"My theory: the Focolari brothers have always resolved issues mainly through personal relationships. When someone builds a good personal relationship with someone else, the issue seems to be resolved, although systemically it is not and it harms the business. We are facing this again now. No one is going to change them. I think that played a role in it. The other thing is, you could theoretically assume that the bishop would have to rap some of his buddies over the knuckles after 1990. This can be something nobody wants to do. And as much as we know from psychology that displacement does not work, the temptation to resort to it is obviously there. 'Why dissect it again when it's over...' It's wrong that these things aren't clearly named. Just wrong. Those who never failed can be disgruntled because nothing was done about it and those who collaborated may worry till death that someone will use it against them. Both approaches are bad burdens to carry. I understand that not everyone was lucky like the child of Fortune that I was. When the StB first summoned me while I was still in the university because I wanted to go to Germany to see non-relatives, they told me that I would have to tell them something when I came back (I think I've told this story before). I said no. I think it was the crucial thing to do at that time because the other two attempts to talk me into collaboration were only half-hearted. That was when I didn't have the state consent and when I was in Toužim. It's not my fault I wasn't dumb back then!"
"Cardinal Tomášek is a huge hero to me, especially in retrospect, for what he endured. Just a few of us actually knew at the time. How he was treated by the ministry: 'Mr. Tomášek, don't ever think that...' and so on. They really humiliated him, kept him waiting and so on. He was powerless with those state authorities. If a secretary told him that somebody wouldn't get approval, they didn't get it. When I was a priest, one of Cardinal Tomášek's sayings was, "We just have our hands, like that." He gestured as with his hands tied, and that was true. I agree with what one can read everywhere today, that Zvěřina a Mádr were the ones who brought about a great change in him. But that was under vastly different external conditions from the consolidating normalisation era. A lot has changed since the Velehrad pilgrimage. Whether he could have done or said something differently, I don't know... When I spoke to Mixa, that was in the free era already, he explained how Tomášek could have endured it: 'It's simple, Father Pio predicted that he would live to see freedom, and that's what kept him going.' I had and have no way of verifying that, but I know Cardinal Tomášek respected Pio. Most importantly, had we all known how it would turn out eventually, we would have behaved differently in the past, in some ways."
"Towards the end of that year of my military service, I got my star. It was a planned rank again, second lieutenant. Then I went on an exercise. That was good, too. There were about six of us 'grads' in Budějovice initially and I was the only one with a star. Everybody had to say where they had served and what they were doing now... It was good, the 'green brains' were left slack-jawed! And so, even though the major I served with wrote a really bad credentials for me, the grad on duty said: 'Come on, you're going to get arrested for this.' I said: 'Look, let's write it like I'm a complete idiot and incompetent.' Then they called me to the military administration office, and I got my second star."
"The upbringing was, first, demanding in a good way, and second, looking back, there was this 'thing' that said, 'Since you're Aleš Opatrný, you're going to do this and you're not going to do that.' The formative pressure of the extended family - because we lived in contact with my mother's sisters and other relatives - so the formative pressure was quite considerable in a good way. Going back to the broader perspective, my parents were kind of old-fashioned, non-technology Google - they knew everything. I was under the impression for a long time that they really knew everything. And then what I came to appreciate when I was in my thirties and up was that they had the patience to tell us all about it. There was a phrase I used when we were so happy to listen to the interpretation: 'Dad, tell me about something,' and he did. And as I said, that extended family was an important thing for my upbringing, the cousins, they were all in a similar vein, and then my parents' friends. My parents had some interesting friends, when I look at it now, who weren't high up on the social ladder, but again, they were no populace, and you needed to stand up to them too, those demanding peers of your parents. And when I was eliminated from my studies on 'cadre' grounds, it was one of these acquaintances who helped me immensely by letting me know that no matter how much of an apprentice-turner I was now, they just believed I'd make it somewhere. In a good way. A doctor, Russian by origin said, 'Aleš, you're the horse I'm betting on,' which I thought was funny at the time, and over the next twenty or thirty years I realized how important that actually was."
Aleš Opatrný was born in Prague on 3 March 1944 to Helena and Aleš Opatrný. As the son of a pre-1948 factory manager, he was not admitted to high school, he trained for a turner and graduated from an evening technical school. In 1963 he entered the Faculty of Mechanical Engineering of the Czech Technical University. He regularly attended the home seminars of Květa Neradová where he met many luminaries especially from among the Catholic intelligentsia. Shortly after graduation, he completed his military service in Žatec, during which he made the decision to become a priest. Although Roman Catholic, his parents had a long and difficult time coming to terms with his choice. At the theological faculty he met a number of interesting teachers, who later had to leave the institute during the onset of normalisation. He was ordained priest in 1974 by Bishop František Tomášek. He found his first priestly post in Plzeň. His pastoral zeal and unwillingness to cooperate with the state authorities were the reason for his transfer to Toužim in West Bohemia. He took advantage of his ties to Plzeň and made the rectory a lively meeting place for mostly Plzeň parishioners. The witness‘s life got a strong impetus from the Renewal Seminar led by Ernst Sievers, which he attended in the mid-1980s. Changed by this experience, he became actively involved in the work of the charismatic movement. In the 1980s he was a member of the advisory board of Cardinal Tomášek. In November 1989, he took an important part in the revolutionary events in Toužim, when he called the first civic assembly in the town to the parish. Shortly after the Velvet Revolution, he was called to Prague, appointed first as a pastoral officer and from 1991 the director of the Pastoral Centre in Dejvice. At the beginning of the 1990s he was instrumental in founding the Society for the Study of Sects and New Religious Directions. Since 2002, he has worked at the Faculty of Law of Charles University where he headed the Department of Pastoral Studies and Legal Sciences for many years. In 2009, he was appointed resident canon of the Chapter of Sts. Peter and Paul in Vyšehrad, which became his home and where he currently (2023) holds the office of provost.
