Seek the truth – seek God. There is nothing else you need.
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Bohumil Polášek was born on 6th November 1923 in Drozdov near Zábřeh na Moravě. He comes from a poor orthodox Catholic family. When he was ten years old he was struck by a lighting. He studied the so-called Seraphic school run by the monks from the Capuchin monastery in Třebíč, where he also experienced the Second World War. In 1948 he was ordained a priest by cardinal Josef Beran and he adopted the name Anastáz. He celebrated his first mass in the church in Jedlá in his native region. During the so-called Action K, when Catholic male orders and their monasteries were forcibly closed down in April 1950, Bohumil stayed in the Capuchin monastery in Prague. When the monastery was taken over by the authorities, he was interned in the monastery in Broumov where they had to take “re-education” classes, and shortly after he was drafted to the Auxiliary Technical Battalions (PTP). He served in the Šumava Mountains, in Banská Bystrica and Zvolen and he did digging work as well as working in the forest. After his release from the PTP he was forbidden to work as a priest, and he thus returned to his native region where he began working in a saw-mill in Hoštejn. In the 1960s he received permission to work as a priest again. He served in the Liberec region and later he moved to Prague’s Vinohrady neighbourhood where he served in the church of the Most Sacred Heart of Our Lord. In the 1990s he served in the Capuchin church of St Joseph in Prague, and subsequently as a priest in Olomouc and Šternberk. He retired in 2005 and he now lives in the Capuchin monastery at Hradčanské Square in Prague.
