"I remember that year just like I remember 1968. Agnes was to be canonized, and at the beginning of the year it was already agreed who would go to Rome for the canonization. And they offered me to go with them by car, and I was still making my mind. And imagine that in May a member of the State Security came to me and asked if I would go to Rome. I said I didn't know. And he said, 'And why wouldn't you go?' And there I started to think that he could do something, so I said that not everybody can go, some people have to stay here for the services. "But go there. . ." And when he kept trying to bait me like that, I said, 'I don't have a passport.' And he said, 'That's not a problem for us.' I said, 'I'm a resident of another district.' - 'That's not a problem at all.' And he took out papers, the passport application. So I said that I don´t have a photo. 'We have your photo.' So that was the motivtion for me not to go to Rome."
"It was not clear-cut. The first time was when I was ten and a half years old, so I started thinking about it for the first time. And then I didn't think about it again and then I thought about it again and then I said no and then I said yes. And it went on until I was about twenty-five. And at twenty-five, as they say, I kicked off and I've never regretted it since and I would never go back."
"I remember it like today. In January we were happy that it would finally break down. The political situation, it slowly looked like it was going to be for the better, because we ourselves had experienced people writing nasty reports about us as we were leaving school, threatening us that we wouldn't get in anywhere, that sort of thing. We were glad that things were changing. When spring came in 1968, it was such a hopeful time, and I asked a gentleman who was retired by then if it could be reversed. And he said at the time that it can't, if somebody puts their foot between the door, you can't open the door anymore. Unfortunately, he died in 1968 after the troops came in, and we couldn't talk about it any more. But what happened was that the door got slammed."
Marian Rudolf Kosík was born on 28 December 1951 in Šaratice near Brno. He was led to the priesthood, to which he has dedicated his life, by the environment in which he grew up. In 1978 he entered the Roman Catholic Theological Faculty in Litoměřice, and was ordained a priest in June 1983. He was contacted by State Security about the possibility of attending the canonization of Agnes of Bohemia in Rome in 1989. In 1995, during the visit of John Paul II to Olomouc, he arranged the so-called papal coronation of the Gothic statue. In 2000 he became abbot in Nová Říše. In 2024 he was living in Šaratice.
