Abstract
zpečnosti.Josef Jelen was a catholic priest and a writer, whose life was shaped by his ambitions to achieve recognition and popularity. In 1949 he was imprisoned because of his anticommunist sermons, but he emerged from the prison as someone absolutely loyal to the communist regime.
To achieve publishing of this work, he became an agent of the state secret service (under an alias Hamlet) and in 1963 he played a role in the imprisonment of two priests from the Trutnov region, František Michálek and Emil Tichý, who were guilty of being religiously overzealous. Right after that, Jelen left the priest service and started his journalistic and writing career in Prague.
In 1972 he published the novel Shadow of the Cathedral (Stín katedrály), in which he tries to justify his activities in Trutnov as well as to square accounts with his superiors in the church. In the novel he claims, that the imprisoned priests committed serious embezzlement of the church assets, so their imprisonment was just an act of justic