Book Review - Out of the Depths

A book review and personal introduction to Ludmila Jarorova
by Ruth McDonough Fitzpatrick
Website rights offered to CNWE. Broader rights available on written request.

OUT OF THE DEPTHS: The Story of Ludmila Javorova, Ordained Roman Catholic Priest
By Miriam Therese Winter
The Crossroad Publishing Company
481 Eighth Avenue, New York, NY 1000l
2001
260 pages
$19.95 hardback
Contains photographs, list of significant dates, Bishops of Koinotes, Acknowledgements, and Resources. No index. Introduction

The world was shocked in 1977 when the papal declaration, Inter Insignores came out of the Vatican. Paul VI was the pope at the time. He had asked his Vatican Biblical Commission to study the Scriptures about the subject of ordaining women. The Biblical Commission found nothing in Scripture that said women could or could not be ordained. The majority of the members favored the ordination of women. Nevertheless the declaration, signed by Cardinal Seper, said women could not be ordained because (1) women cannot image Jesus and (2) it has never been done.

I was National Coordinator of WOC at the time, having just opened the first national office in the Mt. Pleasant area of Washington, DC. We all thought it was issued because the Episcopal Church had ordained women priests in 1974, the first WOC conference was held in 1975 and pressure was growing when in 1976 the original US Bishops historic Call to Action affirmed women's ordination.

We were wrong. Why did the apostle Paul say women should stop talking in Church? Because they had been doing just that. Why did Pope Paul VI say that women could not be ordained? Because women had already been ordained! Now we know that Inter Insignores was issued because the Vatican knew that women priests had already been ordained in the Underground Church in Czechoslovakia in 1970.

When Genevieve Chavez called to ask if I would write a review for Miriam Theres's book about Ludmila Javarova, one of those women priests, my immediate reply was: "I can't think of anyone more appropriate!" She agreed. After all, finding Ludmila in 1992 had been one of the great accomplishments in my life at WOC.

The discovery delegation started with an article buried in the New York Times about the surfacing of married male priests from the underground church in Czechoslovakia after the end of the communist era. The date of that article was December 8, 1991. There was no by-line. The last line in the article said: ". . . and at least three women were ordained." I was startled. My heart skipped a beat and I had to read it again. Yes, the article in the Times clearly stated that at least three women had been ordained in the underground Church in Czechoslovakia -- along with a good number of married men. I put the paper down and said to myself, Dear Godde! Here I am the National Coordinator of the Women's Ordination Conference, and if women have been ordained in my lifetime, I have to go find them, meet with them, hear their stories so that they do not slip into the world of myth and unwritten history. I phoned the New York Times. No one knew who had written the article, or at least they were not telling.

I thought to myself, we can't phone these women. I don't know the language. We can't fax them. However, I had made several fact-finding trips to Central America to get the truth of human-rights violations there. Obviously a delegation of WOC members had to go to Czechoslovakia and find them. Hear their stories. No matter what! Preposterous as it was, we did just that. We were: Martha Ann Kirk from San Antonio, Texas, Carolyn Moynihan from Verona, Wisconsin, Dolly Pomerleau from Mt. Rainier, Maryland and myself, from Fairfax, Virginia, USA. We eventually spent heard Ludmila's story and that of many others in the underground church in Prague, Brno and Bratislava.

Now, thanks to Ludmila Javarova telling her story (through interpreters) to MT Winter, the story of a women priest has been written down. Never again can the Vatican say it did not happen. Never again can anyone say, "Well, I'm sure it will happen, but not in my lifetime!" It happened in our lifetime! No matter that a bishop in Prague told a priest to tell our delegation that the women were all dead. We knew at the time that was not true.

