Stories of Ordinary Medicine: there is always a way
At times it is like a Verne adventure, at others like reading from Albert Schweitzer's diaries, and here and there like a spy thriller set in the former socialist bloc. The life story of Dr. František Slavíček has many colours, yet there are clear lines of a man who decided early in his youth that he wanted to help others. As a doctor and as a priest. Sometimes they wind parallel to each other, often they intertwine, leading across continents. The fact that the fate of František Slavíček, a graduate of the Faculty of Medicine at Masaryk University, is worth filming, was noticed a few years ago by Czech Television, which captured the deeds of the doctor and secretly ordained priest, or rather his work in the Cameroonian mission, in a documentary called Feet on the Equator, Head in Heaven. We met in the house where he lives with other members of the ecumenical movement Focolare, to which he has dedicated a significant part of his life. But he keeps his "head in the sky" all the time, even on the outskirts of Prague.
I originally approached you as a medical graduate, but when I prepared for our meeting and looked up more information about your life, I'm not sure whether I'm sitting with a doctor or a priest...
I'd say it's both. Both vocations were important to me. I did medicine, I did it honestly, and I enjoyed it. But it's a fact that in recent years, for quite a long time now, I've been more involved in the spiritual part of my life.
But as I understand it, you were drawn to faith from childhood, right?
Yes, my grandparents - especially on my mother's side - were religious people, and from a very young age they led me towards spirituality. And my mother, too. I was an altar boy from a young age, which brought me all sorts of teasing from my classmates at school. You know, the fifties... Interestingly, in the second grade, almost the whole class attended religion, but gradually the number of pupils decreased and in the fifth grade there were only two of us. Before school I used to go to mass every morning, for which the others mocked me, but I was so non-conformist and minded my own business. My five years younger brother wanted to go to church with me too, especially during Advent. Rorates, the morning masses as a spiritual preparation for Christmas, the birth of Jesus Christ, started early, as early as quarter to six, and I remember carrying him to them on my back one day when it snowed a lot. We were spotted by the neighbors, who were very anti-religious, and at school they turned us in to the principal. Not just for going to church, but for dragging my brother there. The headmaster called my dad to the school, but he stood up for us, saying it was our free decision because our parents weren't sending us anywhere. The headmaster originally studied to be a priest, but after his stay in a concentration camp he lost his faith and became a communist, so he tried it on Daddy, saying that in the Soviet Union they take children away from such parents for re-education... But Daddy fought in Russia during the Second World War, so he fought back, saying that he fought for freedom, not for oppression, and that if the headmaster was going to make trouble, he would go to the president! In the end, nothing came of it...
What was it about the environment that attracted you so much? I feel that even religious parents have to force their children to go to church...
Well, you know, kids today have a lot of distractions, tablets, cell phones... We didn't have so many options, we were quieter and maybe had more time to think...
Where did you go to school in Brno?
Captain Jarosh's class and Elgartova High School. Then to the Faculty of Comenius, or Obránců míru, and then to the University Hospital...
mother teresa
What led you to medicine when you were treading the path of faith at a young age?
But it wasn't a hindrance, on the contrary! I read a lot, and as a kid I imagined I would be a polar explorer, a scientist who would discover a cure for cancer, and later I thought I would be a country doctor, raise a big family, and serve people from birth to death... And then I wanted to be a missionary... It all just drew me to medicine, so I applied and got accepted. Daddy came back with the president that day, saying that if I wasn't accepted, he'd take a bottle and go intercede for him. (smiles) After the exams, I went to look through the lists of those admitted, and I didn't see the letter S, so I thought to myself that I hadn't been admitted after all... So I looked again and saw that those admitted were already divided into groups, and I was written outside the alphabet as the group leader!
Did you have a plan B in case you weren't accepted?
Not really... just the teenage ones. I enjoyed Verne's books, reading about explorers and scientists, Pasteur, Koch... I just wanted to help people.
You've mentioned missionaries, but they don't often have a happy ending in adventure novels...
You're right. (laughs) I was interested in India, Eastern religions and cultures, as well as archaeology... But medicine prevailed in the end.
“There was absolutely no way for the faculty to know that I was an ordained priest. I had to hide it at home.”
