Out Of The Depths: The Story Of Ludmila Javorova, Ordained Roman Catholic Priest. - Review - book review

National Catholic Reporter, May 11, 2001 by MONI McINTYRE

OUT OF THE DEPTHS: THE STORY OF LUDMILA JAVOROVA, ORDAINED ROMAN CATHOLIC PRIEST By Miriam Therese Winter Crossroad Publishing, 172 pages, $19.95

In this slim volume, Miriam Therese Winter depicts Ludmila Javorova as an extraordinary and courageous woman. Winter carefully unfolds the times and the secret Javorova lived with for 30 years: her ordination into the Roman Catholic priest. hood.

Born into a fervent Catholic family on 31 January 1932, Javorova -- the fifth of Frantisek Javora and Javorova Vrlova's 10 children -- grew up in Brno, a city 120 miles southeast of Prague. The family also included a sympathetic blind aunt who lived with them in the half of the house that they shared with another family. All 20 members of the two families remained in that house until the end of World War II.

Regular attendance at Mass in the parish church and evening prayer in the home helped form Javorova and her eight brothers and one sister in the faith. Their close-knit family inspired great love and respect for one another. Winter writes, "The parents formed a partnership that was a model for their children. `I felt secure in my mother's faith and in her simple trust,' says Javorova. `My father deepened my thirst for knowledge. Those formative years sowed the seeds I would harvest for a lifetime.'"

During these tender years, she felt inclined toward the priesthood, although she never allowed herself to presume a call.

Life during the war years had robbed children of a sense of personal security and freedom: "When Javorova was a child she was afraid of the war, afraid of the bombs, afraid of losing the ones she loved," writes Winter. Food was scarce, and "the sound of exploding shrapnel could be heard throughout the greater part of Javorova's formative years." The Germans held Russian captives in the half of her school that functioned as a prison: "This site," says the author, "was chosen intentionally to use the children as shields."

It proved to be more an incentive than a deterrent, because they often bombed the school. In these grim circumstances, friends, neighbors, family and an abiding faith in God provided the only hope.

One such friend and neighbor, Felix Davidek, would change the course of Javorova's life. Eleven years her senior, Felix aspired to be a missionary after his ordination as a Roman Catholic priest in 1945, the year World War II ended. During his seminary years, he developed a friendship with Javorova's father and brothers and made their house his second home. Felix's quick mind and voracious appetite for learning enabled him to become competent in many areas, including medicine, politics and theology.

Javorova admired him for his intelligence as well as his inner freedom: "Felix Maria Davidek," Javorova said, "was truly not typical -- a free spirit, spontaneous, unpredictable, with a charismatic zest for life. He intended to live out his priesthood independently, in his own way. It was really of no concern to him if what he felt was worth doing had never been done before." As a Catholic bishop he certainly would do something no one, as far as is known, had ever done before: ordain a woman -- Javorova.

Meanwhile, Javorova's own spiritual life flourished. She made her first retreat at the age of 15. "From that moment on my spiritual life really began to develop. I was completely absorbed in it. I felt a flame burning deep within." She felt a call to enter the convent, but her mother refused to allow it.

By 1948, Czechoslovakia was firmly under communist control. One outcome, in Winter's words, "was the relentless and brutal persecution of the church. All denominations suffered. The Roman Catholic church, with its tightly woven infrastructure and opposing philosophy, was a prime objective for the communist regime." Religious life, however, established itself underground.

Undaunted by the governmental control, Felix founded the Atheneum, an underground university that functioned from 1948-1950. Following its demise, he was arrested by the secret police but managed to escape before they could incarcerate him. Shortly after, however, he was arrested again, detained for 11 months in a maximum security prison and sentenced to prison for 24 years for "plotting against the state to undermine its educational system, with founding the university where Davidek trained students to turn against the state, and with conspiracy." News of his fate devastated his family, friends, and parishioners.

By this time Javorova herself was under surveillance. Winter notes that "her father was a political activist, who was known to disagree with the state. Her brothers were considered troublemakers. They too had to be watched. They were friends with certain people, for instance, Davidek, and others already in prison, and they were deeply religious." It would be a long time before Javorova and Felix would work together.

In the meantime, moving from one meaningless job to another and always thirsting to deepen her relationship with God, Javorova never found an acceptable relationship with a man or a convent that would suit her. "From the moment of her spiritual awakening," writes Winter, "she could feel the force of a direction but lacked a destination." Javorova commented to Winter that "women had very few spiritual opportunities before 1965. we were not considered independent." Her unsatiated restlessness grew.