The Book

A woman was ordained in our lifetime and Miriam Therese was the right one to write it down. Ludmila has a remarkable story to tell. Actually she tells two stories -- hers and Bishop Davidek's. "It was all very complex," they kept telling us during that first encounter. So some of what she tells Medical Mission Sister Miriam Therese Winter was not new to me. But a lot of it was. And it is fascinating! When WOC's Joy Barnes delivered the pre-publication review copy to me at my home, I sat up reading until 4:30 a.m. when I finished the entire book. I literally could not put it down. It is a page-turner.

Ludmila tells MT that when she had been just a child playing mass with her seven brothers, she learned that girls could not be priests. "So I went to find my father. He was by his bookcase, absorbed in his reading. I asked him, 'Tatinek, why can't girls be Reverend Fathers?' Without even looking at me, my father responded: 'So you can pray for it, and maybe one day it will happen.'"

It is am amazing story, and MT wisely starts at the beginning with Ludmila's family history. Her grandparents, her beloved blind auntie, all the influences that led her to the point of saying "yes" to Felix Davidek when he came out of prison and asked her to help develop the Czechoslovakian underground church called Koinotes, meaning Community of Believers.

Bishop Felix Maria Davidek was the brilliant, visionary yet pragmatic priest who was also a psychologist and medical doctor. Felix's dream was to start a Catholic university, Catholic Atheneum Chrlice, not just for priests but also for anyone who wanted to learn. He and Ludmila created the clandestine project right under the noses of the secret police. Ludmila was key to the organizing and networking where people secretly gathered in homes to study and share Eucharist. As I read the facts of how they managed to function and spread without being detected or followed, I found the story more gripping than Orson Wells' movie The Third Man!

Ludmila tells the story of how they did it and how and why she was ordained. Under the dire circumstances in which they lived, the pope had given special permission to ordain whomever was needed to keep the faith alive. Winter tells us: "[t]he underground church in Czechoslovakia--known also as the hidden church, the silent church, the secret church, the clandestine church, the second line--traces its claim of Vatican approval." Bishop Felix Davidek not only ordained Ludmila, he appointed her the Vicar General of Koinotes, the wide-spread underground community. Only she and Davidek knew where the other groups of ten or less were. The gift of communism was a new vision of church as small communities where women and men serve as equal partners.

When we arrived in Brno, we went straight to the apartment of underground Bishop Jan Blaha, who greeted us with flowers. As his story poured out, we asked him some background questions. Who ordained him? When, where and who consecrated him as a bishop? He showed us some of his papers but said that for security reasons, there were no underground church ordination records.

Ludmila grew up in the underground church in the midst of war and repression. In World War II, there was daily bombing. The fierce battle of the front passed right through her village towards the end of the war. One of her seven brothers died because of Nazi brutality, another was permanently paralyzed. This was a time of fear, grief and sadness for Ludmila.

Then the Communists took over. They knew Davidek was a priest; he was imprisoned for many years, then finally released. Ludmila had been a child when he went to prison, now she was a grown woman. He came to her house and asked her family to help. He asked Ludmila to work closely with him to develop the underground church, which grew due to her networking and administrative talents. Davidek taught them all how to survive and not be caught by the secret police.

Then in 1968 came the opening to more freedom, "The Prague Spring." It appeared as though there would be a "Communism with a human face." The Orthodox Church, which split with the Vatican in 1054 with the Great Schism, was tolerated by the Soviets and run from Moscow. With the Prague Spring, the Greek Catholic Church, suppressed by Stalin since 1948, its leaders shot or deported to Siberia, became legal. Then there was the third level, Koinotes, which never surfaced. Davidek knew the new freedom could not last. MT tells us: "The night of August 21, [1968] tanks of the Soviet Army invaded Czechoslovakia . . . What followed was a twenty-year period of suppression and 'normalization.' The new government, directed by Moscow, was one of the most repressive of all in Eastern Europe." (p. 106).

Clandestine collaboration with the Greek Orthodox underground Church provided a legitimate way in which married men could be ordained in Koinotes. They became biritual. As they kept telling us, it was all very complex!

