The Seminarian Who Found His Calling In Communist Captivity: Blessed Ján Havlík
On December 14, 2023, Pope Francis signed decrees sanctioning the elevation to the altars of eight new blessed. Six of them are martyrs of Nazi-fascism and communism. Slovak Ján Havlík was among them: his story was also told in 2021 by a young student as part of the “Silent Heroes” project about which we have already written in these pages.
A complicated kid
Janko, as he is still affectionately called in Slovak Catholic circles and his home region, was born in the village of Vlčkovany (now Dubovce) on February 12, 1928. For his father Karol and mother Justina, he was the first of four children. The family lived in extreme poverty, and young Janko would be forced from childhood to make considerable sacrifices to go to school, having to walk sixteen kilometers every day to get there and back home.
As a young boy, Havlík was hardly a role model Christian: official biographies tell us that he was very boisterous and undisciplined, to the point that his mother was often forced to scold and chastise him severely. But as time went on, another key figure within the family would exert a decisive influence on young Janko: his aunt Angela, who would later take her vows as Sister Modesta. Her concrete example sowed the seed of a priestly vocation in Ján Havlík’s soul.
Growing up and the advent of communism
In 1943, 15-year-old Janko decided to move to Banská Bystrica, in central Slovakia, to the apostolic school of the Congregation of the Mission of St. Vincent de Paul. The school was temporarily moved to Trnava in 1944, due to the outbreak of the Slovak National Uprising in August, and then returned to Banská Bystrica at the end of the war. Janko Havlík was a teenager determined to become a priest and follow the example of the Vincentian fathers with whom he studied: he resolved to become a missionary like them.
In 1948, however, the communist coup complicated things, not only for Janko’s education (he would graduate from high school the following year) but for the entire Catholic Church, which was regarded as the people’s enemy and as such fiercely persecuted by the regime.
Communist persecution
1949 was the year in which the communist regime increased its efforts to destroy the structure of the Christian Churches in Czechoslovakia. In particular, the Catholic Church was seen as both reactionary and submissive to the capitalist powers because of its obedience to the Vatican. The failed attempt to create a state church, through the so-called “Catholic Action” in 1949, persuaded the regime to carry out a complete liquidation of the religious orders in 1950, through the so-called Akcia K and Akcia R (the liquidation of men’s and women’s orders, respectively). The Vincentians were targeted with the second wave of Akcia K on the night of May 3–4, 1950. Janko Havlík, together with fellow novitiates, had his first experience of deportation, communist re-education, and finally forced labor in the construction of the Nosice hydroelectric power plant in northern Slovakia. Within three months the re-educational carousel ended, and considering the Vincentian order to have been liquidated, the regime sent everyone home.
Clandestine novitiate, arrest, and mock trial
The authorities brought all the country’s seminaries under state control, but for Janko Havlík and his fellow brothers a new opportunity became available. Father Štefan Krištín, one of the old-school Vincentians, established a clandestine seminary in Nitra. This was a huge risk at a time in history when large-scale mock trials against so-called “traitor bishops” were being set up, and priests, nuns, and lay people were being arrested because of their faith. Courses at Father Štefan’s seminary were held in the evenings, allowing students to keep up appearances by working during the day.
On October 28, 1951, however, the secret police raided the house and arrested everyone, including Father Štefan. The Vincentians would spend fifteen months of imprisonment fraught with violence and torture.
The trial finally took place in Nitra between February 3 and 5, 1953. The establishment of the clandestine seminary was deemed “high treason aimed at overthrowing our people’s democracy system.” A Vincentian nun in attendance would report on the courage and heroism of Ján Havlík, who asked to be given the punishment of his brethren as well, fearlessly responding to the prosecution’s provocations. His sentence was exemplary: fourteen years of imprisonment, later reduced to ten upon appeal. Janko therefore became an MUkL (muž určený k likvidácii, a man doomed to annihilation), but he addressed his mother this way: “Don’t cry, mother. We wanted to offer God the sacrifice of the altar, but now we will offer our suffering and our very lives instead of the Blessed Sacrament.”
