PhDr. Markéta Koronthályová

"And then an interesting situation arose when I told Father Ladislav Pokorný, who was the dean of the theological faculty at the time, and he said: 'Well, look, there is one school where your personnel flaw might not matter, and that is the theological faculty. No woman has ever taught there in history, but why not give it a try? Someone has to be the first.' Then there was a moment of silence, and then he called me back and said, 'Well, look, I talked to Bishop Tomášek about it, and he wouldn't be entirely against it, but he wants to talk to you. So you have to go to the Archbishop's Palace to talk to him.' So I went. My heart was pounding, and we sat across from each other in the Archbishop's Palace. Bishop Tomášek turned on the radio so we could talk, and we talked about upbringing and education, because he was a teacher by training, and then he said: 'Well, you know, I’ve always thought that the female element should be included in the education of seminarians, because for education to be complete, it must include both the male and female elements. As a teacher, I know this very well.' And then he said something to me that I carry like a diamond in my heart. He said, 'You know, I wouldn’t let just anyone in, but I’ll send you there.'"

"Well, so we were prepared to be expelled. And when we had somehow come to terms with that, they called us back and said they weren't going to expel us after all. And then we found out, when we looked into it, when it was possible, that it was actually part of a struggle between two communist wings at the Faculty of Arts, that there was a progressive wing and a regressive wing – I don't know – [of people] who needed to prove to each other that the others were bad. And they took advantage of it. Of course, we never managed to find out who set up the workers from ČKD and who put up the notice. But they wanted to prove how bad they were. Well, so they called us in and said they had decided not to expel us because we had excellent academic results, it was a scientific study competition at the time, and we each had several papers, participations, and so on. So they wouldn't expel us, but they would give us a reprimand. And they gave each of us a piece of paper saying that we were being reprimanded for behavior that was incompatible with the behavior of a student at a university in a socialist state, period. So there was nothing about the church, nothing about religion, because – they kept hammering it into our heads: 'Of course, you have the right to religion, we have religious freedom, we are a free country, but nowhere is it written that you have to study at the Faculty of Arts. But you can have your religion.' It was phrased in such a way that it was as if we had gotten drunk somewhere and trashed a bar, it was on the same level, it wasn't clear what the point was. But with this paper, it was clear that we wouldn't find any job in the field anywhere."