This is a story about a Czech Catholic Bishop who began his ministry in 1964 in the diocese of San Antonio, and a chance meeting at the Tenth National Eucharistic Congress held in Indianapolis, Indiana, from July 17-21, 2024.
It was a providential meeting, unlikely in all routine circumstances, between the co-editor of Today’s Catholic and officers of the North American Pastoral Center for Czech Catholics. Still, it led to this article which will attempt to express some thoughts on what ministry to immigrants might include.
Sixty years ago, a newly ordained priest named Peter Esterka was assigned to the diocese of San Antonio because many immigrants from his homeland, Czechoslovakia, were members of parishes in Yoakum, Hallettsville, and others. He had escaped from the Communist regime at the age of twenty. It was a dramatic and suspense-filled crossing, cutting the barbed-wired border under the eyes of the guards in their high towers, because he had been told clearly and repeatedly that he would never have a future in his home country. Conforming to the expectations of the Communist leadership was unthinkable for him because he saw clearly that to join the Communist youth, or even, to do as many did at that time, “just put down your head and pretend to go along,” would betray everything he believed. With teachers and local officials who were gatekeepers for who could go to school or get a good job, he argued using logic and defiance, until it became clear that they would destroy his life and his family unless he succumbed. So, he decided to leave, even though it was known that no one had escaped successfully during the late 1950s. He wrote the story of that escape during the few years he spent in the diocese of San Antonio. It was the work of witness, an attempt to keep his promise to the higher voice that guided him. He wanted to stand up for faith and the freedom to worship God; he wanted to do something to warn people of the dangers of communist propaganda. No voice higher in authority than that of the State could be acknowledged in Czechoslovakia during those forty dark years.
At the time of Peter’s ordination to the priesthood in Rome in 1963, Cardinal Luigi Traglia, who was made a cardinal by Pope John XXIII and who was full participant in the sessions of Vatican Council II, offered him a position in the Vatican as the Cardinal’s secretary, an honor and a career that few would refuse. Peter wanted to be a pastor, not a “Company Man” as he styled it. He gave up his chance to rise in the Vatican ranks to an almost certain place of power. He packed his single bag for a new unknown -San Antonio, the part of America that kids in Dolni Bojanovice called “rooty-shooty Arizona-Texasu.”
The journey of this priest deserves retelling for it exemplifies the call to Go Out …farther and farther, metaphorically and physically, to the ends of the world in service. He rejoiced in his relationships with the Incarnate Word nuns, Sr. Joan of Arc, and others, who taught him English and made him feel at home. He enjoyed evenings watching TV with his pastor while eating Fritos and frozen raspberries, and he positively reveled in driving his first car, a white Ford Fairlane, on the long, open stretches of Texas road. But he was restless again. And that means going out …to the next step. After almost three years among his familiar and beloved fellow Czechs and Moravians, saying Mass with them and accompanying them in their sacramental moments of life, Fr. Peter Esterka was again restless. He knew he couldn’t really help them, answering their questions, enabling them to discern God’s calls and develop their consciences, with his present level of education.
He decided to go to Rome to the Pontifical College Nepomucenum in Rome to complete his graduate studies at Lateran University and earn the terminal degree of Doctor of Sacred Theology. He accomplished that goal, something he could never have done had he stayed in Czechoslovakia, in a year and a half, completing the work by mid-1968. His dissertation, published in the well-respected Journal of Ecumenical Studies (Winter, 1971) analyzed the contribution of Bishop Antonin Cyril Stojan and the Congresses for Christian Union held at Velehrad in Moravia, his home region, with 4 sessions from 1907-1936. During transitional times, there is usually some unease. It may follow an accomplishment and often signals a call for growth in the spiritual life. It may look like a simple change to an outsider, an energy driving toward something more challenging.
In 1968 Fr. Esterka was invited to become a professor of Theology in a forward-looking College for women run by the Sisters of Saint Joseph of Carondelet in Saint Paul, Minnesota. The news of change was not welcome in San Antonio, neither by the ears of the pastor nor the bishop, who fully expected Fr Peter to return to his former position as assistant in one of the parishes. But his ministry would expand in another arena, neither so comfortable nor familiar as the lovely Texas Czech besadas and tombolas. His “going out” to Minnesota in obedience to the transcendent voice he recognized leading him in his life meant preaching and teaching in a language he had learned only two years before in Texas. It meant explaining the Church’s theological positions in moral theology to American women in the late 1960s, fresh from Woodstock and Beatlemania. None of his teachers in higher education had been women. By his admission, he did not date before escaping, because it seemed futile and unfair since he could see no future in his homeland. Most of the religious sisters he knew from Nepomucenum in Rome and Yoakum in Texas were playing the traditional roles of Martha, not the role of Mary.
