From the Underground Church to Freedom

Tomáš Halík, Gerald Turner

Description

International best-selling author and theologian Tomáš Halík shares for the first time the dramatic story of his life as a secretly ordained priest in Communist Czechoslovakia. Inspired by Augustine's candid presentation of his own life, Halík writes about his spiritual journey within a framework of philosophical theology; his work has been compared to that of C. S. Lewis, Thomas Merton, and Henri Nouwen. Born in Prague in 1948, Halík spent his childhood under Stalinism. He describes his conversion to Christianity during the time of communist persecution of the church, his secret study of theology, and secret priesthood ordination in East Germany (even his mother was not allowed to know that her son was a priest). Halík speaks candidly of his doubts and crises of faith as well as of his conflicts within the church. He worked as a psychotherapist for over a decade and, at the same time, was active in the underground church and in the dissident movement with the legendary Cardinal Tomášek and Václav Havel, who proposed Halík as his successor to the Czech presidency. Since the fall of the regime, Halík has served as general secretary to the Czech Conference of Bishops and was an advisor to John Paul II and Václav Havel.

Woven throughout Halík’s story is the turbulent history of the church and society in the heart of Europe: the 1968 Prague Spring, the occupation of Czechoslovakia, the self-immolation of his classmate Jan Palach, the “flying university,” the 1989 Velvet Revolution, and the difficult transition from totalitarian communist regime to democracy. Tomáš Halík was a direct witness to many of these events, and he provides valuable testimony about the backdrop of political events and personal memories of the key figures of that time. This volume is a must-read for anyone interested in Halík and the church as it was behind the Iron Curtain, as well as in where the church as a whole is headed today.

