Life is about nothing less than a clear conscience
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Arnošt Červinka was born on May 24, 1939 in Zlín to Anna and Arnošt Červinka. The events of the Second World War drastically affected the family’s destiny. Arnošt’s uncle and mother’s brother, František Diviš, was arrested and imprisoned in Terezín on suspicion of aiding the resistance. From there he returned home in May 1945 - for the funeral of his father, who was fatally shot by retreating German soldiers. Arnošt himself lived the last two years of the war with his grandparents in Rašovice, separated from his mother and two siblings, whom he did not see for the first time until August 1945. The family was strongly Catholic, and the upbringing of the children was carried out in this spirit. In the 1950s, Arnošt resigned from the Pionýr youth organization by his own decision, because he wanted to devote himself fully to ministry. His father refused to join the Communist Party in 1948, and because of this Arnošt and his sister Anna had problems with admission to secondary school. After completing a one-year teaching course following elementary schooling, Arnošt managed to graduate from Gottwald’s 11-year secondary school. In order to be able to study at the Faculty of Theology, he first had to work for two years, first as a music teacher and then as a worker in Gottwald’s Svit. Thanks to this, he improved his Dossier (a file with information about one´s class background, one´s views and ideological attitudes) and in 1958 he was able to join the Roman Catholic Cyril and Methodius Faculty in Litoměřice, which he completed with priestly ordination five years later. After the start of normalization, Arnošt Červinka once again got into a dispute with the regime. In 1971, he consciously did not participate in the elections of the representative bodies of Czechoslovakia and at the same time refused to join the pro-regime Catholic organization Pacem in terris. This resulted in a transfer to a village parish and a ban on priestly activity in the Gottwaldov district. After the Velvet Revolution, Arnošt Červinka taught history at the Archbishop’s High School in Kroměříž for twenty years and at the same time continued to work as a priest. He is the author of the publication History of the Zlín parish and surrounding parishes. In 2021 he lived in Zlín.
