"He [father] had never been a parish priest. Because he started working as a high school professor at the first state grammar school in Prešov. He taught history and something else they added there, and in 1950 they fired him for not converting to Orthodoxy. And so his journey searching for all kinds of jobs began. I know he got a placement in Louny. From Prešov to Louny, somewhere in the Sudetenland, or whatever it is...! But in Louny, there was some manager there, and he says: "I don't need you. What for? You don't know anything...' So they sent him back, saying they didn't need him. I don't remember how long he was there, a few months. He did not stay there for a long time. Well, then I know that he worked at the Prakovce engineering plant in Slovakia. Well, and we were still in Prešov, living as a family. They kept moving him around, but they left us alone. But then they announced that the whole family had to move out."
"So they were very disappointed, so they started attacking me. In such a way... But then when the ordination came, as they say, 'when push came to shove', they came and walked into the cathedral and started shouting. Posters saying that I'm a collaborator, a stetsec and so on. And they justified it by saying, 'Well, you're a Doctor of Science and a Candidate of Science, and under communism, no State Security collaborator could have become a Doctor of Science or a Candidate of Science.' That was reasonable, it was logical... Well, it's hard to argue against such logic. So they were shouting there, and we had to go to the other church. We left them in my cathedral, but there are two churches connected. You can walk from one to the other. So that's where I was ordained, not in mine, in the cathedral, but 'at Halík's' as we say today."
"Our director, Anton Repka, was the best. I applied to the seminary already back then. They didn't admit me, of course, but that was when I officially applied, and the Greek Catholic Church was not yet allowed, so I [went] to the Catholic one in Bratislava. Well, I don't know how he found out. And one day, I was on my way to school, and he passed by me and said, 'So, Hučko, you applied for theology. Yes. So when State Security comes to ask about you, I won't tell anybody.' Like he was going to ensure it wouldn't spread further. They didn't admit me anyway, but it doesn't matter. But I knew through a priest, he was in one of the villages there, that his children were attending religious classes too. He used to be a Franciscan before. These are the types of paradoxes that were happening at that time. That where you wouldn't expect help, you would find help, and where you would expect help, you wouldn't find it."
"That's a question that's circulating now, and it's being discussed in many forums. I've heard on the radio, or wherever they were discussing it, what's the deal with artificial intelligence. There is a fear that it will take over all of us, this artificial intelligence. That it will force us to do some things that the artificial intelligence thinks are right. But that there must be the human brain, the human will, and we can't leave everything to artificial intelligence. Because artificial intelligence has no heart, it doesn't love. It does what is right factually, and it will abide by that, but there has to be forgiveness and mercy, and this intelligence doesn't know mercy, and that is what makes it scary. It has to have a heart, and artificial intelligence doesn't have that; it only has a brain, but it doesn't have a heart."
Ladislav Hučko was born on 16 February 1948 in Prešov to Ladislav and Šarlota Hučko. His father was a Greek Catholic priest who refused to convert to Orthodoxy after the Church was forcibly dissolved in 1950. His punishment was losing his job and being forced to move to different parts of the country searching for work. After graduating from the Prešov grammar school and not being admitted to theology, the witness began his studies at the Faculty of Science in Košice. Afterwards, he worked at the faculty for a short time before he had to leave it for his religious attitudes. He found employment in the field of oil and gas research in Bratislava. He actively participated in the activities of informal religious groups and became a member of the ecumenically open Catholic movement Fokoláre. Shortly after the Velvet Revolution, he began theological studies at the Pontifical Lateran University in Rome. He was ordained a priest in 1996 by the Bishop of the Eparchy of Križevci in Croatia. After returning from his studies in Rome, he served in the ministry, taught theology at the Theological Institute in Košice, and contributed to the founding of the theological journal Verba Theologica. In 2003, Pope John Paul II appointed him the Apostolic Exarch for Catholics of the Byzantine Rite in the Czech Republic. In 2023, he lived in Prague.
