Freedom for a Fighter

It was again bishop's move in the diplomatic chess game played by Communism with the Roman Catholic Church.

Last week the brand-new Czechoslovak government of Premier Josef Lenart announced that Prague's Archbishop Josef Beran and four other prelates would be released from confinement.

The release of the five Czech bishops was the first sign of a thaw between the church and a Stalinist regime that has been tougher on Catholicism longer than any other satellite government. But it had in short (5 ft. 2 in.), cheerful Josef Beran a tough opponent. Son of a schoolteacher, he served 15 years as a parish priest before becoming a teacher at Prague's Charles University in 1927. Beran was arrested by the Nazis in 1942, spent nearly three years at the notorious Dachau concentration camp. Pope Pius XII named him Archbishop of Prague in 1946.

Like Hungary's Josef Cardinal Mindszenty, Beran chose to battle his Communist overlords rather than negotiate with them after the Reds took over in 1948. He publicly protested the seizure of church property, forbade his clergy to take an oath of loyalty to the new regime, and eventually was put under house arrest. One day in 1949 Justice Minister Alexei Cepicka visited the archiepiscopal palace, hoping to bully him into submission. In answer, Beran went to a closet, picked up a bundle of ragged clothes that he had worn at Dachau, said "Let's go." He was hustled out of public view to imprisonment in a series of well-guarded country villas.

Now 74 and reportedly in ill health, Beran is not expected to take possession of his see. His release along with his fellow bishops was obviously designed to provide a favorable image for a new government faced with public unrest over economic troubles. It also stirred hope again that Cardinal Mindszenty might soon leave his lonely exile in the U.S. legation in Budapest. For in Prague to hear the news of Beran's freedom was Hungary's Premier Janos Kadar, the Red satellite leader who seems most eager to reach some new form of concord with the church.

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