Davidek felt strongly that women as well as married men should be ordained. With the terrible Soviet repression, he was sure that many priests and others would be sent to prison, even Siberia. From the time of his prior imprisonment, he remembered the women prisoners did not have priests available to them. Ludmila was already Vicar General and knew everything about the extensive contacts she organized in the silent church. They needed women priests. Greatly influenced by Tielhard de Chardin and smuggled papers from the Second Vatican Council, Felix Davidek set up a two-year clandestine community study on ordaining women for Koinotes. In order to discuss and vote on the ordination of women, he daringly called an secret meeting, a Counsel of God's People for December 25 and 26, 1970. It was a time of some of the worst repression.

As the Council gathered, Ludmila and Felix experienced shocking, soul-piercing betrayal from some of their best friends and co-workers in Koinotes. The secret council was ripped apart in a devastating manner. Even so, the council continued and voted to ordain women. So, in their usual manner, Ludmila was secretly ordained with only one witness, Felix's brother Leo Davidek.

Late at night, in rapid succession, Ludmila was consecrated a deacon, then a priest and then celebrated her first mass. Afterwards, she snuck home in the night, not able to tell anyone, not even her parents. She tells us: "I didn't do it for the power, I didn't do it to compete. I just wanted to serve. I wanted only to make the life of others lighter. I believe that the essence of the Gospel is to make the yoke of people lighter and I wanted to help." (p.227).

Neither Nazism nor Communism could destroy Koinotes which had spread all over over Czechoslovakia and even into Rumania. But division and betrayal from inside the community rent it apart into two communities, both with the same name of Koinotes. From that time on, Felix Davidek's health disintegrated. The split was devastating and he was never the same.

Post-ordination Events

That happened in 1970. I was living with my husband and young children in Naples, Italy, leading tours to the Vatican through the Military Council of Catholic Women. During one semi-private papal audience, I received a bronze medal from Pope Paul VI. I had it specially mounted in gold and attached to a woven gold bracelet.

In 1977, when I opened the first WOC office in Washington DC, and organized protests around the country against the newly issued Inter Insignores, I decided to present my bracelet to the first woman ordained in the RC Church -- hoping, of course, that it would be me and I could keep it.

In 1995, when the Twentieth Anniversary Gathering of WOC, Discipleship of Equals: Breaking Bread/Doing Justice, also split wide apart, I left the WOC office suffering a great deal of pain and anguish. Never again would I wear my papal medal on the gold bracelet. Then Ludmila came back into my life again! This time she was coming to the US and all of us on that first delegation, Martha Ann, Carolyn and I were invited by Dolly (the fourth woman) to come to lunch in Washington with Ludmila. Carolyn brought her teenage daughter Marca so she could meet the priest who made her mother cry tears of joy as Ludmila lifted the crystal chalice in Brno.

At the luncheon, with the interpreter translating, I told Ludmila of how I had received the papal medal from Paul VI around the same time that she was ordained; how I had long ago decided to give it to the first women ordained. As I closed the clasp of the bracelet around her wrist, I told her that if she ever needed money, she could always sell the bracelet, but she could never sell the medal because it had been blessed by the pope -- and blessed articles, as we all know, can never be sold! That was not an idle joke. With the opening of the Czech economy to capitalism, inflation was setting in and people had already lost jobs and health care. Homeless people were beginning to appear on the streets of Prague.

Imagine how I felt when reading this book, that Bishop Felix Davidek had given Ludmila a bracelet only to have it lost in a disastrous crash that nearly killed them. Once again, I had that overwhelming feeling that this was bigger than all of us. It was a feeling I experienced so many times at the WOC office that Theresa Anderson, the Benedictine nun who worked with me, and I often commented about with feelings of great awe. It was a feeling that someone, something was behind all of it; we could never have done all this by ourselves.

