Two more martyrs from communism. (Slovakia).

Rome--On November 4, 2001, the Holy Father beatified eight Servants of God, as he termed them, in St. Peter's Square--four Italians, one Portuguese, one Spaniard and two martyrs of the Greek Catholic Church, one Slovak and one Czech. The last two were Pavel Peter Gojdic, Bishop of Presov, and Methodius Dominic Trcka, a Redemptorist.

Gojdic entered the Order of St. Basil the Great some years after he had been ordained, desiring a regular spiritual life and hoping to avoid being made a bishop. In 1926, however, Pope Pius XI gave him a pectoral cross, saying, "This cross is only faintly symbolic of the heavy crosses God will send you...."

In 1940 he was appointed Bishop of Preslov. Before the war he had to defend the Ruthenians against the onslaught of Slovak nationalism. During the war he helped refugees, prisoners, and inmates of concentration camps, and became known as "the man with a heart of gold." The Communists dissolved the Greek Catholic Church in 1950, as they had done two years earlier in Ukraine, and Gojdic was arrested and imprisoned. Then began a long process of suffering, mistreatment, and humiliation, until he died in 1960 in the prison of Leopoldov, worn out by suffering and sickness and forgiving his persecutors. Praising him, the Pope said, "He could have left prison if he would have surrendered his fidelity to the Church and to the Pope. He remained faithful, and today we venerate him in the glory of the Blesseds, an example of rich spirituality and enlightened pastoral work."

Father Trcka was born in 1886, entered the Redemptorists in 1902, and was ordained in Prague in 1910. During the First World War, he took care of Croatian, Slovene, and Ruthenian refugees. In 1919, when he asked to work with the Eastern Catholic Church, his superiors sent him to Lviv, to assist with the Greek Catholic faithful there. Subsequently he oversaw the installation of Greek Catholic Redemptorists in Michalovce and established a number of retreat houses and convents.

During the Second World War, he was in difficulties with the Slovak state because of his help to the Ruthenians, but at the end of the war the Redemptorists established the Vice-Province of Michalovce, and he was appointed its first Vice-Provincial. In 1949, the Communists suppressed the Vice-Province, and in 1950, he and his confreres were taken to concentration camps to be interrogated and tortured--which Methodius calmly endured. In 1952 he was accused of collaboration with Bishop Gojdic; when he continued sending regular reports to his superiors in Prague, this was called espionage and high treason and brought him a sentence of twelve years in prison. In Leopoldov prison in 1958, he was caught singing a Christmas carol and condemned to a "correction cell" where he contracted pneumonia. "Because of the hardships and suffering in prison," the Holy Father said of him, "he died in his cell, offering an heroic example of fidelity to the Gospel, solidarity with his own people, and love for the Christian tradit ion of the Eastern Rite."