The Czech Catholic Church is seeking the beatification of three priests executed by the communist regime on the basis of fabricated charges. Fr Frantisek Paril and his colleagues, Vaclav Drbola and Jan Bula, were sentenced to death on the basis of fabricated charges of plotting murders and arson attacks in a show political trial in 1951, the Prague Monitor reports citing Mlada fronta Dnes.
Then communist president Klement Gottwald turned down the suits for pardon.
The Catholic Church now wants to declare them martyrs and it has started the process of their beatification today, the paper writes.
The priests paid dear for having once met the mysterious Ladislav Maly, an apparent psychopath who was trying to provoke anti-communist resistance in the Trebic area, south Moravia, in 1951.
Maly was involved in the famous "Babice case."
He accompanied resistance fighters to a school in Babice where local communist officials met.
After an attack in which three communists were killed, Maly escaped to nearby fields where he was shot dead by the police, MfD recalls.
"The three priests were convicted only because they knew Maly," historian Adolf Razek, studying the case, told the paper.
Church representatives launched the process of declaring Bula a martyr in March 2004, later Drbola and Paril were also included in the proposal, church court chairman Karel Orlita, from the Brno Bishopric, told the paper.
According to available statistics, 58 Catholic priests, nuns and monks were killed after communists seized power in the former Czechoslovakia in February 1948.
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