"These priests were ordained as officially, biritually. That is: to justify - according to the Code of Canon Law - that they were married, they were ordained, as it were, by the Greek Catholic Church. With the proviso that they can also serve Latin, that is, as Roman Catholic services. They were Roman Catholics, but that was sort of the way around it. Later on, after the revolution, when it was discovered - I think it was reported at that time that we had about seventy married priests - suddenly there was a problem with what to do with them. And I think that it could have been... that the ideal thing at that time would have been to leave it as it was. Not to question the priesthood and let them serve out their time as married priests. With that said, it could work really as an experiment... a living experiment in what that would mean - the eventual abolition of celibacy. What that would look like, how that would work, whether or not it would work, and whether or not there would be an ability in the Church to take that away from the ordinary faithful as well. So, unfortunately, that didn't happen. It was said... it was blamed on the uncertainty of their ordination and that they, therefore, had to be reordained. Those married priests could function anyway at most... so either become “fully committed” - either transfer to the Greek Catholic Church or to serve as deacons.”
"Then, when the Charter was created, now there was the Anti-Charter, it was signed everywhere - so of course, everyone in universities was expected to sign. We were just in our sixth year of medical school. It was interesting how that went: the whole year convened, and now one of our third-year classmates, a future dentist, came in and read a statement condemning something. And then - it was terribly interesting - a boy who had been the chairman of the SSM, the Socialist Youth Union, since the first year... But: he became chairman because when he had applied to medical school in Prague the year before, they sent - he was Slovak - they sent a report from his hometown that he was ministering in the church. He applied in Prague because he wouldn't have gotten in Slovakia. And that it was not appropriate for him to become a future doctor. So they put him in zero, in the zero years. And so, to get into medicine, he became a member of the SSM when nobody was there yet - the Socialist Youth Union. Well, yeah, but at the same time he kept that spirit, so in that sixth year, when our classmate came in there saying that we should condemn something, he said - well, okay, but could she read us the Charter? That we, as future doctors, are led to stand behind the weight of our signature, so if she could read it to us so we know what we're condemning. Of course, the lady didn't know the Charter, as no one did, so she burst into tears there. And the meeting ended and disbanded."
"Because hagiotherapy was beginning to develop, that is, a way of working with the biblical text, where the Bible functions as a projection mirror of the person, that is, you work not with what the text wants to say - let's say, that's how I would put it - but with how the person authentically experiences it, regardless of what it wants to say. Of course, the more specifically someone perceives an event, the more telling it somehow is about the person. I'm thinking of an example right now - I don't know, we read the story of Sodom and Lot's daughters, how they seduce their father there in this incestuous act, and all of a sudden there's just - I remember reading this with our addiction ward patients - one of them exploded in incredible indignation: how terrible it is that she thought she was going to come to church, that there were going to be some spiritual books read, and here they were reading something terrible. And of course, at that moment, it probably doesn't take any great experience, but it's clear - here she is talking about herself somehow."
"The sun was shining, it was pretty cold. At home, I pulled on my boots so I could run away quickly. And then my wife asked where am I going? I said I was going to a demonstration. And she got really mad that instead of picking apples in the garden, I was going to tear down socialism again. So I got offended and stayed at home. So on the seventeenth of November, I was nowhere, I was “pouting” at home that I couldn't destroy socialism. But, of course, immediately the word got out about what had happened. So right away - again it went through the parish of Kobyliska - already on Sunday of the nineteenth, we started to organize that we should go to the schools with strikes, to try to support it somehow. So we were already spinning our wheels."
"How did I come to faith? That's an interesting question. I was born into such a strange family because at that time, in that fifty-second year, both my parents were members of the Communist Party. But I know that my mother said that sometime in 1948 or 1949, when she went to the May Day parade carrying some flag (she had a bruise on her stomach from it), somehow the young people there started chanting, 'Amen to the Vatican.' And my mother, who was a believer, got angry. And since then, she's been disillusioned with the Communist Party. And even though she remained a member of the party until she was ninety-eight, she didn't feel that way internally anymore. So I grew up in such a divided family. My mother was a believer, a Catholic, and later she played the organ in the old Bohnice, in Kobylisy. My father remained faithful to the communist ideology. He worked at the University of Economics. When the crisis period, as it was called, the liberalisation, democratisation, came in 1968, he was very involved in it. But because he had such a very good record, he managed to pass the so-called vetting procedures that were then. He stayed in the Communist Party and he became a hardened communist. So I grew up in a semi-Communist, semi-Catholic family."
Prokop Remes was born on April 12, 1952, in Prague into a Catholic-Communist family, himself leaning towards his Catholic heritage. He began to grow close to the faith while studying at the classical grammar school in Štěpánská Street. Although he was attracted by the humanities, in 1971 he entered medicine as “the least political field”. After graduating in 1977, he worked as a gynaecologist and obstetrician in a hospital in Kladno, but he encountered the necessity to perform abortions, which was not in line with his faith. In 1984, he moved to the gynaecological outpatient clinic of the Bohnice Psychiatric Hospital. Here he became closer to psychiatry, but also the Catholic dissent. In the underground, so-called “Dvořák’s group”, he began to educate himself in theology and to prepare for lower priestly ordination - although he was already a married father of a family at that time. His underground studies were ended by the Velvet Revolution, after which he had to study theology from the beginning, this time at the “above-ground” Catholic theological faculty. However, secretly ordained married priests faced distrust from the Church after the coup and Prokop Remes did not become a priest. In the 1990s he became certified in psychiatry and introduced a new form of psychotherapy in Bohnice - hagiotherapy, i.e. therapy with biblical texts. He also co-founded the Society for the Study of Sects and New Religious Directions. In 2021 he was still working as a gynaecologist, psychotherapist and religionist.
