And though a strong leader within his own family, Benda grasped that the Christian father must above all be a servant of Christ.
The family cannot survive as a community if the head and center is one of its own members. The Christian statement is simple; it has to be Christ who is the true center, and in His service the individual members of this community share in the work of their salvation. One hopes that the well-grounded family can exist even without this distinctively religious affiliation; however, the focus of service to something “beyond,” whether we call it love, truth or anything else, seems essential.5
Benda said that the family house must be a real home, “that is, a place which is livable and set apart, sheltered from the outer world; a place which is a starting-out point for adventures and experiences with the assurance of a safe return”—in other words, a haven in a heartless world. The loving, secure Christian home is a place that forms children who are capable of loving and serving others within the family, the church, the neighborhood, and indeed the nation. The family does not exist for itself alone, but first for God, and then for the sake of the broader community—a family of families.
When that nation and its people are held captive by a totalitarian order, then Christians and their families must push as hard against the totalitarian world as it pushes against them. That’s what the Benda patriarch taught, and that’s how he and his family lived.
Benda survived to see the fall of communism in 1989, and his friend and close collaborator Václav Havel became the first president of a free Czechoslovakia (and presided over the peaceful separation of the Czech and Slovak nations). Benda stayed active in Czech politics until his death in 1999. His widow, Kamila, still lives in the book-lined Prague apartment where, under communism, she and her husband hosted seminars for dissidents.
A Benda Guide to Child-Raising
I first visited Kamila at the family’s Prague apartment in the spring of 2018 to pay my respects to the memory of her late husband. His ideas informed my own Benedict Option project, which aims at building strong Christian communities in the West’s post-Christian culture. She invited some of her adult children, and grandchildren, for the evening. We gathered in the parlor of her flat, with bookshelves bearing thousands of volumes reaching from floor to ceiling, framed family photos scattered around, and a huge plaster crucifix hanging on the wall.
That Sunday evening, I learned that Václav and Kamila had not only raised children who kept the Christian faith under communist persecution, but also that their brood stayed faithful after communism, even though the overwhelming majority of their fellow Czechs had turned their backs on God. What’s more, all the Benda grandchildren are also practicing Catholics.
The Benda family apartment is near the former headquarters of the StB (Státní bezpečnost), the communist-era secret police. Under the dictatorship, people who had been summoned for interrogation would sometimes stop at the Bendas’ for advice about how to endure what was about to come without breaking, and to receive encouragement. Those same people would stop at the apartment for comfort after their ordeal. What the Benda family gave to the resisters was more than mere Christian hospitality.
On that first visit, and in two subsequent meetings with Benda family members, I was eager to learn how Václav and Kamila led their family to build up the inner strength of their children, not only as faithful Catholics but also as young people who understood the meaning of their parents’ mission—and the sacrifices it would necessarily entail. Here is the advice they give.
MODEL MORAL COURAGE
“Our parents were heroes for us,” says Patrik. “My father was the sheriff from the High Noon movie.”
Václav often taught his children how to read the world around them, and how to understand people and events in terms of right and wrong. He did not allow them to drift into ignorance or indifference. The battle into which all of them had been thrown by history was too important.
For example, Václav explained to his kids that there are some things more dangerous than the loss of political liberties.
“Our father told us that there is a difference between a dictatorship and totalitarianism,” says Marek. “Dictatorship can make life hard for you, but they don’t want to devour your soul. Totalitarian regimes are seeking your souls. We have to know that so we can protect what is most important as Christians.”
Watching how his brothers behaved in their adolescent years revealed to Patrik how much moral authority his father had within the family. Rebellion against authority is normal for kids that age, but the children of dissidents didn’t have that luxury.
“All the arguments within the family had to be put aside so we could stand against the outside threat from communism,” Patrik says. “When my father told my brother Martin that he couldn’t drink alcohol publicly until he turned eighteen, he explained that this rule is a way of protecting the whole family against the regime. ‘You can’t do that,’ he said to Martin, ‘because it could endanger all of us.’”
Rather than regarding this as a heavy yoke, the Benda kids saw it as an opportunity to serve something greater than themselves.
“Watching High Noon really formed our way of fighting against evil,” Marek Benda says. “Everyone is asking the sheriff to leave so that the town will have no problems from the bad guys. But the sheriff comes back nevertheless, because his virtue and
