Czech priests executed by communist regime beatified as martyrs in Brno
Two Czech Roman Catholic priests killed by the communist regime were beatified in Brno at the weekend. Jan Bula and Václav Drbola were hanged after a show trial in the 1950s, the darkest decade of the totalitarian era.
Clerics Jan Bula and Václav Drbola were beatified as martyrs in front of over 13,000 people in a hall at Brno’s Exhibition Grounds on Saturday afternoon.
The two were victims of what were called the Babice show trials, one example of many such abuses of the judicial system in Czechoslovakia in the 1950s, the bloodiest decade of the Communist system.
Bula and Drbola were found guilty of the killing of three local Communist Party officials in the Vysočina region, a crime falsely blamed on a subversive group directed from abroad.
Historian Tomáš Petráček, who is himself a priest, shared some background about the two clerics with Czech Radio.
“Those priests represented a moral backbone for the local farmers who resisted the beginnings of the collectivisation of agriculture in what was a very traditional area, with a kind of folk Catholicism.”
Bula and Drbola were hanged in Jihlava in 1952. The former was 31, the latter 39.
The two parish priests came from humble backgrounds and were popular in the rural area, a fact that made them a target for the authorities. Tomáš Petráček continues.
“The totalitarian regime understood that if it didn’t eliminate some people and frighten others into submission, it wouldn’t succeed in breaking the spine of the nation. For the regime, they were merely human material from whom fake confessions – and ideally accusations against others – could be extracted. Then they snuffed their lives out without batting an eyelid. The cynicism of the Communist elite and those who carried out these brutal actions was hard to believe.”
What does Saturday’s declaration of the two priests as “blessed” mean in practical terms? Pavel Konzbul is Bishop of Brno.
“When somebody is beatified, they became a kind of model. Their names can be taken by those undergoing confirmation. They have a day in the liturgical calendar as a kind of memorial, when people remember them as an example to us all.”
The two priests beatified on Saturday will be remembered every year on June 17.
Beatification follows a complex process under Roman Catholic law. The first phase, which for Bula was in 2004 and for Drbola in 2011, takes place at diocesan level. Witnesses spoke before a tribunal and historians combed the archives for details about the pair.
The second phase takes place at the Vatican in Rome, where Pope Leo XIV signed a decree on the beatification of Bula and Drbola in October last year.
Being beatified is the step before canonisation, the process by which someone is made a saint. A miracle attributed to the individual’s intercession after beatification is usually required for this.