So when Ludmila says she was led by God, I know what she means. When we prepared to go to find Ludmila, I already had her name, address and phone number in Brno. I had sought that out via totally different contacts in the human rights sector. I had also visited with Ambassador Rita Klimova, the Czechoslovakian ambassador to the U.S. at her embassy in Washington. I had done a lot of sleuthing.

But God is always the God of surprises! Unknown to us, Frank Mikes, an underground priest living in the US was a member of WOC. Frank had sent for the "Holy Thursday Female Foot Washing Ceremony Organizing Packet." I had dedicated the packet "in Solidarity with the women ordained in Czechoslovakia". It moved Frank to surface. Without his trust, we would never have been invited to be guests of the Koinotes community, to give a workshop in theparish of Sts. Cyril and Methodius on the ordination of women, to be gifted with a mass and the crystal chalice that was lifted by Ludmila as we all stood around the small table in her apartment as we celebrated and communicated out of our depths.

I felt compelled to visit Davidek's grave. How powerful it was when we went there to pray at his grave in the beautiful old cemetery next to a small church named Our Lady of the Thorn Bush. It had been build on a goddess site. Not unusual.

Ludmila would not go with us to his grave. Carolyn, a therapist, pointed out that she was still grieving. He had died in 1988 without living to see the Velvet Revolution or the Berlin wall come down. Little did any of them expect the treatment the Vatican meted out once they surfaced after years of life-threatening service to keep the faith alive. Ludmila had much to grieve. We all grieve in different ways. We all have different lives and different forms of spirituality. The spirituality portrayed in Out of the Depths is not my kind of spirituality. But the wonderful thing is that all are welcome around God's table, and the diversity of spiritualities is to be embraced and celebrated. I always said we cannot be traveling on our journeys marching in fascist lock-step.

Still, there is more unsaid than said in Ludmila's story Nowhere is there a reference to sexuality, although I am sure the community must have had to deal with that in actuality since women and men lived together and priests were married. The community proposed women and men working in mutuality but there is little analysis of or reflection on the patriarchal system, although Davidek encouraged reflection on the signs of the times and political situations. Towards the end of the book, the story goes too fast, we never learn, for example, why Ludmila asked Felix to stop living in her apartment two years before he died.

I hope the pope reads this book. And I hope he bows his head in shame for the shabby treatment the underground church has received under his reign. The Kyriarchy owes Ludmila an apology for the dastardly way it has treated her. Being the peace-filled, loving woman that she is, I think she will gladly grant absolution and give her blessing. And, as we all know, with absolution comes penance and the need to make amends. Ludmila, a woman who has suffered much and loved much, deserves justice. She deserves more than a second-hand papal medal. She deserves financial remuneration for her service to the church. How else can she retire?

Ludmila should be made a Cardinal of the Church so she can vote in a papal conclave for the next pope. Don't laugh. She would make a good Cardinal. Koinotes would have never existed and would have fallen apart without her hard work, her theological learning, her caring compassion, and administrative talents.

Ludmila Javarova is a Roman Catholic woman priest who was ordained in our lifetimes. She has broken the silence of the Silent Church. Thanks, to Miriam Therese Winter, History now knows her story. And that's' what theology today is all about -- telling our stories.

_______________________________

Fitzpatrick has a BA in Religious Studies from Georgetown University (1975) and an MA in Theology with a Concentration in Spirituality from Washington Theological Union (1997). In 1992, as WOC National Coordinator, she led the first WOC delegation to Czechoslovakia that found Ludmila and urged her to go public with her story, lest she disappear into the myths of history. Her e-mail is ruthfitzpa@aol.com.

The world was shocked in 1977 when the papal declaration, Inter Insignores came out of the Vatican. Paul VI was the pope at the time. He had asked his Vatican Biblical Commission to study the Scriptures about the subject of ordaining women. The Biblical Commission found nothing in Scripture that said women could or could not be ordained. The majority of the members favored the ordination of women. Nevertheless the declaration, signed by Cardinal Seper, said women could not be ordained because (1) women cannot image Jesus and (2) it has never been done.