The community of priests that I belonged to operated cautiously, covertly and on the basis of strict secrecy, and this proved to be a prudent strategy. We would all meet together as a group three times a year, but otherwise we only met in twos. Most of the time we celebrated Mass alone very early in the morning, and on Saturdays or special occasions with friends. I celebrated my “first mass” in the Czech lands with my brother priests on the Feast of Christ the King at a country cottage not far from Prague. After that I celebrated Mass fairly regularly in the home of my friends, the Kováříks, a couple whom I had been with in the autumn of 1968 during our brief exile in Britain. The windows of their apartment looked out over the old Jewish cemetery in the heart of Old Prague, and so during Mass I would often think of the chosen people of Israel, God’s first love, and ask forgiveness for all the suffering we Christians had caused the Jews, both in the Prague ghetto and elsewhere in the world. I also liked to celebrate Mass in summer with friends in the open air, at early morning in forests, or in the mountains. We operated according to the principle that we could divulge our priesthood to others only if three conditions were fulfilled—and always under an oath of total secrecy. They had to be people we knew very well, they had to be capable of keeping a secret even in extremis, and they had to require our service as priests for some reason. But as a matter of principle, it was forbidden in our circle to inform our own parents, because apparently in the past carelessness had resulted in a breach of security when someone from the family circle had “let the cat out of the bag.” This could, of course, jeopardize the entire group, and betray the whole network of the “hidden church” that had contacts abroad. Such carelessness could have dire consequences, not only for the clandestinely ordained priest, but also for other people. Priests risked several years’ imprisonment for the “crime of impeding the state supervision of churches and religious societies”—which in our days usually carried a two-year sentence—but they could also be charged with “collaboration with foreign enemies,” and goodness knows what else. However, there was no longer any risk of a death sentence, or imprisonment for life for “spying for the Vatican,” as there had been in the 1950s. So I couldn’t even tell my mother, with whom I lived until her death in 1986, that I was a priest. However, I am sure that a mother’s heart can sense very many things. Although we couldn’t speak about a lot of things specifically, it was obvious toward the end of her life that she knew somehow what my situation was. She respected my secret, however, and I was glad she didn’t know absolutely everything, because it would have been hard for her to live with the knowledge that I could be sent to prison any day. Although she did not profess membership of the church during her adult life, I don’t think she ever abandoned faith as such in her heart. A few years before she died, Fr. Reinsberg, who was fond of both my parents, reconciled her formally with God and the church. From then on, during her lengthy time in hospital, I was able to bring holy communion to her. It rather distressed my mother that I had no family of my own, or close blood relatives. Although she knew I was already a grown man for many years, and “could make my way in the world,” she was also knew I wasn’t a “practical person” and had various other vulnerable features. It was great relief to her just before her death when the family of Dr. Scarlett Vasiluková-Rešlová, who was part of my closest “spiritual family,” and helped me selflessly to take care of my mother, fully “adopted” me and forever afterwards was my calm human support. My mother died peacefully in my arms, reconciled with God and people, on the First of May—the feast of St. Joseph the Worker, to whom she prayed every day for years the prayer she had prayed since childhood: “preserve me from sin and grant me a happy death.” Previously I was unable to imagine what a “happy death” was, and I had feared the day of my mother’s death since I was a child. But when I held my mother by the hand, said a few words of farewell, and gave her holy communion, she immediately closed her eyes, and I felt her passage into eternity as a gift, and I knew her prayer had been heard. “The underground church” or “illegal church structures” were actually what the secret police called us. We never regarded ourselves as some special church “alongside” or even “against” the church that officially functioned in Czechoslovakia. Every baptized person is part of the church. I have always attached importance to Karl Rahner’s assertion that the church is the sign of the unity of humankind, and those who are not formally members of it belong to it in a certain way by the very fact of being human, and particularly by virtue of their yearning for meaning, truth and good. We realized that under a Communist regime, the church could not publicly perform much of what is a natural and inseparable part of its life. We wanted to prevent the church being reduced to the bare minimum of activity permitted by the atheist regime, which was essentially just the liturgy, and the repair of church buildings, a situation to which many members of the laity, and even the clergy, were beginning to become accustomed. In the ranks of the officially active clergy we carefully distinguished between many self-sacrificing priests whom we deeply respected, and with whom we cooperated where possible, and the officials of the regime-sponsored “Association of Catholic Clergy—Pacem in Terris,” who could be seen embracing the Communist bigwigs in front of the TV cameras; we could only pray for the latter. But both the “official” church and the “unofficial” structures were multifaceted, and extremely variegated. I never thought of the Czech church in those days as monochromatic; those of us who were clandestine priests never thought ourselves better than those priests who continued to serve in parishes, and often had to compromise with the regime. As it was later proved, there were heroes and traitors—but above all weak and erring individuals—on both sides. (excerpted from chapter 5)

1. Are You Writing About Yourself?
2. My Path to Faith
3. The Spring That Turned Into Winter
4. My Path to Priesthood
5. A Priest of the Underground Church
6. The Decade of Spiritual Renewal
7. The Revolution of St Agnes
8. Exodus
9. New Foundations
10. The Experience of Darkness
11. The Path of Politics – Challenge or Temptation?
12. Windows on the World
13. On the Threshold of Old Age
14. A Journey to Eternal Silence

Sujets

• Religion
• Christianisme
• Religious Intolerance
• Religious
• Philosophie et théologie
• Christian Church
• History

Informations

• Publié par: University of Notre Dame Press
• Date de parution: 31 octobre 2019
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9780268106799
• Langue: English