František Slavíček
You are forty-nine, so you joined the faculty in the sixty-seventh year and a year later the tanks arrived. How do you remember the events of August of the year sixty-eight, especially since you were already so close to the Church then?
That was pretty cool... Because before that, the Prague Spring, that was the revival. Suddenly there was freedom, the possibility of spiritual lectures, as students we could express ourselves freely... And after half a year such traumatic events... At first we were united in resistance and hope, student strikes were organized, but gradually it started to crumble...
Yet you were ordained in this atmosphere right at the age of sixty-eight as a nineteen-year-old. How did that happen?
In high school I ministered at St. Thomas Parish, where I met an older altar boy who saw that I was very interested in spiritual things. We talked about theology, and he had quite a modern outlook, and he equipped me with literature on dogmatics, morality, and so on, and then he introduced me to a secret bishop, to whom I began to go to seminars held in various apartments. Felix Davídek, as the bishop was called, was very learned and had - so to speak - a "pull on the gate". When I saw how many people around me were ordained, I asked him to ordain me too. But I didn't have the canonical age, which is, if exemptions are granted, at least twenty-three. But after August 21, Felix was afraid that all the bishops might be deported to Siberia, so he changed his mind and ordained me. It was November 15, and I went from the school, straight from the autopsy room, to an apartment, and there he ordained me without any glory.
(Felix Maria Davídek was a Czech Catholic priest who was imprisoned between 1950 and 1964 for, among other things, "education in hostile thinking against the people's democratic establishment". After his release he built extensive alternative theological and educational structures. - author's note.)
But after ordination you were at greater risk of possible punishment by the regime, weren't you?
Well, yes... But nobody would have thought that such a young boy would be a priest... Moreover, we didn't work publicly, we stayed in secret and I had my circle of sick and old people whom I visited... Which also brought me to a crisis, because I had no way of exercising my priesthood. So I was looking for a way to fill it, and I was interested in Mother Teresa, because in that kind of work I could apply both the priesthood and medicine.
But it was a while before you could follow her...
It's interesting that things sort of worked out for me... After the third year I was on an internship in Ivančice, together with Honza Placheta, who was coincidentally the son of the director of the Regional Office of National Health, which was located in the University Hospital... In the sixth year, director Placheta called me to ask what I was planning. I was thinking about Vyškov or New Town in Moravia, and he offered me a position at the University Hospital in Brno. I didn't know whether to accept, so he gave me time to think about it, and I remember walking around the hospital and considering my options, but in the end I agreed and was admitted to the first internship. I guess the fact that I was quite a good student and I finished with a red diploma...
Did your classmates in college know you were an ordained priest?
No, absolutely not. I had to hide it. They didn't even know at home. My mother only found out after a while... The bishop was afraid it would get out. Otherwise, it was known that I went to church. I wasn't allowed to teach, but I didn't find out until I left my first internship that I was listed as a reserve for the chief. But I decided to go into cardiac surgery...
That would actually be quite an escapist stunt, to be a secret priest and a non-partisan, and still make it to the primary...
I was never in the party, but I didn't aggressively oppose the regime either, because I thought it was more important to work well and build good relations with people, which I hope I did. But when you put it like that, I remember when in the third year of high school our teacher asked us what we wanted to study next, and what kind of university believers shouldn't apply to because they wouldn't be accepted. One of my classmates blurted out that she was going to medical school. But the teacher replied that believers were suitable for medical school because they had a good attitude towards the sick.
love thy neighbour
How did your faith then manifest itself in your work in the hospital?
Basically, it was about living as a Christian. And that lifestyle includes the biblical "love thy neighbour as thyself", that is, to be a neighbour to the patients, to try to empathise with them and act accordingly. One experience that helped me a lot in this was when, after my first year of medical school, I was injured on the job, had two operations, and was in the hospital with the uncertain prospect of moving the fingers of my right hand. A frowning nurse came in, gave me an injection without a word, and left. I was immediately in a foul mood and felt worse. Another time a nurse came in smiling, gave me the injection, exchanged a few words and I immediately felt better and hope for recovery grew in me. It helped me a lot afterwards, as a doctor, in my relationship with my patients.
What happened to the dream of Mother Teresa during your time at the FN Brno?
