Bl. Dominik Trčka

Dominik Trčka was born in Moravia, in today's Czech Republic, in 1886. He joined the Redemptorists, a congregation devoted to preaching to the poor, took the name Metod, and was ordained in 1910.

From 1919 he worked among Greek Catholics in Galicia and eastern Slovakia, adopting their Byzantine rite, and became the superior of the Redemptorists there. In 1950 the Czechoslovak Communist government suppressed all religious communities. He was sentenced to twelve years in prison and tortured. In 1958 he was put in a punishment cell for singing a Christmas carol, caught pneumonia, and died in Leopoldov prison in 1959. He was beatified in 2001.

Dominik Trčka was beatified in 2001.

Beatification allows public veneration, usually in a particular region or religious family. Canonization extends it to the whole Church.