Extrait

From the Underground Church to Freedom

Copyright © 2019 by Tomáš Halík
The work was supported by the European Regional Development Fund-Project “Creativity and Adaptability as Conditions of the Success of Europe in an Interrelated World (No. CZ.02.1.01/0.0/0.0/16_019/0000734).”
Published in the United States of America
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Halík, Tomáš, author. | Turner, Gerald, translator.
Title: From the underground church to freedom / Tomáš Halík ; translated by Gerald Turner.
Other titles: To že byl život? English
Description: Notre Dame, Indiana : University of Notre Dame Press, [2019] | Translation of: To že byl život? : z podzemní církve do labyrintu svobody.
Identifiers: LCCN 2019021443 (print) | LCCN 2019981271 (ebook) |
ISBN 9780268106775 (hardback) | ISBN 9780268106799 (epub) | ISBN 9780268106805 (pdf)
Subjects: LCSH: Halík, Tomáš. | Catholic Church—Czech Republic—Clergy—Biography. | Theologians—Czech Republic—Biography. | Intellectuals—Czech Republic—Biography. | Czechoslovakia—Politics and government— 1968–1989. | Czechoslovakia—Church history.
Classification: LCC BX4705.H137 A3 2019 (print) | LCC BX4705.H137 (ebook) | DDC 282.092 [B]—dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019021443
LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019981271
∞This book is printed on acid-free paper.
This e-Book was converted from the original source file by a third-party vendor. Readers who notice any formatting, textual, or readability issues are encouraged to contact the publisher at [e-mail]
. . . with all my ways you are familiar.
—Psalm 139:3
And I have always been unwilling to ask the way—it was never to my taste! Instead I sought and tried out the ways myself. My entire journey has been an experimental questioning.
—Friedrich Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra
Contents
ONE Are You Writing about Yourself?
TWO My Path to Faith
THREE The Spring That Turned into Winter
FOUR My Path to Priesthood
FIVE A Priest of the Underground Church
SIX The Decade of Spiritual Renewal
SEVEN The Revolution of St. Agnes
EIGHT Exodus
NINE New Foundations
TEN The Experience of Darkness
ELEVEN The Path of Politics, Challenge or Temptation?
TWELVE Windows on the World
THIRTEEN On the Threshold of Old Age
FOURTEEN A Journey to Eternal Silence
ONE
Are You Writing about Yourself?
Human life is ongoing self-interpretation. If I wish to present myself to someone else or to understand myself, I start to tell my own story. This is me in time. Unlike animals or things, we are not simply “now”: I myself am observing events. I unfold from a past that I carry with me, and at the same time, in a certain sense, I already “have” the future: in the form of hopes, wishes, plans, and fears.
Sometimes the derivation of the Latin word for religion— religio —is given as re-legere —re-reading. Yes, faith is reading our own story anew, reading it from another viewpoint, in a broader context, with detachment and deeper understanding. Our life, viewed with the eyes of faith, is not a “tale told by an idiot, signifying nothing,” as Shakespeare’s Macbeth says. It is a story whose hidden author and director is God. But he does not move us like puppets on strings; the drama in which he has placed us is more like commedia dell’arte — a play in which we are given enormous scope for improvisation. We recognize God’s writing style by its infinite generosity and its incomprehensible trust in our freedom. Wherever human freedom is not deformed and caricatured by indiscipline and willfulness, wherever it is realized in love and creation, there, in that freedom of human self-transcendence, can we glimpse perhaps the purest image and illustration of God, who is very freedom and generosity.
Confessions , the title of Augustine’s best-known book, can denote both confession of sins and confession of faith, or credo. Confession, the honest narration of one’s own life journey with all its faults and misgivings, is certainly closely linked to confession in the sense of confession of faith, confessing to God. During the Mass we confess our sinfulness and our faith. Before confessing to God in the confession of faith, we go to confession to confess our sins and doubts and confess our humanity.
In confessing our sins and weaknesses we confront the person within us whom we would rather leave outside the church door—but it is that person who is truly invited to the feast. When you give a banquet, invite the poor, the crippled, the lame, and the blind. That is what God does also: he does not invite the wealthy, just, and pious side of our being in its Sunday dress, the side that wants to reward God—or thinks it can. God invites what is blind, lame, weeping, poor, and hungry within us. Not in order to condemn this “less attractive” side of our being, but in order to feed and cheer it. The rabbi from Nazareth never failed to speak about it in his arguments with the Pharisees.
