Bohumil Polášek

* 1923

  • “There was a kind of a revolt in Plavecké Podhradie. There was a church where believers were allowed to go, but when their priests (officially approved by the communists – transl.’s note) celebrated the mass, nobody would go there in protest. When the mass was celebrated by a priest from the Auxiliary Technical Battalions, the church was full of people. The authorities were angry because of it, and so they banned the masses altogether.”

  • “I can share the following story with you; it happened while I still lived at home. We had a field and cows and since the place was further away from the village, people had a kind of shelters built there. One day there was a thunderstorm and we went to hide in one of those shelters, and it got hit by a lightning. I was a little boy, I was ten years old, and I was lying on a plank there. My mom and brother were sitting inside. Dad saw the place where the lightning struck. The cows that were there dropped to the ground as it hit. I woke up; I got some burns on my leg and stomach. All the others were unharmed, I was the only one injured. I started crying. A neighbour who lived in the neighbouring village invited me to his house, gave me some food and I ate it and ran home to Drozdov.”

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    Loretánské náměstí, Praha 1, 29.04.2014

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Seek the truth – seek God. There is nothing else you need.

portretAnastaz.jpg (historic)
Bohumil Polášek
zdroj: sbírka pamětníka

  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.