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NDIAS Quarterly 2015 - 2016
interview with Tomáš Halík by Andrea Rogers
Msgr. Professor Tomáš Halík was a Templeton Fellow at the NDIAS in fall 2015, researching for his project, “Afternoon of Christianity: How Can Christian Monotheism Keep Its Identity in Global Pluralistic ‘Post-Secular’ Civilization?” Tomáš Halík is full professor of philosophy at Charles University in Prague at its Institute of Philosophy and Religious Studies, and he specializes in philosophy of religion, sociology of religion, interreligious dialogue and dialogue between believers and nonbelievers. Halík has been president of the Czech Christian Academy since 1990. In 1998 he was appointed a member of the European Academy of Sciences and Arts. Pope John Paul II appointed him, in 1992, Advisor to the Pontifical Council for Dialogue with NonBelievers and, in 2009, Pope Benedict XVI granted him the title of Monsignor – Honorary Prelate of His Holiness. In 2014, for his exceptional contributions to affirming life’s spiritual dimension, he was awarded the Templeton Prize. AR: Can you start by talking about your life’s work and what you’re specifically doing while you’re here at the Notre Dame Institute for Advanced Study? TH: My work, and also my project here at Notre Dame, is deeply connected with my life story. I was born in Prague, in former Czechoslovakia, when the Communists came to power, in 1948. During the hard persecution of religion in our country, I became a Christian believer and I decided to be a priest. I studied philosophy, sociology and psychology at Charles University in Prague, which is little bit older than Notre Dame, as it was founded in 1348. But I was not allowed to enter the priest seminary, which was absolutely controlled by the secret police and by the regime, especially after the Soviet invasion of Prague, through Czechoslovakia, in 1968. So I studied theology in secret underground seminaries and lectures, which were given by important theologians, including today’s Cardinal Schönborn and Cardinal Kasper. They came to Prague as private tourists and gave lectures in the private flats. Then I was secretly ordained a priest in a private chapel of a bishop in Erfurt, in East Germany. It was so secret that even my mother was not allowed to know I was a priest. I worked 11 years in an underground church. My official profession, my official job, at this time was as a psychotherapist with drug abusers and alcoholics in Prague. Concurrently, I helped the Prague Archbishop Cardinal Tomášek, writing some of his letters and sermons, and he became a great symbol of the spiritual struggle with the Communist regime.
After the Velvet Revolution in 1989, my life radically changed. I started to teach openly as part of the theological faculty of Charles University. I founded the Czech Christian Academy, as well as the Academic Parish in Prague. I baptized in this parish more than a thousand young people these past 25 years. Additionally, I started to travel. For 20 years, I was not allowed to travel to the West, so, now that I could, I visited all continents of this planet, even Antarctica. I devoted my life to dialogue with people of different cultures and religions. And I started to write books. I wrote my first book when I was 50. I said to myself, “The blossoms are there, the fruits must come.” So I disappear for part of every year for hermitage in Germany to write a book. I’m there absolutely alone for five weeks for meditation and for writing. My writing is a form of my meditation. Here at Notre Dame, my project has a mysterious title, “The Afternoon of Christianity.” What do I mean by that? I think that the history of Christianity is like a day. The morning, from the beginning of Christianity until the threshold of modernity, was the time to develop the structures, the institutional structures and the doctrinal structures. Then came the noonday crisis— the confrontation with modernity, secularization, with the “death of God,” and so on. I’m deeply convinced that now Christendom and Christianity is at a threshold of a new era, of the post-modern, maybe post-secular age. But my question is are we prepared for this post-modern, post-secular age? Vatican II was a very important step in the confrontation with modernity, as it prepared the Church for life in the secular world. But are we prepared for the post-secular world? Vatican