People often tend to be proudly locked up in their “virtues,” certainties, and strengths. What is fundamental in them opens up through their thirst, their yearning, and their wounds. What is fundamental in us is that very “openness,” openness to what is fundamental, to what is “the only needful thing,” which does not open itself to us at our moments of our satiated, self-sufficient, self-assurance. The openness of the human heart and the openness of the Kingdom of God are one and the same openness.
Who am I actually? “I have become a question to myself,” Augustine says. Yes, our self—like our God—must be for us the subject of continuous questioning, doubting, and seeking. We seek ourselves, and God also, by telling our story, and in telling it we do not conceal our trembling. Only the heart that has not ceased to tremble in holy restlessness can, in the end, find rest in the sea of God’s Peace.
❚ “ARE YOU WRITING ABOUT YOURSELF AGAIN? Do you think people have the time or inclination to read about your life?,” my associate Scarlett asked today in my study as she took a casual glance at the manuscript I had just handed to her for her critical comments. Scarlett has been at my side for forty years in good times and bad. She is the first person to read my texts, and a severe critic of everything I say, write, and do. No one on earth is capable of upsetting me the way she does; no one on earth has been of benefit and assistance to me the way she has. When several of my friends were appointed to high office after 1989, I could see that they desperately needed someone to give them systematic feedback, instead of the yes-men and lickspittles who surrounded them. The mature and good-natured side of myself I owe chiefly to Scarlett. The Bible says that a woman of fortitude is worth more than rubies; it requires a lot of fortitude, patience, and an unflagging hurricane of energy to stand by me.
What am I to say in response? I am writing about myself but also about a half century of history of a country in the heart of Europe, and particularly about the history of the sorely tested Czech Catholic church. I’m not a historian, that’s for sure, and my testimony will be a “subjective” one. How else? Naturally I am also writing my story for the readers of my books, and for those who have attended my lectures. When I read a book or listen to someone’s talk I frequently ask myself: How did this person come to the views they expound? Have they derived them mainly from books, from their study of specialist literature, or are their opinions also backed by the gold of their own personal life experience? Has their vision of the world undergone trials and crises? Did they have to revise or radically reassess their former views sometimes? When I know an author’s life story and how their personality and opinions have evolved, their writings become more vivid, meaningful, credible, and immediate. My readers and listeners also have the right to know the internal context of my writing, as well as the external one, not just the historical circumstances and the social and cultural context, but also my life story and the drama of spiritual seeking and the process of maturity; should they wish to, they will find here the key to a deeper understanding of what I try to convey to them in my books and lectures. Before describing what one sees, one should declare where one stands, what is one’s standpoint, and why one has adopted it.
“Are you writing about yourself?” I could also reply that I am writing about God. But is it possible to speak about God and not invest one’s life in that account? Were I to speak about God “objectively” without investing myself in it, I would be speaking about a pallid abstraction. Wouldn’t such an “external God” be merely an idol. Conversely, is it possible to speak about oneself and say nothing about God? Were I to speak about myself and say nothing about God, I could attribute to myself what is his and become stuck for eternity in a trap of self-centeredness or drown myself in narcissistic superficiality. When Narcissus leans over the surface of the lake he sees only himself, and his eye remains fixed to the surface and his own image there. This superficiality turns out to be fatal for him. The gaze of the believer must penetrate deeper. Only then will the depth not become a malignant trap.
Two realities, crucial for our life, are invisible : our self and God. We see many manifestations that can be attributed to our self and others to God, but neither our self nor God presents themselves to us things that we can point to and which we can localize with certainty. The mystics—and particularly my beloved Meister Eckhart— have asserted one very profound thing that is also extremely dangerous: God and I are one and the same.
This position can indeed be dangerous. When, from our standpoint, God has coalesced with our self, in the sense that we have substituted God for our self, then we have lost our