“If anyone strikes you on the right cheek, turn to him the other also.” These are the words of Christ from his Sermon on the Mount. They are not particularly clear or convenient like many others in the Gospel. However, we do not make much effort to understand them patiently, and therefore we act as if they do not exist, as if they were there just for interest. Some then misuse them. These are people who think that the most can be accomplished by doing nothing, by sighing, and by waiting for the end of the world.
It truly does not require much reading and contemplation to recognize that an active attitude toward life, faith in action, is the very soul of Christianity. All capacities within us are to serve the love of God (…), we must not leave even a little of them idle, nor the slightest thought and most insignificant word, for from everything we will have to account. We must stretch our strength to the end, like the body of Christ on the cross, to the limits of our possibilities and even beyond.
It is therefore false to assert that Christianity ever preached that one should not resist evil. He who passively observes the injustice done to his brother, to whom he has obligations, and does not use all his means, all his strength, to help him, would sin against the fundamental commandment of our faith.
The above excerpt comes from the pen of Jesuit Adolf Kajpr, a priest who publicly opposed Hitler's aggression (and later the rise of the communists) as a journalist and editor of several magazines. His writings, which connected daily liturgical readings with the current situation, were a support not only for the Prague St. Ignatius parish but also for the wider public. For "publishing incendiary articles" he was arrested by the German occupiers in March 1941, survived the Pankrác prison, and concentration camps in Terezín, Mauthausen, and Dachau. After returning to his homeland, his post-war journalistic activities brought him the same accusation a second time, this time from the communist regime. Again he was imprisoned in Pankrác prison, followed by Mírov, Valdice, and Leopoldov, from which he never returned alive… Currently, the second part of his beatification process is taking place in Rome.
(Adolf Kajpr SJ /1902–1959/; excerpt from the essay “Turn the Other Cheek”,
published in “The Messenger of the Divine Heart of the Lord”, 1940;
quoted and processed according to the book Presence is God's own time. Refugium 2021)
