Progressive priest proclaims dissolution of the form of the Church in post-modernity

Halík: "This form of the Church is at an end".

In an interview, the priest Tomáš Halík explains what renewals the Church needs in order to be prepared for the challenges of post-modernity.

The Czech theologian Tomáš Halík

"Since the Enlightenment, there has been a process of ex-culturation of the Church. This culminated in the loss of confidence of hundreds of thousands of believers. This form of church is at an end."

The priest Tomáš Halík (74) knows life in the communist underground as well as life in the universal church: he was ordained in the GDR, in the 1980s he was a close associate of Franticek Cardinal Tom ek. After the fall of the Berlin Wall, he completed postgraduate studies at the Pontifical Lateran University in Rome, followed by a habilitation in practical theology in Wroclaw and in sociology in Prague.  Pope Benedict XVI awarded him the honorary title of "Papal Prelate", and in 2014 he received the Templeton Prize, the unofficial "Nobel Prize for Religion". In an exclusive interview for the feature section of the "Tagespost", Halik explains what renewals the Church needs in order to be prepared for the challenges of post-modernity.

Professor Halik, you once told of a Protestant friend who no longer calls himself a Protestant because there is no need to protest against Pope Francis. Can you understand that there are people who consider Pope Francis himself to be a Protestant?

Everyone who played an important role in the history of Christianity, starting with Jesus, had his opponents. So why should this Pope have no opponents? All important high-profile figures also have enemies. 

The same Pope also said that he thought the Protestant Church in Germany was so beautiful that we didn't need a second one. Don't you see the danger that the Synodal Path will lead to a Protestantisation of the Catholic Church and thus to a schism?

No, I think that is necessary. We are in a situation like before the Reformation. At that time, the sale of indulgences was a scandal as a sign of a deep crisis of the entire system of the medieval church. And today, too, the abuse scandals are not just problems of individuals, but a signal that something is rotten with the whole system of power in the Church. It is about the abuse of power and authority. Pope Francis has said that this is a disease of clericalism, we have to cure it. And this is only one aspect of a great crisis of Catholic Christianity through exculturation. The main task of the Church is inculturation and evangelisation. Evangelisation must be linked to inculturation, otherwise it is just indoctrination. 

Can you explain this a little more?

Since the Enlightenment, there has been a process of ex-culturation of the Church. This culminated in the loss of confidence of hundreds of thousands of believers. This form of church is at its end. We have to take this crisis seriously. Something is perishing, but this is also an opportunity to rediscover the reason. The Church really needs a radical renewal, but this does not have to be and cannot only be a change of institutions and structures. In this respect, I also understand a little of the Pope's criticism of the German Synodal Path. It concentrates too much on institutional changes. We have to discuss that, but that is not the most important thing. I concentrate more on the inner renewal, on deepening theology and spirituality. But that doesn't mean that the old structures don't need changing. The Pope has responsibility for the whole Church and I hope that the synodal process will lead to decentralisation. Various countries are already prepared for the ordination of women at least to the diaconate. I mean, in Germany it might not be such a big problem. But in Africa or in Poland it is something else.

Wouldn't decentralisation mean moving from the Roman Catholic Universal Church to national churches? In Germany, wouldn't such a church be in direct competition with a church product that already exists, namely the Protestant Church?

Well, it's not exactly the same. This is a new era now. I mean, the most important thing in the Catholic heritage is not celibacy or things like that. The most important things are spirituality and liturgy. 

Pope Benedict had tried to reconcile the followers of the old forms of liturgy with those of the new. Francis has now gone back on that.

That was a surprise for me. I had expected more plurality in the liturgy of the Catholic Church. This also includes tolerance towards the old rite. But perhaps for many the old rite was more a symbol of resistance to the Pope and the new developments. We also had some very strange, sectarian Christians. There is a difference between Catholicism and catholicity. In the 19th century, Catholicism saw itself as a counter-movement to other -isms, such as socialism. This Catholicism has lost vitality. The Second Vatican Council wanted to overcome that and find a way from Catholicism to a real catholicity. But I think the reforms of Vatican II came a little too late. The confrontation with modernity came when its emergence had long been completed. The Council did not prepare the Church for the radical, plural postmodern society. For that, another reform is needed and I hope the Synodal Way can prepare the Church for this global postmodern society. But it is clear that some local churches have still not embraced Vatican II. 

