Fr Pavel Bačo

Introductory Statement

I was born in the town of Slavičín in the Czech Republic in 1974. I joined the Jesuits of the Czech province in 1992. After my philosophical and theological studies in Munich, Dublin and London (Heythrop College) I was working mainly as a university chaplain or parish priest in the university chaplaincies and Jesuit parishes of Olomouc, Brno and Prague in the course of the last two decades. In the summer of 2020 my Jesuit superior in the Czech Republic  appointed me to be the Novice Master of the joint Czech and Slovak novitiate in Ružomberok (Slovakia) and sent me together with our only candidate to the Jesuit North West Europe Novitiate in Birmingham so that I could have some formation alongside an experienced novice master and to offer our novice a bigger novitiate experience. In 2021 the Czech and Slovak Jesuit superiors decided that they would keep sending their candidates to Birmingham in the future and I became the assisstant of the British Novice Master. In the last two years I was in the same Jesuit community here in Birmingham with Father Kensy. I got to know about his work in the chaplaincy, while he and the British Jesuit superior got to know about my past! This exchange resulted in my being appointed as part-time Roman Catholic chaplain from the 2022/23 academic year.