“On our own, we wouldn’t have been able to put together the kind of council the Communists organized for us”
Bohumil Kolář was born on January 7, 1924, in Prague. He was the second child of Bohumil Kolář, the elder and Anastázie Kolářová. His father was a construction worker and his mother was in the household raising five children. His mother died of tuberculosis when he was eleven years old. He attended elementary and grammar school in Prague - Vinohrady. He graduated in the midst of the so-called “Heydrichiáda” (a campaign of terror against the Czech population in retaliation for the assassination of Reinhart Heydrich by an airborne unit of the exterritorial Czechoslovak army). Bohumil decided early on in his life, in his childhood, that he’d serve the church by becoming a clergyman. Therefore, he quite naturally chose to study Theology in 1942. He attended the archiepiscopal seminary in Prague - Břežany until the liberation of Czechoslovakia in 1945. After the liberation, Prague’s Faculty of Theology was re-opened and the students of the archiepiscopal seminary could continue their studies at the Faculty. Bohumil Kolář was one of those few from the individual dioceses selected for advanced studies of Theology in Rome. He finished his studies in Rome in 1948 and was ordained right at the time of the February 1948 coup d’état in Czechoslovakia. Although the post-February situation in Czechoslovakia wasn’t good for the church, Bohumil didn’t have any fears about coming back to the country and becoming a cleric. In July 1948, he returned as one of the last from Rome to Czechoslovakia and became a chaplain in Roudnice nad Labem. In June 1949, Bohumil Kolář was one of the many clerics who was not frightened by Communist pressure and read the pastoral letter entitled A Message to the People of Faith by Their Bishops and Ordinaries in the Hour of the Gravest Test. For his brave stand he had to suffer the consequences: he was interrogated by the secret state police and subsequently jailed. However, on October 28, 1949, he was pardoned. That was just the beginning. In the few years that followed, relations between the Communist regime and the Roman-Catholic church gradually deteriorated and culminated in the open persecution, arrests and imprisonment of priests and clerics in the early fifties. Some of the leading members of the clergy were even executed. Mr. Kolář was arrested on August 23, 1952. His detention and subsequent arrest in Brno lasted until June 1953, when the district court of justice in Ostrava finally announced his verdict. On trial was a group of eleven charged with high treason. Among them were three Roman-catholic priests: Antonín Bradna, Karel Pilík and our Bohumil Kolář. They were found guilty and sentenced to long terms in prison. Mr. Kolář was sentenced to 10 years of maximum security jail time. After the trial, Mr. Kolář was put in a prison in Mladá Boleslav where he spent several months working with mica. In November 1953, he was transferred to the infamous Valdice prison. He worked in several places around the prison, mostly in the Koh-i-Noor works and in the glass-grinding works. Life in prison meant constant harassment by the jail guards, cold and starvation. On the other hand, it also meant meeting inspiring people from all walks of life. He cherishes these encounters to this day. Friendships were being made not only with other catholic clerics but also with brothers from other churches and religions. Mr. Kolář was released from Valdice in May, 1960. He wasn’t allowed to continue his clerical service, so he got a job as a warehouse employee. He worked in the warehouse until 1968 when the political relaxation after the Prague Spring enabled him to return as a parson to Roudnice nad Labem. Here he worked until 1991. In 1991, he got a job at the re-established Faculty of Theology where he taught Pedagogy and Catechism for several years. He was also working for the Prague seminary for five years in the first half of the nineties. In the present, Mr. Kolář still actively serves in two parishes near Prague.