Which ones do you have in mind?

Some from Eastern Europe. The Second Vatican Council fell in the time of communism, the priests had practically no possibility to study the new theology. Since they could not read Karl Rahner or Joseph Ratzinger, that is, the intellectual preparation and background to the Council, the changes and reforms from above arrived only very superficially and formally. So we reverse the altar and now use the national language instead of Latin, but that was very superficial. And today an equally superficial conservatism reacts to this as an accomodation to modernity. All changes in the Church must be prepared theologically and spiritually. That is also where I see my task: to think through and meditate with others on what this synodal process needs. I am deeply convinced that it needs not only these institutional changes, but most of all a spiritual and theological deepening.

How do you assess the legacy of Pope Benedict XVI in this context?

The two Popes John Paul II and Pope Benedict ended a period of Church history with great nobility. But now it is time for a new epoch. The old epoch had the task of coming to terms with modernity. I think that Ratzinger's dialogue with Habermas at the Catholic Academy in Munich a year before he was elected Pope was very significant. The two agreed that liberal, secular humanism and Catholic Christianity need each other. To overcome the one-sidedness of both sides, they need compatibility. This was a good ending to the long-standing conflicts between Catholicism and modernity. No adaptation, but no counterculture either. A balancing compatibility. In this period, Pope Benedict played an important role. I knew him personally and I hold him in high esteem. Never before in Church history has such a great theologian been Pope. He was good for his time, but now there is a new situation with new challenges and for that we also needed a new Pope. The downside was that he was more of an intellectual theologian than a manager. So he didn't have much strength to deal with the real problems of the Church.

Does Pope Francis have the strength to bring about the changes that have emerged from the synodal process?

So far, yes. He is making his changes in the Curia step by step with Jesuitical perseverance and he is giving a lot of good impulses. I think that thoughts such as seeing the Church as a field hospital still need to be deepened. That is the task of us theologians.

Critics accuse you of asking many correct questions and formulating them very well, but that you do not go into depth and do not offer any solutions. How do you answer these critics?

There are some questions that are so good that you should not gloss over them with answers. The questions are very important and they should also remain open and provoke you to find your own creative answers. Theologians are not there to offer ready-made recipes. The situation of the Church in different countries is very different. Everyone has to find their own way, but we can provide the inspiration.

They demand a deeper spirituality. There are, for example, priestly brotherhoods that do not complain about a lack of new members and a lack of young people, but the established church does.

They have new blood and crowds. But my impression is that priests in certain brotherhoods are rather cult priests and not church priests. What they offer is an escape from the reality of today. They offer a refuge from the complex and demanding present. Populists and fundamentalists do the same. They give simple answers to complicated questions, but it doesn't work. Therefore, I see in this conservatism more of an analogy to populism in politics or, indeed, to fundamentalism. The word "religio" can be derived on the one hand from "religare", meaning "to reunite", but also from "religere", meaning to read anew, to reinterpret the Bible and put it into a new context. This nostalgia for the good old days does not help us. We should give impulses for a creative co-creation of today's world and not build a counter-culture or a bunker.

Background

The Czech sociologist, religious philosopher and priest Tomáš Halík, born in 1948, learned during his years in the underground of the communist dictatorships of the Warsaw Pact to see beyond the end of his nose and never lose sight of the European dimension. Halík, who was Secretary General of the Czech Bishops' Conference from 1990 to 1993 and external advisor to Czech President Vaclav Havel, is today not only Professor of Sociology at the Faculty of Philosophy of Charles University in Prague and Rector of the University Church of St. Salvator as well as President of the Czech Christian Academy, but he has also been a visiting professor at Oxford and Cambridge Universities. Halík gained international fame most recently with his opening speech at the continental meeting of the World Synod in Prague at the beginning of February, in which he admonished that "radical thinking" was necessary "for those who want to search for the core of the faith and change the Church".

Most recently, Tomáš Halík published the book "Der Nachmittag des Christentums" (Verlag Herder, Freiburg 2022).

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