"I didn't feel that like some colleagues who had this sort of Manichean vision that it was the devil in the Manichean-Persian-dualist sense. I feel like my position is religiously authentic. The 'loving your enemy' thing is a contradiction in terms, but that comes precisely from the fact that it's no longer the enemy. In this Christian context, it's a person whose eyes need to be opened, who needs to be given something that's missing."
"These were people who worked in intelligence with a certain organization about which they knew basically nothing, which was the Church. That in itself led to misconceptions on their part, because oftentimes they saw a conspiracy and a hateful statement in something that is just in the Bible and relates to a completely different context. My concern was to kind of remove those deficiencies for them, because there was nobody else who could do it. The church hierarchy wouldn't have it, they couldn't have it, and they wouldn't have it from those who were in trouble. So that's what I felt was necessary to do - eliminate that tension and hostility, which was a misconception the way I understood it."
"That one branch of European culture is deeply orientated towards a kind of egalitarian, fair society that communism is trying to make. The images I'm sending you include a quote from Engliš's book The National Economy, where he writes: 'The man who would live according to the principles of love of his neighbour would feel as free under communism as the individualist under capitalism. Of course, this is impossible among egotists.' I understand this as, yes, it's a futile effort, but it's a difficult question when an idea that I accept in principle is promoted, say, in a stupid way, by power."
Milan Klapetek was born in Velké Tresné in the Žďár nad Sázavou district on 24 June 1944 to Miloslav Klapetek and Dana Klapetková, née Unčovská. In 1961, he trained as a turner in Brno and studied at a high school of mechanical engineering for three more years. Completing his military service, he worked for two years as a stage technician in several Brno theatres. He studied at the Comenius Evangelical Faculty of Theology in Prague in 1968-1973. He worked as a vicar in Vsetín, Cvikov and Brno in the 1970s and 1980s with a short break. He was actively involved in the Peace Department of the Evangelical Church, thanks to which he attended several conferences of the World Council of Churches abroad in the 1980s. He worked to establish a dialogue between the Church and the then socialist regime. As part of this effort, he collaborated with the StB as an agent between 1975 and 1989, forcing him to leave the Church in 1991. Since 1994, he has been teaching at the Brno University of Technology, including philosophy and rhetorics, and he has also been a lecturer at the University of the Third Age since 2005.