I couldn't officially go to see her, but I at least applied to the Ministry of Health's cadre reserves for work in developing countries and was offered to go to Iraq with a geophysical expedition that needed a doctor. Iraq, that's Mesopotamia, or biblical places like Babylon, Nineveh... I was attracted to that, but I didn't know if the hospital would release me. In the end, though, it was no problem, so I gathered piles of medical supplies, even learned how to pull teeth, and headed out. I really liked the environment there, and I imagined going from Iraq to India, but that wasn't possible because they took our passports when we arrived... So after a year I went back to the cardiac surgery and kept trying.
To flee abroad?
Yes. I was once on an official tour to Cyprus and I tried to make some contacts through the local church, but they didn't really recommend it because Cyprus was very pro-socialist at that time.
“I had women sent to me for abortion referrals, and as a believer I didn't know how to handle it. Eventually they stopped sending them to me because they saw my dilemma.”
František Slavíček
But you made more than one escape attempt, didn't you?
Yes, but I didn't do it to get "better", I did it to get into missions. My contact - a priest in Cyprus - discouraged me from my intention at the time because he said a pilot from Libya had tried to escape via their island shortly before, but they returned him and his plane. But he offered me the contact of a ship's captain who could get me secretly by sea to Israel and from there I could go on. But that didn't seem to work... And then there was the plan to disappear via Spain, where we were also on an official tour, and I got in touch with a missionary there who was supposed to give me the contact of a missionary - a believer. In the end, this didn't work out either, but it was actually lucky for me...
What do you mean? I would expect that it demotivates a person to realize that under the current regime he probably won't be able to fulfill his dream...
Even though I couldn't go on missions, I kept looking for a job and found my way into the Focolare Movement. It is a very ecumenical movement within the Catholic Church, aimed at dialogue with other churches, religions and people without religious convictions. I was once invited to their meeting - also secret, by the way, in the woods - where they talked about the fact that Christ is also present in our neighbors, that is, in other people. There I realized that I did not have to go to India or Africa to serve Christ, but that I could find him in everyone I met. That was an amazing discovery for me! When I went back to work in cardiac surgery after that encounter, everyone thought I had fallen in love, how happy it made me. (smiles)
Has faith ever been a barrier to your work as a doctor?
There was a time in my internal medicine department when the head of the clinic came to me and took me to another ward to see a pregnant patient who was not well, but she had mitral stenosis, a narrowing of the bicuspid valve, and as a result she developed pulmonary edema. The associate professor decided to send her to the hospital to terminate the pregnancy, which I did, but of course, from a believer's point of view, this was a problem for me. Only then did it occur to me that we could have tried to arrange a valve operation without extracorporeal circulation at the surgery, and I suppose that would have been possible in pregnancy. I was sorry, because we could have saved the life of the mother and the baby...
There couldn't be just one case like this, could there?
The members of the focolare live in communities - men and women separately - and when I became a member I started commuting every week from Brno to Bratislava until I finally moved there and started working as a cardiologist at the local clinic. (smiles) I talked to them, described their condition, and then I stopped dealing with it, but it happened that they decided to keep the baby... My colleagues then stopped sending them to me because they knew what my dilemma was. (smiles) But I remember one patient, for example, who was sent to me because she had been operated on for a serious heart defect in her childhood, but this in itself was not a reason to abort, since she had already had two successful pregnancies. When I examined her, however, I was puzzled myself because it was indeed a serious defect and the operation had not solved anything. So I told her that if she decided to keep the baby, I would accompany her and arrange for her to have the operation in Brno after the birth. She agreed, she was operated on in Brno with minor complications, and when we met two years later, she said she wouldn't trade the baby for anything in the world...
You tried to find ways where others could not see them...
Yeah, I did, I did.
with faith into the world
To sum it up: after graduation, ten years at the Brno University Hospital, a year in Iraq, then Bratislava...
...yeah, ten years too, then I went to Lithuania when they opened a focolare there. And I worked there part-time. I went to Lithuania already during the Soviet Union, for the so-called Mariapoli, then still secret spiritual exercises in the forests and so on... People there were quite closed and afraid, because they had a fresh memory of deportations to Siberia, and they were afraid that someone might denounce them... So we tried to bring them together in this way, to get rid of their fear. I spent over two years in Lithuania before I returned to be in charge of the movement again in the Czech Republic, Slovakia and Ukraine...
