father in God, he did keep in touch, clandestinely, with as many of them as he could reach; and he nourished in them a sense of abiding and uncompromising fellowship, even though it could not enjoy, for the foreseeable future, any outward form.

Thus they persevered for eight more years. Then, in the Prague Spring of 1968, there seemed to be grounds for hope that a better outcome was in the offing. Political reforms were moving towards a liberal democratization of the country. And in those resurrectional months it did not seem unthinkable that there might be a substantial relaxation of official hostility to the Church; that it might even be possible for the religious Orders to reconstitute themselves, perhaps even being allowed to reclaim their buildings. It was a cheering prospect.

No such redemption occurred. In August of that year, a Soviet-led armed invasion turned back the clock. The reform movement was suppressed, and a re-installed hard-line regime proclaimed the gospel according to Brezhnev. At a few removes of succession, he was true heir to Stalin; under him, the country was once again the so-called Workers’ Paradise — in reality, the citizens’ Hell.

At the time of the take-over, the border was still porous: people could still get out to the West, across the border into West Germany. Many stayed, not willing to abandon their country, even in such a dark hour. Others left, for various reasons: to escape probable persecution, or to resettle in a world of brighter and more humane opportunities. Among those who left was Anastáz Opasek, who spoke German, taking with him other Břevnov monks who were likewise bilingual. They were invited to join fellow Benedictines in the monastery of Rohr, near Munich, where they would help serve as teachers in the adjoining high school.

It was, for them, patriots all, a heart-rending decision, to quit their beloved homeland, leaving it to a despotic fate. But in reality there was no chance they could reassemble there as a religious community, either in Břevnov or elsewhere in Bohemia; and their first duty was to their vows, even if that meant fulfilling them in exile. They were destined to be away for the next twenty-two years.

Those two decades in Rohr were, for the most part, a time of restoration for the exiled Benedictines. They had endured imprisonment, ostracism, serflike work. Above all, they had endured prohibition, being forbidden the right to live out their vocation as a religious community. That right could now be once again enjoyed.

That enjoyment was always tinged, of course, with a certain sadness. From afar, they had to mourn the death of Jan Palach, who immolated himself in downtown Prague, beside the statue of St Wenceslas, in protest against the re-imposition of tyranny, the denial of justice, the crushing of normal human aspirations.

There were also, however, encouraging signs. As time went by, it became clear that there was, at home, a thriving dissident community. It was not so much an organized political opposition as it was a loose coalition of like-minded idealists, who had inherited the sane mantle of the pre-war Masaryk republic, who stood for the principle of civic rights, and who were intent on formulating a blueprint for recovery, to be acted on when the Communist regime should eventually collapse from its own intrinsic enervation.

The great sign of that moral determination was the founding in 1977 of Charter ’77. This was a document, signed by thousands, which served as a blanket manifesto covering a multitude of dissident activities and attitudes. These were essentially of two kinds: condemnatory and constructive. The evils of the police state were exposed to world scrutiny by smuggling out accounts of malicious prosecution and imprisonment, with flagrant examples of the wholesale repression of freedom of expression, assembly, and worship. On the positive side, the Charter signatories conducted wide-ranging, but clandestine, seminars on what might be, at some future date, the outline of a just society; and the substance of those reflections, in written form, was widely circulated in copies made by a covert network of typists.

Opasek knew of all this. As soon as Charter ’77 was published, he read it in German translation, where he was living in Rohr. “Its contents impressed me enormously”, he later wrote, “and convinced me that this was the most important document issued in our country since 1968… the beginning of something quite new and unprecedented”.

Already, in 1972, he had worked along parallel lines himself. He had founded an organization called Opus Bonum, based in West Germany. Under his leadership, academic conferences were held on religious and cultural subjects, which later expanded into the political realm. With an eye on the future, meetings of the young were held in Rohr. And the organization was active also in publishing, issuing books on religion, history, and philosophy, editions of documents, and new literature in both prose and verse.

That last activity was especially dear to Opasek, since he himself, besides everything else, was lifelong an accomplished poet, in an original and modernist style. The best proof of that is in his own work. In English translation, here is a poem called “Spring in Rohr”, from his 1974 collection called “Images”.

Spring in Rohr

The landscape is spreading

in various angles

its skin is brownish

has green eyes of fields and meadows

its hair the trees adorn its head

often on the horizon

sometimes within a hand’s reach

village churches peek around each hill

it is a landscape akin to my country

chiselled paths could lead as far as Bohemia

the fingers of poles will bear hops

it is only spring and lenten fasts

stocky farmers

in Bavarian German

praise the Lord God

sing to the Lord

the sign of the flood

has not reached here

the children speak in the universal language

of innocence and wonder

throughout the year

in dancing steps

the Virgin Mary

rises toward heaven

While living in Rohr in 1975, Opasek received an invitation to go to Rome, along with other members of Opus Bonum, to attend the dedication of the newly installed Jan Palach Monument, which had been created by an Italian sculptor as a memorial tribute to the young Czech student who had immolated himself in 1969 in Prague. He, Opasek, was very touched that the fate of his homeland should have occasioned such an eloquent response in another country. He afterwards, in gratitude wrote a poem about the monument and its meaning. It reads in part:-

Jan Palach’s Monument in Rome

A luminous sky with hot days

a firm stone pedestal

such a blue sky God painted

into it your hands are lifted

your fingertips touch the blue

you want to live in the ardour of your love

and with his hands the sculptor

orated about a freedom that burns

because you alone are dead but yet living

in these days of heavy grief

you are still burning

because unfree life

is nothing more than

vegetating

Freedom, of one sort or another, is crucial to a just society. Palach had known this, and died a fiery death to cast light on a regime built on lies. Havel knew this, equally: he pitted the truth against that regime, with his aphorism about “living in the truth”; and he based his dissident opposition on that. If anyone, Opasek knew it, too: for at the centre of his faith was Jesus’s dictum that “the truth shall make you free”; it was a door that opened on freedom, first on the pilgrim road to God, but second on the civic path to peace and justice.

To Opasek, many miles away across the frontier, the dissident movement back home was a beacon of hope. Havel, in and out of jail, was a kindred spirit. Repeatedly, whenever an unbugged connection could be made, Opasek phoned him long distance, to offer him encouragement, to endorse his approach to problems. Theirs were not conversations about ad hoc tactics: rather, about pure principle. Seldom have two men, coming at the same thing from different starting-points, the spiritual and the intellectual, been so at one. Their joy, in the outcome, was identical.

Opasek was seventy-six in November 1989, when the Communist regime collapsed in the Velvet Revolution. He went back home the following year, and was able to negotiate the return of Břevnov Abbey to the Benedictines. In 1991 Havel, who was now President, awarded him the country’s highest civilian honour, the Order of the White Lion.

He died in 1999 on August 24th, aged eighty-six.

Requiescat in pace