Encouraged by a genuine martyr

Father R. Vierling tweeted:

Ján Havlík (1928-1965), a Vincentian seminarian who died from the effects of torture perpetrated by the Czechoslovakian Communist regime, was beatified as a martyr at the Basilica of Our Lady of the Seven Sorrows in Šaštín, Slovakia.

Nearly 60 years after his death, his beatification is a reminder that millions suffered under communism and still stuck with the Lord. We have freedom of religion in America and waste it every day.

The tweet continued:

Ján Havlík, CM, was born in Vickovany (Skalica, Slovakia) on February 12, 1928. After finishing high school, he entered the Congregation of the Mission in Banska Bystrika (1949). On October 29, 1951, he and other seminarians were detained in Nitra. The state police interrogated and tortured him for sixteen months, leaving him hungry and cold. After a trial (February 3-5), he was sentenced to ten years in prison. Refusing to betray his faith, his sentence was extended to eleven years in prison. He spent the last period of his imprisonment at Valdice. Even in prison he was interrogated, mistreated, tortured and left without food and in the cold. He always acted in a courageous manner.

After the verdict, he said to his mother, “Don’t cry, mother. We had to offer a sacrifice to God at the altar, but now, in place of the host, we will elevate our lives and our sufferings to Him”.

When he was able to leave prison, he was sent home, seriously ill, where he died. He led a holy life: devoted, excellent in singing, gifted in word, devoted to the Virgin Mary, persevering and loving in prayer.

How cruel to send a broken man home to die before his mother.

The Soviets routinely did this because communists hate God because they work for the devil. Totalitarians usually do. The West gave Zelensky a pass when he shut down the Ukrainian Orthodox church. The press is a silent partner in his corruption and treachery.

Havlík’s trial showed the stark contrast between the Soviet Union under Stalin and the United States under Truman.

The martyr’s trial was held a month before Julius and Ethel Rosenberg were tried and convicted of espionage, for which they later executed. The left has made martyrs out of these traitors who gave atomic secrets to Josef Stalin.

The real martyr — the one who was imprisoned for daring to be religious — receives little if any attention in the press.

The left has not forgotten the executed traitors — even though the trial was 73 years ago. The left is relentless in seeking revenge.

Roy Cohn, the young prosecutor who convicted the Rosenbergs, became a longtime target of the left. His most notable client in private practice was Donald Trump, who later hired Rudy Giuliani, the lawyer who defeated the Five Families of New York as a prosecutor and cleaned up the city. Gone were all those lovely kickbacks from criminals.

Democrats went after them, getting Cohn disbarred, bankrupting Giuliani, and do I really have to catalog the crimes committed by prosecutors against President Trump?

America is becoming the very Soviet Union we waged a cold war to defeat. We need to start learning the harsh reality of what this means to our little world — and the love of God that men like Ján Havlík gave their lives for.

The Congregation of the Mission — a website for those in the Order of Saint Vincent which Ján Havlík belonged to — said he grew up very poor:

In his handwritten curriculum vitae, we read, “Because I wanted to continue my studies, for two years I attended the Civic School in Holic, to which I walked 16 kilometers each day. After two years, I began to attend the Junior High School in Skalica, traveling 36 kilometers every day by bicycle.”

10 miles a day walking to and from school makes for a very good (if tired) scholar.

In prison, the Soviets used him as slave labor.

At the end of February 1953, Ján Havlík was escorted to the Jachymov lager as a miner in the uranium mine. It is in this atmosphere of fatigue and suffering that he discovered that, if he cannot be a priest, he can be a missionary.

His faith in God saved him. Christianity is the most revolutionary movement in world history. The idea that the here and now are temporal — that every man, woman and child can live for eternity — that what the politicians do today do not matter is awesome, inspirational and encouraging. You can see why Stalin burned every church he could because Christianity threatened the very existence of Soviet governance.

Just as it threatens the DC deep state today.

For most of my life, I thought such things as the torture and martyrdom of Ján Havlík happened only in other countries. Then we elected Donald John Trump president and instead of accepting him, the people who run our government spied on him, sued him, impeached him, tried him, attempted to assassinate him and in two weeks will imprison him — just like 1,200 supporters imprisoned under the falsehood that a protest on January 6, 2021, was an insurrection.

All the documentation gathered by the J6 committee disappeared. Congress refuses to release the 41,000 hours of tape of this insurrection as they call it. The press is as curious as a dead cat about what really happened. Reporters are too busy going gaga over Trump daring to accept an invitation to attend a ceremony for 13 troops killed in the surrender of Afghanistan.

But keep the faith because in Butler, Pennsylvania, on July 13, there was a sign from God that everything will be OK.

I am not Catholic but the martyrdom of Ján Havlík encourages me.