Mons. doc. Ing. Mgr. Aleš Opatrný , Th.D.

"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."