Missionary meaning and a second indictment
Janko Havlík was sent to the terrible Jáchymov labor camp complex, where the MUkL extracted uranium without any protection: the regime would then gift it to the “friends and brothers” of the Soviet Union. The atmosphere in the camp was extremely harsh and the risk of bumping into the occasional snitch was always high, but Janko remained sharp in his thinking. As he entrusted to his friend Anton Srholec, who reported on it in his memoir Svetlo z hlbín jáchymovských lagrov (A Light from the Depths of Jáchymov’s Lagers), “I feel like I’m on a mission. After all, no missionary could aspire to a better or more inspiring place than this!”
Janko was relentless in offering every possible help, be it of material or spiritual nature, to his fellow prisoners. This, however, ultimately led his tormentors to abuse him all the time. Beaten and locked up in solitary confinement, assigned the worst kinds of labor, brutally interrogated at all times, day and night…His friends hurt because of him, and pleaded with him to try to be less uncompromising and more flexible in his “missionary spirit.” But for Ján Havlík, the testimony of Christian love could not accommodate any compromise.
Because of this tenacity, Ján Havlík would be further convicted of crimes against the state while still a prisoner of the regime. Transferred to one of the camps in the Příbram complex Janko had begun copying and translating religious and philosophical texts that had been banished (such as Maritain’s Integral Humanism, translated directly from French). It was only a matter of time before the delation came, and in 1959 came the subsequent sentence: the missionary activity of this young seminarian was intolerable for the idea of “religious freedom” as enshrined in the Czechoslovak constitution. Ján Havlík was sentenced to an additional year of imprisonment.
An unwavering faith
His final stint in prison was the hardest. Especially in 1958, as Ján himself mentioned in his memoirs, the torments he endured in Ruzyn Prison in Prague seemed to strain his until then unshakable faith. Janko experienced a genuine “dark night of the soul,” from which he emerged only thanks to his trust in Divine Providence.
Ján’s state of health upon his release from prison on Oct. 23, 1962, was alarmingly frail: weakened by eleven years of physical and mental agonies, the 34-year-old, never-ordained seminarian, who had become a missionary amidst the gloom of communist prisons, was hurriedly grabbed from his cell, dressed, and abandoned outside the gates of the Valdice prison. However, he did not consider his missionary work finished and immersed himself in working to translate religious texts from German and Italian. Janko also took the time to write a prayer book based on the Stations of the Cross, in which he envisioned a child accompanying Christ to Calvary. It is not difficult to discern, within this text, the missionary intent that Ján himself had embraced during his years of imprisonment.
Martyrdom and Spiritual Legacy
It was December 27, 1965, the feast day of St. John the Evangelist (and his name day), when Ján died on the streets of Skalica. He had not yet turned thirty-eight. In the last few weeks, he perceived ever more the value of his sacrifice, as is clear from his writings: “Today, the altar of sacrifice is my sickbed and my decaying body.”
Almost fifty-eight years later, the Church is acknowledging his extraordinary stature as a martyr of the faith by declaring Ján Havlík blessed. It does so at a time of acute divisiveness when it becomes increasingly evident that there is a need for a new understanding of the notion of “mission.” Now that the Church needs the courage to recognize the need to be a missionary, first and foremost within itself, the example of Janko Havlík is a providential one. This young seminarian could have whined about everything the communist regime took from him, right up to the last moment of his earthly existence. Instead, Janko acknowledged and welcomed the missionary opportunity amid the circumstances in which he unwillingly found himself.
Sources for this story:
- Janko Havlík: nádejný slovenský blahoslavený (available online)
- Život ako dar — Janko Havlik (573) (video available online)
- Anton Srholec — Svetlo z hlbín jáchymovských lagrov, Vydavateľstvo Michala Vaška, Prešov, 1996
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