July 5 marked the 124th anniversary of the birth of Father Adolf Kajpr SJ, a Czech Jesuit priest, journalist and preacher who became a martyr of two totalitarian regimes. The Czech Jesuits are currently promoting his cause for beatification.

Born in 1902, Adolf Kajpr grew up in difficult circumstances and experienced poverty from an early age. He later worked as a shoemaker before entering the Society of Jesus. His formation led him to the priesthood and to a particular vocation as a preacher and writer. Through his ministry, he sought to communicate the Christian faith in a way that was both clear and relevant to the challenges of his time.

Kajpr lived through two of the darkest periods of 20th-century European history. During the Nazi occupation of Czechoslovakia, his preaching and writings openly challenged Nazi ideology and propaganda. In 1941, he was arrested by the Gestapo and imprisoned in several concentration camps, including Dachau. After the end of the Second World War, he returned to Prague and resumed his ministry and work as a writer.

His freedom, however, was short-lived. After the Communist takeover of Czechoslovakia in 1948, Kajpr again became a target of the authorities because of his preaching and his criticism of the new regime. In 1950, he was arrested and sentenced to 12 years in prison on charges of treason and espionage. He spent the final years of his life in communist prisons and forced-labour camps. He died in Leopoldov prison in 1959, following a heart attack. His life thus became a powerful witness to fidelity to Christ in the face of two successive totalitarian regimes.

On the occasion of the anniversary of his birth, we can recall some of Kajpr's own reflections on love and on the inspiration of Sacred Scripture. They reveal a deeply theological mind, but also a spirituality rooted in the concrete experience of suffering, freedom and fidelity.

“…love needs no why. Simply because it is so. And we may rebel, how can God love one more than another? And yet here too we rebel in vain. God loves each of us so much that we cannot complain of any injustice on his part. We cannot reproach him if he loves some more. Indeed, he must love some more, otherwise love would lose its meaning, its beauty. We can never and nowhere seek and expect complete equality, because that would mean a desert, a crushing monotony, which is the end of all life. Therefore, there is no such equality in the love of God either.”

(From the book Adolf Kajpr: Ministerium verbi, p. 246, prepared for publication by Vojtěch Novotný, Karolinum Publishing House, 2017.)

Kajpr's reflections on Sacred Scripture reveal the central place he gave to God's Word and to the message of St Paul, particularly the call to love:

"I often use the expression: St. Paul says this or that, with St. Paul it is this or that. I do not say this because St. Paul has such or such a style, that he has such or such a nature, but because his letters are part of Holy Scripture. Paul speaks in them, but God speaks through him, the Holy Spirit speaks through him. If something is Holy Scripture, it means that it was written by Moses or David or Isaiah, or Matthew or Mark, or Paul or John, the very Originator of which is the Holy Spirit. Of course, God knows our every thought, nothing moves in us without him, we can find his trace in everything, but when the Scripture was created, God intervened more directly into the soul of that human writer, and yet with complete certainty he achieves his goal, that man wrote, and wrote what God wanted to communicate to humanity as his Revelation. In this way, the whole of Scripture becomes the direct word of God, and therefore St. Paul says: "But if I have not love, I am nothing," he does not say this of himself, he is not the only one behind it, but God himself says it, his eternal Wisdom speaks to us in those words and asks us to take them really seriously as an expression of the only way to life. If we are sick and go to ask the advice of some famous doctor, how we hang on his lips and how carefully we try to do what he tells us. How should we now listen to the Divine Physician of our souls. From those ever-recurring words: "I am nothing, nothing benefits me if I have not love," it follows with absolutely inexorable emphasis that it is really a fundamental question of happiness and contentment, of life and death."

(From the book Adolf Kajpr: Ministerium verbi, pp. 473–474, prepared for publication by Vojtěch Novotný, Karolinum Publishing House, 2017.)

For Kajpr, love was not an abstract ideal, but the very heart of Christian life. His own life gave a particular weight to these words. Having endured imprisonment under both Nazism and Communism, he remained faithful to the Gospel and continued to see love—not power, ideology or self-preservation—as the path to true life. His witness continues to speak to the Church today, reminding us that the Word of God is not simply something to be studied, but something to be lived, even in the most difficult circumstances.