I don't understand how you could travel abroad under socialism, and even for the purpose of spreading the faith...
There were always ways. I used to go there for holidays during socialism. There was a doctor in Lithuania who was being treated in Karlovy Vary, where a friend of ours, a married Fokolarin, was also being treated at the time, and he got talking to her and she invited him to Lithuania. Her husband and son were also doctors and we went there together. I didn't go there for work until after the revolution. My colleagues were surprised when I had a career in Slovakia, but I told them that for the same reason I moved to Bratislava, I was now moving to Lithuania. Because the main purpose of the Focolare is to seek unity among people, among churches, religions, but also people without religious convictions.
Did you go to Lithuania to spread the faith, but at the same time work as a doctor?
Yes, although it wasn't easy to get a job. I knew Russian, but I didn't speak Lithuanian, and that was at a time when Russian was being pushed back... But even when I went from Brno to Bratislava, some people didn't understand. When I said I was following the voice of my heart, they thought I was getting married. (smiles) Of course, after the revolution there was freedom, so I could admit that I was going for religious reasons, but in Lithuania they were suspicious of me at first. They thought I was either a fraud or some kind of religious fanatic, which I was perhaps neither. (laughs) I found a job in the hospital doing ultrasound, doing heart and blood vessel tests, learning the language and living in the community... I thought I would stay in Lithuania forever, but eventually I was called back to the Czech Republic in the mid-1990s, and at the beginning of the new millennium I went back to Slovakia for three years... In short, always where I was needed.
Did you work as a doctor in the Czech Republic again?
No, I wouldn't have the capacity for that anymore, I was only working in the movement... In 2003 I was elected to the Focolarine Centre in Rome, but after a year it became clear that I needed to go to Africa. So I went to Cameroon, where I spent thirteen years.
So you made it to the mission after all! Did you know you were going to spend so much time there?
I told myself that it makes sense to stay on a mission for at least ten years, because it takes time to get to know the local mentality and to learn to communicate with the people on their level, so as not to appear as a foreign element.
What did you leave behind during such trips? In all the time we've been talking, you haven't talked about any of your own family besides your parents and your brother...
I've had a lifetime of wanderlust. During the totalitarian era, we couldn't travel, so we went to the GDR, Russia, Romania or Bulgaria, but not much else. When the borders opened, it was a different situation. And what did I leave behind? Relationships. Good relationships. I tried to build community and bring people together everywhere. And I didn't have a family of my own, the Roman Catholic Church is still celibate... Not that I wouldn't have liked to get married! (laughs) But one prefers God, and when one lives with other people in relationships, something is sought together, built together, and so the need for family is actually fulfilled...
“I once found an old lady smoking in the toilet. So, being a smart young doctor, you know, I gave her a lecture about the harm of smoking. She listened to me with such a nice smile and when I finished she said, 'Doctor, smoking is my only pleasure and you want to take it away from me?' So I understood that you have to see a person with respect, really as a person, because we are all different and what remains in the end is human brotherhood and love.”
František Slavíček
At the beginning of Focolare's work in Cameroon, it is said that there was a plea from a local tribe with a huge infant mortality rate. They prayed for help to preserve the tribe and their prayer reached Rome and your movement built a hospital there. So you went there as a minister, but at the same time, your medical experience must have come in handy, right?
I would certainly have been useful there as a doctor, but I consulted with the bishop who was in charge of the missions before I went, and he said that pastoral care, that is, spiritual care, took precedence. And there were so many tasks that there was no time for medicine. And there were doctors and nurses...
In the documentary Feet on the Equator, Head in the Sky, made by Czech Television about your mission, I was intrigued by a passage about a local healer, whom you say can solve some of the hardships better than Western medicine. Yet when you saw the problems the locals were facing, didn't your medical training resonate with you?
