Provide Housing for Sick, Frail and Elderly Religious Sisters in Slovakia
Tuesday, March 21, 2017

The congregation wants to build additional rooms where frail and elderly Sisters can be cared for properly, and ACN wants to help. Will you support housing for these Sisters in Slovakia who endured such repression in the communist era?

The former Czechoslovakia was one of the countries in Eastern Europe where the Church was most brutally persecuted during the communist era. The Catholic faithful were subject to repression and reprisals, many priests were imprisoned or sent to labor camps, convents were dissolved in 1950 and, in a covert police operation, male and female religious were forcibly deported to “concentration convents” – isolated centers where they were deprived of all contact with the outside world. Church historian Vaclav Vasko has described these places as “nothing else but supervised concentration camps for religious.” Nuns and Sisters were urged to throw away their religious habits, in which case they were offered freedom and a chance to study. But almost all of them refused and remained faithful.

On February, 20, 1969, atheist journalist Milos Vetvicka, writing in the journal Reporter, decided to call for the rehabilitation of the 7,646 religious Sisters then in Czechoslovakia. He wrote, “They wear long habits and a large cross on their breast. They live subject to pressure and discrimination, but they endure their fate with a smile, because Golgotha is also their mission. They hope in another world, because our world has proved to them that there is no justice in this one.”

Following the political changes in Eastern Europe, the former Czechoslovakia was divided into two separate republics, the Czech Republic and Slovakia. Today, people can once again live their faith freely, but the religious Sisters who lived through those times of oppression are old and frail today. As a result, the Norbertine (Premonstratensian) Sisters in what is now the Slovakian town of Vrbove are caring lovingly for their elderly Sisters in the faith.

Recently, these aging Sisters, many of whom now need special care, had to be moved from their former accommodation, which had become dilapidated and unsuitable, and placed temporarily in an evangelization center. But this is only a short-term solution, since the center can no longer be used for its intended purpose of pastoral work with the laity. This work is also important as a means of deepening the faith of the people.

The congregation wants to build additional rooms where the frail and elderly Sisters can be cared for properly, and ACN is keen to help. We have promised $15,900.

Will you help us provide housing for these sick and frail elderly religious in Slovkia, Sisters who endured such repression in the communist era?

Sister Akvitna has already thanked us in advance: “May the Lord reward you for everything you are doing for the welfare of Holy Mother Church!”

Code: 443-05-19

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