Amazingly he rose to the challenge and became a much-admired classroom teacher, rocketing through the ranks from assistant to associate to tenure to full professor. He served as chair of the Department of Theology and was sought-after as a speaker and consultant. He succeeded in teaching high-level theological thought to students who were not used to abstract arguments. They had life experience; they were old enough to have grudges against religion. At the same time, he learned that the way to human understanding was not through the use of the manual-anchored theology that had been universal in his seminary days: Church Teaching, Moral Theology, Volumes I, II, III and IV. This post-Vatican II world required a more creative, dialogic, and eclectic approach, drawing on works as rigorous as Josef Fuchs, Bernhard Haring, and Charles Curran. He used the film “The Shoes of the Fisherman” to demonstrate to the students how the arc that bends toward mercy might be imagined in real life. He stayed in that teaching role, having integrated it with his pastoral ministry, living in rectories and helping in Minnesota parishes for more than thirty years. But he expanded it further during these years. He fulfilled the promise he made to the overriding voice that guided him after his escape, the promise that he would work for freedom in the world.
Monsignor Esterka saw becoming a Chaplain in the Military as something he could do practically to advance the forces of freedom and democracy in the world. He joined the Air Force as a Captain and, after 20 years of service in the Air Force Reserves, he retired as a Lt Colonel. He held the military in high regard, writing at the time of his retirement in 1995, “I joined as Chaplain in 1974. I believed then, and still do, that a strong military is essential in keeping us free. Moreover, it provides, as I know it, an opportunity for formation in the ideals of courage, commitment, and service.”
What more could be in store for him? How did he come full circle to be made a bishop responsible for ministry to Czech Catholics in the Diaspora? He learned through his service in the Air Force that his ministry need not be, could not be, conventional sacristy-based ministry. He wrote: “When ministry was needed, I was there without counting hours. My service was not bound by conventional expectations….”
Theologians say that each life is theologically relevant. It can tell us something about God. When I look at the life of this priest, it seems the universe was conspiring to achieve something. Or perhaps to show that each achievement was meant to open the doors to the next challenge. When he was ordained bishop on September 11, 1999, the motto on his coat of arms read, “Go out into the whole world….” He was charged by the Czech Bishops Conference with the burden of ministry to Czech Catholics in the Diaspora and, as happens rarely with bishops, expected to live, not at his home See in Brno, but in America with the refugees and immigrants who, like he, arrived from the Czech lands during the last half of the 20th century. He grew into this ministry gradually from 1978 when he was inspired during an annual “ethnic” celebration in Chicago. It was a religious event, but also a family reunion, relaxing and socializing. There was music and dancing and re-telling of old jokes. It was fun! It reminded him of the pilgrimages he had been part of in his boyhood. Even though he had no official mandate at that time, he realized that the ministry of the future for immigrants would not be in parallel parish-like structures that offer only the Mass and Sacraments. As well as the comfort of one’s native language and whatever practices could be salvaged from the old-world culture, it would have to reflect the search for happiness and goodness of a people on the move. He didn’t see it then, but maybe the ministry of the future would not be settled and confined, made up of people with familiar names and facial features, experiencing happy isolation with like-minded countrymen and women. Maybe it will resemble more closely the pilgrimages of the villages of Moravia, the Youth Days of the Popes, or the Eucharistic Congresses of the 21st Century.
All of this brings us to the organization in search of its mission. In 1986 Msgr. Peter Esterka founded in Sant Paul Minnesota a Funding organization that came to be known as the North American Pastoral Center for Czech Catholics. It was the practical response to a financial emergency brought on by the communist confiscation of all church property. The Czech Seminary in Rome, Pontifical College Nepomucenum, was in danger of being taken over by the Communist State since it was the property of the Czech Church headquartered in Prague. Msgr. Esterka was recruited from the Vatican, through the efforts of the Cardinal bishop of Chicago and Bishop John Morskovky of Galveston-Houston, to establish a Fund, independent of the Czech Catholic Church, that could therefore save Nepomucenum if it were threatened. The convoluted story of how this was accomplished can be read elsewhere. The relevant point here is that NAPCCC had only one mission: to save Nepomucenum, and only one form of ministry: to supply funds in financial emergencies. Only the amazing success of this Foundation made it necessary to re-think its mission when the Communist threat was overcome in 1989, and again after 2021 when Bishop Peter Esterka died.
The experience of sponsoring the Eucharistic Congress and having a booth through which to meet people opened the question even more widely. Was it enough to give money to restore roofs and remodel kitchens? Was the support of Czech language classes and Children’s St Nicholas parties the best way to use the money which bishop Esterka had stewarded with such expertise? When Jitka Hromek-Vaitla, the bishop’s niece who is currently president of NAPCCC, and Fr Michael Skluzacek, a longtime friend of the bishop and board member, met the co-editor of Today’s Catholic, the idea was born to write this article. The extraordinary religious experience of being at the Eucharistic Congress and feeling the love and energy of so many people gave rise to a second idea. Maybe such gatherings would happen more often if there was support. Maybe more Catholics would look not so much to heaven but between themselves for the inspiration of the Holy Spirit and the courage to give their bodies and pour out their spirits in Eucharistic union with Christ if all had access to large and powerful gatherings as well as small and intimate ones. Could a funding organization find its ministry in enabling and supporting pilgrimages?
What do you think? Would you participate?
Joan H Timmerman, Ph D Anaheim, California