Pontiff Praises Cardinal Secretly Ordained Under Communism
August 26, 2011: Benedict XVI describes 87-year-old Cardinal Ján Chryzostom Korec
as a "hard-working, faithful and prudent pastor." The papal praise came in a Latin-language
letter sent to the cardinal and made public Wednesday, the 60th anniversary of Korec's
episcopal ordination. His episcopal ordination was noteworthy by any standards.
It happened in 1951, when Korec was only 27 and had been a priest just one year. L'Osservatore
Romano described it as an ordination "carried out very hastily, in an apartment, with
the fear that the police would raid at any moment." Ján Chryzostom Korec was born
on Jan. 22, 1924 in Bosany, in the Diocese of Nitra, in Czechoslovakia. Communists
came to power there in 1949. The following year, Korec was clandestinely ordained
a Jesuit priest. His episcopal ordination the following year made him the youngest
bishop in the world. For nine years he carried out his mission as a priest and
bishop in a factory where he worked as a laborer, and later as a night watchman. He
was arrested in 1960, and tried and sentenced to 12 years in prison. He was kept in
a monastery converted into a prison, where there were six other bishops and some 200
priests. During his prison years he celebrated Mass every day, and when he was
in isolation, in his imagination he did the spiritual exercises. In 1968, with the
"Prague Spring," he was released from prison but was gravely ill. To earn his living
he began to work as a garbage collector in Bratislava. It was then that he celebrated
Mass for the first time in public. Rehabilitation came in 1969, when he was able
to get a passport for Rome, where he met with Pope Paul VI who handed him the episcopal
insignias. In 1974, however, his rehabilitation was annulled and he was imprisoned
again, to serve the remaining four years of his sentence. Released immediately due
to his poor health conditions, he continued to work as a laborer until he was 60. Pope
John Paul II appointed him bishop of Nitra, Slovakia, in 1990, and made him a cardinal
in 1991. In 1998 the Holy Father called him to the Vatican to preach the Lenten spiritual
exercises. For several years he was president of the Slovakian episcopal conference. In
an interview with the Jesuit review La Civiltà Cattolica (Feb. 21, 1987), he said:
"I don't attribute great merits to myself. The more the years pass, the more I see
that what is important belongs to grace, that is, to God."