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Czech cardinal; archbishop of Prague. Elevated to the cardinalate in 1965. Declared a Servant of God in 1998.

 

SIG - Signature and several words in his handwriting. Signed twice on one side and once on the reverse. Autograph accompanied by a 1966 black and white glossy image by Houston Chronicle award-winning photographer Blair Pittman.  (Then feisty 77-year old Beran completed an extensive tour of the US).

 

He was imprisoned in the Dachau concentration camp during World War II after the Nazis had targeted him for "subversive and dangerous" behavior where he almost died in 1943 due to disease. He was freed in 1945 upon Allied liberation and Pope Pius XII nominated him to head the Prague archdiocese. But the introduction of the communist regimesaw him imprisoned and placed under house arrest. His release in 1963 came with the condition that he could not perform his episcopal duties and he was later exiled to Rome in 1965 as part of a coordinated deal between the church and the national government.

 

At the beginning of June 1942 Archbishop Beran announced that he would celebrate a Mass for the Czechoslovak prisoners of war detained and in Czech in direct defiance of Nazi directives. The Gestapo arrested Beran on 6 June 1942 during World War II (on the basis of being "subversive and dangerous") and he was later imprisoned without trial in Pankrác at Theresienstadt (alongside future cardinal Štěpán Trochta) and also the Dachau concentration camp. From 6 June 1942 until 6 July he was held in Pankrác before being sent for two months to Terzin. He arrived at Dachau on 4 September 1942 where his number was 25844. It was there that a typhoid epidemic in 1943 almost killed him but he rallied from it and remained there until 29 April 1945 after Allied forces liberated the camp. Upon his immediate return to Prague the President of Czechoslovakia Edvard Beneš decorated him with the Iron Cross and the medal of Hero of the Resistance - the two highest honors the nation had.

BERAN, Josef (1888-1969)

$295.00Price
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