Mikloško, in his youth a close aide to the underground Catholic bishop Ján Chryzostom Korec, credits the clandestine bishop—made a cardinal by Pope John Paul II after communism’s fall—with emphasizing the importance of small communities.
“He told us that they”—the communists—“could take everything from us. They could take samizdat from us. They can take our opportunity to speak out publicly from us. But we can’t let them take away our small communities.”
Mikloško started university in Bratislava in 1966, and met the recently released prisoners Krčméry and Jukl. He was in the first small community the two Kolaković disciples founded at the university. Christians like Krčméry and Jukl brought not only their expertise in Christian resistance to a new generation but also the testimony of their character. They were like electromagnets with a powerful draw to young idealists.
“It’s like in the Bible, the parable of ten righteous people,” says Mikloško. “True, in Slovakia, there were many more than ten righteous people. But ten would have been enough. You can build a whole country on ten righteous people who are like pillars, like monuments.”
These early converts spread the word about the community to other towns in Slovakia, just as the Kolaković generation had done. Soon there were hundreds of young believers, sustained by prayer meetings, samizdat, and one another’s fellowship.
“Finally, in 1988, the secret police called me in and said, ‘Mr. Mikloško, this is it. If you all don’t stop what you’re doing, you will force us to act,’” he says. “But by then, there were so many people, and the network was so large, that they couldn’t stop it.
“If they had come at us in the seventies, they might have succeeded. But we always remembered that the goal was to turn our small numbers into a number so big they can’t stop us,” Mikloško says. “Thank God we had leaders who taught us patience.”
“Most of us had fear, but there were people among us who really did act absolutely fearlessly. I’m thinking about Silvo Krčméry, Vlado Jukl, Bishop Korec, but there were hundreds, even thousands of others,” says historian Ján Šimulčik. “Young people like me saw their example and were able to grow in courage by their example. The lesson here is that when you see someone acting courageously, you will act courageously as well.”
In many traditional liturgical churches, on the night of the Easter celebration, the congregation stands in total darkness, holding unlit candles. The priest takes the flame from the paschal candle, lights a few tapers held by the faithful, who turn to those around them and spread the flame. Within minutes, the lights from scores, even hundreds, perhaps, and in cathedrals, even thousands, of candles illuminate what was once a sepulchral room. This is the light that precedes the proclamation of Resurrection.
And so: In 1988, the underground church leaders, the spiritual grandchildren of Father Kolaković, organized the Candlelight Demonstration in Bratislava—the largest protest event in Czechoslovakia since the 1960s. The police used water cannons to disperse thousands of Christians gathered peacefully on the city’s main square to pray for religious and civil liberties. But it was too late for the communists: the momentum was with the people. Within two years, communism was over.
“I had the fastest rise of any modern European politician,” jokes Slovak lawyer Ján Čarnogurský, a former political prisoner and a leader of the Candle Demonstration. “I was released from prison, and two weeks later, I was sitting at the table with Václav Havel negotiating with the communists about the handover of power.”
Small Groups Can Be a Pastoral Lifeline
Father Kolaković’s instinct to build up the Catholic laity as a source of resistance proved to be a stroke of genius.
“The official, approved Catholic Church was limited to just the churches,” says Ján Čarnogurský, who defended dissidents in court. “If the priests were discovered coming to someone’s apartment and praying with them, for example, they would be sentenced to prison. It was against the criminal code. It took maybe twenty years before the Catholic Church figured out how to keep the faith alive under these conditions, but it was the underground church that did it.”
In Soviet Russia, Evangelicals learned and practiced this survival skill decades earlier. The Baptist pastor Yuri Sipko, now sixty-eight, recalls the world that he was born into—a world that his parents and their friends had been living in for some time under Stalin’s merciless persecution of the churches.
“The strongest strike was against the preachers and the pastors, first of all. They took the preachers and pastors to prison. Other men stood up and filled their shoes,” Sipko tells me. “Then they took their houses of prayer. Then at that point began the practice of small groups—people who lived close to one another would gather in small groups. There was no formal structure of pastors or deacons. There were just brothers and sisters who read the Bible together, prayed together, and sang.”
“When they jailed my father, my mother was left alone,” he continues. “Several other sisters were left without husbands. We all got together. We found the Bible they had hidden. The women were reading the Bible to all of us. They were telling how people should live, what we had to hope for. They prayed together, and cried.”
These small groups continued the life of the Baptist church for decades, until Gorbachev released the last Evangelical prisoners of conscience.
“Sixty years of terror, they were unable to get rid of the faith,” the pastor muses. “It was saved specifically in small groups. There was no literature, no organizations for teaching, and even movement was forbidden. Believers rewrote biblical texts by hand. Even the songs that we sang. I even remember writing these notebooks for myself. But they preserved the true faith.”
Over steaming cups of black tea, the pastor reflects with palpable emotion.
“Many of us didn’t even have Bibles. Just to be able to find yourself in