I tried to see the people and their problems not only through my eyes, but through their eyes. Africans generally have a holistic view of people and illnesses, but when someone gets sick, they don't take it as an infection, for example, but that someone put a spell on that person that made them sick or even die. I remember that in my first year I came to a village where in one family two small children died under strange circumstances. In the evening I stayed there with a young couple, the man was a chief, that is, a chief, they were educated, but even when we discussed the case and I told them that such deaths could be explained rationally, they replied that this was my belief, but that their belief was different. That's when I understood that if I went against their beliefs, I would just be a stupid white man who didn't understand them. So I chose a different path. Shortly after this event, a boy came to me saying that his mother, who lived in the town, had called him and said that someone wanted to kill him magically and that he should go to the ngambeman - that is, the native witch doctor and healer - to protect him. And he asked me what he should do. So I didn't refute him anymore, I asked him if he was a Christian, if he believed in Jesus Christ and if he believed that all power in heaven and on earth had been given to him. And he said he did. So I said to him, "Then why are you afraid?" The boy didn't go to any more ngambeman after that, and a fortnight later he came to see me again, and I asked him how he was still alive, and we just laughed about it together. So in this way I was there spreading the Christian faith that frees from fear and from things that destroy life.
brotherhood and unity
So it was easier to spread faith than science?
My role was primarily to spread the faith, but science and education were equally important. In Fontenoy, where we were active, we had, in addition to primary schools, a gymnasium run by teachers from the movement. And imagine living at home in an earthen house with a clay floor, where you light your kerosene lamp, and now you come to a school where there is the internet, teaching at a high level... Education helped tremendously, among other things, for the recognition and dignity of women in what was originally a patriarchal system, because in our gymnasium, girls were taught together with boys.
Why did you end up in Cameroon after thirteen years and not stay longer?
As I said, I had a brother five years younger than me who also entered the focolare as a single man, and he was in Prague, Košice, Croatia and Rome. But then he got sick, he had some strange combination of Parkinson's and Alzheimer's. He was living in the community and when his condition worsened, I got a call from my fellow brothers saying that he needed constant care and what to do about it, since they were not able to care for him so intensively. So I arranged in Cameroon that I would return to the Czech Republic. It didn't happen right away, as we were planning a big celebration of fifty years of focolare in the area, but then I came back and took care of my brother. That brought me back to medicine. My brother was progressively losing the ability to move and speak, and when we couldn't cope any more, he went to the St. Wenceslas Home in Boleslav, which is only ten kilometres from the focolare, so at least I could visit him every day.
But if it weren't for that, I don't think we'd be sitting here together right now and you'd still be in Africa, right?
I am, although I would probably be in a different place, because shortly after I left, a guerrilla war broke out in Cameroon. Cameroon was originally a German colony, but after the First World War it was divided between the French and the English. The Francophone part was the first to become independent, then the Anglophone part, which partly joined Cameroon and partly joined Nigeria. According to the constitution, there should have been equality of languages and inhabitants, but the francophone part was larger and the anglophones did not have the same rights, and not everyone knew English, for example, in public offices or public functions. The government wasn't very active in this, so violence and demonstrations began and the independent republic of Ambazonia was declared and is still being fought over to this day. So even members of the focolare had to leave Fontem. The indigenous people are still partly there, but the various warrior groups in the forests are recruiting young boys, so many are fleeing...
How do you remember it, when such events go completely against the idea you have been trying to promote there for many years?
Not easily, but again, for me it is beautiful that the natives continue to do what they have learned even in difficult conditions. The hospital we built there is working somehow, and what we sowed may not be working as one would imagine, but the idea of brotherhood and unity has not completely perished either. It continues as far as possible.
Since you are so well-travelled, did you ever manage to visit your dream India in your lifetime?
No, I didn't. But never mind. I learned a lot of things in Africa, including that holistic view of man... You know, when I started at the internship, I had a good assistant, Bořek Semrád. He always helped me when I needed it, but otherwise he let me work independently, and one worked in certain patterns... Once I found an old lady smoking in the toilet. So, as a young, smart doctor, you know, I gave her a lecture about the harm of smoking. She listened to me with this nice smile and when I finished she said: "Doctor, smoking is my only pleasure and you want to take it away from me?" That's how I came to understand the need to see a person not only in those schemes, although they are necessary for orientation, but with respect, truly as a person, because we are all different and what remains in the end is human brotherhood and love.
