From: clarinews@clarinet.com (PETER S. GREEN)
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Subject: Secret Priests have until Palm Sunday to surface
Keywords: international, non-usa government, government, organized religion,
	religion, political parties, politics
Date: Sat, 11 Apr 92 7:11:14 PDT
Location: czeckoslavakia
ACategory: international
Slugword: czech-priests
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	PRAGUE, Czechoslovakia (UPI) -- Some of Czechoslovakia's secret
priests and bishops, the plain-clothes cold warriors of the Roman
Catholic Church's struggle against communism, will not comply with the
church's Palm Sunday deadline and give up their underground ministries.
	In a recent letter to the estimated 260 secret priests and 16 secret
bishops in Czechoslovaia, the Czech and Moravian Bishops' Confrence has
told the priests and bishops they must help avert a potential schism -- a
church with ``two kinds of priestly activity... two kinds of masses, two
ways of giving communion, two ways of giving the sacrament and two ways
of spreading the gospel.''
	But many secret priests and bishops -- ordinary men who would not
otherwise have put on the cloth -- were ordained in an effort to keep the
church alive in the face of brutal Communist repression and they refuse
to give up their posts.
	To complicate the situation, the Vatican says 80 of the priests and
four bishops are married. Catholic priests must remain celibate.
	For 10 years Milan Beran, a married father of four, ministered to the
Catholic community of Czechoslovakia, criss-crossing the country under
the cover of his job repairing church roofs.
	Ordained in a stealthy midnight ceremony, Beran was part of the
secret church, and his family life helped him avoid the suspicion of the
secret police at a time when communist authorities often imprisoned
priests.
	Disguised as laborers or hospital workers, secret priests carried out
pastoral work in factories, or slipped to the bedside of dying patients
to administer last rites. They organized summer camps for Catholic youth
and trained aspiring priests shut out of the few remaining state-
supervised seminaries.
	Through the Czech bishops conference, the Vatican has now told these
secret priests that married men must give up acting as priests, and
others must pass a test of their ecclesiastic knowledge to remain
priests.
	``If they keep officiating after Palm Sunday, despite the orders of
the bishops, then the church could soon be in a state of schism,'' says
the Rev. Dominik Duka, a former secret priest now working for the
official church.
	Bristling at what they see as high-handed tactics backed by the very
priests who collaborated with communist rule, many secret priests are
refusing to give up their mission.
	``I will keep on ministering when I have the time and when it is
needed,'' says Beran, who works in a home for street people. Priests are
few around his East Bohemian home and he still travels the region
celebrating mass.
	The Vatican is also worried that in the decades of its covert
operation, the secret church may not have abided by church doctrine, and
the vitally important pastoral chain, that has passed unbroken from the
Catholic Church's founder, Christ's apostle, St. Peter, may have broken.
	``That could put in doubt much of what the secret priests did in the
underground,'' says Vaclav Vasko, a church historian who spent seven
years in communist labor camps for his Christian activism.
	Earlier this month, Cardinal Josef Ratzinger, head of the Vatican's
Congregation of the Doctrine of the Faith, the Church's disciplinary
body, came to Prague to investigate the situation and call for firm
action against the secret bishops.
	The Czech bishops, many of whom feel the Vatican has treated its cold
warriors shabbily, have toned down the Vatican's threats. But if the
secret bishops and priests continue to officiate despite Rome's orders,
say church officials, they could create a schism within the church.
	Beran says he does not see why it matters whether he is married or
not, or whose orders he works under.
	``I felt a call and there was a need,'' he said. ``And there still is
a need. There are many people seeking something but the communists kept
them ignorant of God.''
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