"So a great pilgrimage of priests was convened on Easter Tuesday, after Easter, attended by a thousand priests, which was an extraordinary, great event. I think now for those priests, for us priests, because we met for the first time in such an unorganized space and manner. Because until then, priests even if they met within the diocese, it was always accompanied by Pacem in terris, accompanied by church secretaries under some auspices of a meeting or an anniversary. Whereas this was a pilgrimage that filled the Velehrad basilica. We set off from Velehrad with the fact that our task is to send hundreds and hundreds of people from every parish to Cyril and Methodius. In other words, the result was then this pilgrimage, which we could not participate in, in our own way, but we could send believers there and actually mediate the attention towards it."
"In Sušice, I attended such interrogations about two or three times, and I solved it to myself that it was a kind of courtship. When they sat me down and I was sitting there, when I left afterwards, I found out that I had been sitting there for five hours or six hours or whatever. They always took turns, changed, and since I have a certain disposition thanks to chess, I then took a walk for two hours near Otava and discovered that they actually had six sets of questions that they always came back to again and again. And as they recorded it, they could then compare what they thought was correct and what not. And I felt like I didn't get into any trouble. And it ended in an interesting way, when I was actually asked the hard way, directly, if I would actually like to study in Rome. And I was like, 'Well, what would that mean?' I was just kind of messing around a little bit. And he told me, and that's when I realized he was left alone there, and he said, 'That would mean you'd have to be our person.' And I was like 'Oh no.' And I got up and I was leaving. Because I knew they had no chance of keeping me there anymore."
"So we got up around four o'clock, I went to help him [uncle] cut hay, we cut hay. In the morning, when we got up, really in the dark, of course we just, as they say, drank our milk and went, and sometime around half past six, when we were almost done, my aunt ran across the meadow and she could be heard shouting: 'Pepík, Pepík, there will be a war.'So it's really a memory very... today I say a bit cabaret, almost anecdotal, but it was very dramatic at the time. It wasn't a joke, it wasn't some crazy woman screaming. Because she got up to prepare to go [on vacation], she turned on the radio and heard from the radio that we were occupied. So the first thing was that she ran for her husband. So the impression... I remember how we actually spent the whole day in such a certain... today I would say it was actually stress, that we didn't know what to do, what start, what it meant. And some such late afternoon, tanks arrived in front of the windows of Petrovice hill and we saw it all the hard way. That memory is quite dramatic."
Adolf Pintíř was born on May 14, 1952 in Žihobce in a large Catholic family. His mother Maria was a housewife, his father Adolf worked as a teacher. However, he had to leave the school in 1961 because of his attitudes. Seven years later he was rehabilitated, but the situation was repeated in 1977 after his son’s priestly ordination. He never returned to school. At the age of 14, the youngest sister Ivana secretly entered the Congregation of the Sisters of Mercy of St. Charles Borromeo and later took the religious name Angelika. Adolf Pintíř studied at the Cyril Methodius Faculty of Theology in Prague, located in Litoměřice, where he met a number of inspiring personalities, mainly among his older classmates. He interrupted his studies by completing basic military service. In July 1977, he received priestly ordination from the hands of Cardinal Tomášek in Prague. He worked as a chaplain first in Sušice, briefly in Týn nad Vltavou and then until 1997 in Chotoviny u Tábora. During his time in Sušice, he became friends with the Kaplan family from Prague, who organized large Christian meetings at their nearby cottage. He later took an active part in these events, linked to the French community in Taizé. He then helped one of the daughters, Martina Hošková, born Kaplanová, to find and rent a vicarage in Dražíč, where they continued the tradition of summer meetings of Christian families. Adolf Pintíř participated in the organization of the priest pilgrimage to Velehrad in 1985, then in the declaration of the Year of the Holy Scriptures, and then he was in the preparatory committee of the Decade of Spiritual Renewal. He also published the Christian samizdat magazine Resurrection with friends. From 1997 he worked as the dean of the Cathedral of St. Mikuláš in České Budějovice and at the same time began lecturing at the Theological Faculty of the University of South Bohemia in České Budějovice. In the years 2009–2015 he became the vicar general in České Budějovice, from March 2014 to June 2015 he was the administrator of the diocese. At the time of filming (2022), he was the chief chaplain of the Czech Grand Priory of the Order of Malta, the chairman of the Ackermann-Gemeinde Association and an auxiliary clergyman in Sušice.
