Hanging on a rope and heading upwards: The story of Salesian Libor Ovečka
Stáhnout obrázek
Libor Ovečka was born on 27 September 1950 in Prague. His father Josef and mother Olga came from a Catholic background in Central Moravia in the foothills of the Jeseníky Mountains. His father was a secondary school professor of Greek and Latin. He had to leave school in the 1950s and when he returned he taught Russian and German. Libor Ovečka graduated from grammar school, then studied English and philosophy. In August 1968, he photographed Soviet tanks in the centre of Prague. From 1970 he studied theology in secret and in 1979 was ordained in Krakow. He worked in the environment of the Salesian community. With his friend and theology student Mireia Ryškova, he was followed by State Security. He appears in a signal file named Preacher by the agents. He continued his theological studies in secret in Erfurt, East Germany. In the early 1990s he received his doctorate from the University of Passau. He founded the Jabok Higher Vocational School for the study of social and spiritual work with youth. At the time of the recording in 2024, he was working at the rectory in Dolni Počernice, Prague.
