"Only once, it was probably in 1989 on St. Wenceslas Day, I was at a demonstration. I was at St. Vitus's for a service and someone said that they were going to Wenceslas Square. So we went. And they legitimized me and asked me if I was a believer and I told them, 'Yes, I'm using my right given to me by the constitution.' I think they said something like I'd better leave. But it wasn't even suppressed in any way."
"I was at military service together with the academic sculptor Otmar Oliva, who was arrested there. Because they were checking his locker and they found the Charter 77. He showed it to somebody and they reported him. And so we were all called in for interrogation and that was not pleasant. 'And did the Charter affect you in any way, either in 1977 or later?' Well, we talked about it.I know an official came to the halls of residence at that time and said we were to sign a protest against the Charter and I said I hadn't read it [the Charter] and so he left."
"Otherwise, when we are in this area, I met the Archbishop of Prague Josef Cardinal Beran. He had family in Bolevec, in Pilsen. In the year 1949 he held a service in the Cathedral of St. Vitus then returned home and was told he was not allowed to go out. And then they took him to different places. In 1963, there was an internment, he was not convicted, but kept out, even his family did not know where he was. He had a sister in Bolevec and she could meet him twice a year, but it was in the building of the Ministry of the Interior that he was brought there. And then, in 1963 there was a release, he was officially released, but he was not allowed to take office, but he was allowed to receive visitors. I know that we were there with him, it was in Mukařov near Prague and then in Radvanov. In 1965 he was appointed a cardinal and went to Rome, saying that the government would not allow him to return. And, because when he died in 1969, he was buried in a place of honour among the popes. But later his last appeared, where he wrote that he would like to be buried in Prague, and if that was not possible, at least in the grave of his parents in Bolevec. Therefore, there was a meeting, and in 2018 his remains were transported back to Bohemia and placed in Prague in the church of St. Welcome to his cathedral. So I knew him personally, and he even sometimes wrote me a greeting."
"It was already noticeable that things was beginning to move on, and already that the communist regime basically allowed a fairly significant number of believers to travel for the canonization. They did not want it to take place in Prague, or here in Bohemia, for the Pope to come, because canonization is the Pope's business. And they were afraid of John Paul II. as he was a Pole, the Pope from Poland, who knew the communists and who understood a fair bit about them, and of course he acted quite straightforwardly. And, he emphasized, for example, human rights and so on. The very fact that they had already allowed a gathering of such a large number signalled the fact that the regime was already collapsing. Even in general, they allowed at the time that whoever deposited certain foreign currency, had a certain amount of Western currency, could request an exit clause. And, back then, people bought German marks and then said they had them, and they got, for example, the exit clause. The canonization was really something big, so many people gathered there. Maybe we met some relatives there that we had not seen since 1968, because they went to Canada, and suddenly we met there again after all these years. That was very nice and kind. Then, when we were already coming back, then the so-called velvet revolution had already taken place."
Filip Zdeněk Lobkowicz was born on 8 April 1954 in Pilsen, his family lived in nearby Křimice. He grew up with his parents and four other siblings, he was the youngest of them. He did not experience first-hand the confiscation of the family property and the move from the Křimice castle to the local brewery. His father Jaroslav Lobkowicz originally managed the family estate. After the expropriation of the family property, father worked as a road mender and later as a warehouseman delivering books for the Plzeň company Kniha [Book]. The family was Catholic and attended religious services. Zdeněk Lobkowicz was an altar boy from the age of four and very soon he considered a career as a priest. However, there was still a long way to go. After graduating from the grammar school in Plzeň, he completed two years of a library follow-up study with a final exam in Prague, and then studied library science at the Faculty of Arts of Charles University in Prague. His two siblings were not allowed to study by the communist regime. When he unofficially and secretly entered the Premonstratensian Order in 1976, he adopted the religious name Filip. In the 1980s he refused to cooperate with State Security. He secretly studied theology and prepared for his spiritual career, which he could officially enter only after the Velvet Revolution. He was ordained a priest in 1990. Since his ordination, he worked as a priest in western Bohemia in the Premonstratensian Canonry of Teplá in various parishes (Mariánské Lázně, Teplá, Cheb). He was elected abbot of the Teplá Abbey for the first time in 2011 and for the second time in 2020. Important milestones for him were his participation in the canonization of St Agnes of Bohemia in Rome in November 1989 and his audience with Pope John Paul II in Rome in 2003 on the occasion of the worldwide meeting of the Premonstratensians. In 2023 he was living in the Teplá monastery.
