Catholic priest Jan Bula was hanged on this date in 1952 at Jihlava

A Rokytnice pastor, Bula (English Wikipedia entry | the more detailed Czech and German) put himself in the gunsights of the postwar Communist state by defying its strictures on proselytization and commenting publicly against them.

Although perhaps a gadfly from the state’s perspective he was by no means a dissident consequential enough to have merited his eventual treatment; however, he was cruelly rolled into a notorious 1951 show trial called the Babice Case. Occasioned by a fatal raid launched by anti-Communist terrorists, the Babice trials targeted a huge number of ideological enemies and eventually resulted in 107 convictions and 11 death sentences.* Bula was among them, speciously condemned a traitor for complicity in the attack — a move that also opportunistically accelerated a case that state agents had for some time been attempting with little success to construct by means of entrapment.

“We human beings do not love God enough,” he wrote in a letter to his parents before his hanging. “That is the only thing for which we must ask forgiveness.”

The Catholic Church is currently considering this modern martyr for beatification.

* After the Cold War these sentences were retrospectively overturned or reduced, and a judge in the Babice case, Pavel Vitek, was prosecuted for his role in it.

On this day..

• 1527: Hans Hergot, immovable type
• Feast Day of St. Baudilus
• 1622: Sultan Osman II
• 1691: Mark Baggot, Jacobite spy
• 1799: Simon Taylor, for indulging in drunkenness
• 1795: Ignac Martinovics and the Magyar Jacobins
• 2001: An adult actress stoned to death in Evin prison
• 1881: Po'olua, "darkened in my mind"
• 1943: Wilhelm H., pensioner and vandal
• 1987: Edward Earl Johnson, "I guess nobody is going to call"
• 2001: Zhang Jun and his gang
• 1820: Karl Ludwig Sand, a curious strand of German history