Josef Toufar

The event commonly referred to as Číhošťský zázrak (in English: Číhošť miracle) happened on 11 December 1949, during the third Sunday in Advent, in the Church of the Assumption of the Virgin Mary in the village of Číhošť, Havlíčkův Brod district, Czechoslovakia. The alleged miracle was used by Communist authorities as a pretext for anti-religious repression. The priest Josef Toufar was tortured and died during the investigation of the event.

During a church service held on 11 December 1949 in the Church of the Assumption of the Virgin Mary in the village of Číhošť, several witnesses noticed that a half-metre long iron cross standing on the main altar moved several times on its own. The next day, one of them notified the priest, Josef Toufar, about the unusual event. Toufar claimed that he didn't notice anything, stating that he was in the pulpit, with his back to the altar and the cross. Later, he recorded the testimonies of 19 witnesses and soon after that, on 21 December, SNB (Czechoslovak National Security Corps) officers arrived to the village to examine the church.

The information about the miracle quickly spread and caught the attention of the authorities of the Communist state established after the coup d'état of 1948 in Czechoslovakia. The StB (State Security) decided to exploit the event for propaganda purposes to discredit the Roman Catholic Church. In January 1950, they arrested Toufar and forced him—under brutal torture—to testify that he faked the miracle by installing a mechanical device leading from the pulpit to the cross. According to their version, he operated the device in order to deceive parishioners. During the interrogation, they took him back to Číhošť to film a falsified reconstruction of the event. Toufar was so badly beaten that in some passages of the film he had to be replaced by another priest. Shortly after that, he was transferred to a closely guarded state hospital in Prague, where he died on 25 February 1950, under a false name.

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