Orthodox Christian Saints

In June 1942, 750 German soldiers surrounded a cathedral in Prague.

Inside, seven young paratroopers were barricaded in a stone crypt. They had done the unthinkable: assassinated Reinhard Heydrich, the Hangman of Prague, the man who ran the Nazi terror apparatus and presided over the planning of the Holocaust. The Third Reich wanted them alive. They would not be taken alive.

The bishop whose cathedral sheltered them was sixty-three years old. He had not been there when the decision was made to open the doors. He could have claimed ignorance. He could have walked away. Instead, he wrote a letter to the German authorities taking full responsibility for everything and surrendered himself.

He was shot by firing squad on September 4, 1942.

His name was Gorazd. And his story begins not in 1942, but in the year 863.

The Shepherd of Prague is the biography of Hieromartyr Bishop Gorazd of Bohemia, one of the most extraordinary and least-known figures in modern Christian history. Born Matěj Pavlík in a small Moravian village in 1879, he was ordained a Roman Catholic priest, served for fourteen years as chaplain to the forgotten patients of a psychiatric hospital, and spent two decades wrestling with a theological conviction that would define his life: that the Roman Catholic Church, as historically present in his homeland, was not the original faith of the Czech people. It was a replacement, imposed by force in 885 AD when Pope Stephen V expelled the disciples of Saints Cyril and Methodius and forcibly Latinized the church they had built.

The original faith of Moravia was Orthodox. And it had been waiting, like a buried seed, for eleven centuries.