Vaclav Havel waves to crowds in Prague, shortly before becoming Czech president in December 1989.
Kamila Valenta writes in America,
“I was 17 years old when I heard the Lord’s Prayer spoken in public for the first time. It was in November 1989 during the Velvet Revolution, which brought freedom to Communist Czechoslovakia. The crowd of almost 500,000 people chanted and cheered while the dissidents spoke. But when the Rev. Václav Malý started praying the Our Father, it grew quiet.
After two generations of religious suppression and intense Communist indoctrination, few people could recite the prayer by heart. Many had never heard of it. But everyone understood it was a solemn moment.
Father Malý, a Czech priest who had been previously imprisoned and persecuted, led peaceful meetings in Prague with Václav Havel and other prominent dissidents of the underground anti-Communist movement. The police could have arrested the priest at any moment for public preaching, but he remained calm.
That cold and snowy day marked for many their first encounter with public worship, spirituality and prayer. The Catholic Church that Father Malý represented was very different from the church that I knew. I knew of the church from textbooks that passed through the government censorship and presented a very biased interpretation of history.
Father Malý’s church also felt different from the artistic and architectural wonders of silent, empty buildings that I somehow knew I belonged to, but whose mystery was far beyond my reach. As if coming out of the shadows of its cathedrals, the Catholic Church came alive in the humanity and vulnerability of Father Malý. He encouraged and comforted everyone, baptized or not. He was there for us whether or not we had found the courage to defy 40 years of official atheistic teaching and openly contemplated the possibility of God’s existence.
The fall of Communism ushered the world into a new era of unprecedented technological progress, interconnectedness and acceleration of political developments. The church finds itself now in a similar place. It can be a transformative force—politically, economically and spiritually—by standing with the powerless and vulnerable today as it did during the fall of Communism.” — 7/15/21, America Magazine
The Spiritual Havel
Kevin Clarke, Dec. 20, 2011
Czech President Vaclav Havel is being remembered as a revolutionary and an artist, an accidental political leader during a period of rapid change. He is also being remembered by some as a spiritual seeker, who understood that man and a healthy social order do not live by the bread of democracy alone.
Here’s Carl Gersham in (the 2011) Washington Post:
Increasingly in his later years, Havel was in a constant search for spirituality. He was not religious in a formal way, but he was repelled by “the relativization of moral norms” and believed that all the values he cherished would be lost if modern man could not rediscover “his transcendental anchor.” He called the institutions of democracy “merely technical instruments that enable man to live in dignity, freedom and responsibility. But in and of themselves, they cannot guarantee his dignity, freedom and responsibility. The source of this basic human potential lies elsewhere: in man’s relationship to that which transcends him.” This spiritual dimension, he believed, is also what gives democracy its “universal resonance,” since it is what “connects all cultures and in fact all humanity.”
Havel was also remembered by Archbishop Dominik Duka of Prague. The CNS story (which follows below) also recalls Havel’s almost inadvertant returns to Catholicism, under the spell of the Pope John Paul II’s “charismatic personality”:.
Prague archbishop remembers Havel as friend, ‘fellow prisoner’
By Catholic News Service
PRAGUE (CNS) — Calling former Czech President Vaclav Havel a “friend and fellow prisoner,” the president of the Czech bishops’ conference said the entire nation owes Havel a debt of gratitude for its freedom and the new flourishing of Czech life and culture..
Archbishop Dominik Duka of Prague, who was imprisoned with Havel by the communists, asked that the bells of all Catholic churches in the Czech Republic ring at 6 p.m. Dec. 18 in memory of the former president who died that morning at the age of 75.
The archbishop, who met Havel in prison in 1981 and continued to meet with him after the end of communism in 1989, was scheduled to celebrate Havel’s funeral Mass Dec. 23 in St. Vitus Cathedral.
“He knew the loss of freedom, the denial of human dignity, oppression and imprisonment,” Archbishop Duka said in a statement posted Dec. 18 on the Czech bishops’ website. “I am convinced that everyone across the country, regardless of political or religious beliefs, owes him honor and thanks.”.
Havel, a playwright and essayist, was one of the founders of the Charter 77 movement, which began criticizing the communist government of then-Czechoslovakia, particularly for its lack of respect for human rights, in 1977.
He served four years of hard labor and nine months in prison for dissident activities before becoming head of state after the 1989 “Velvet Revolution” that toppled communism. He resigned in 1992 when Slovakia declared its independence, but was elected president of the Czech Republic six months later.
Havel met Pope Benedict XVI during the pope’s trip to Prague in 2009. He met Blessed John Paul II at least five times, three of them in Prague, and Havel attended the late pope’s funeral at the Vatican in 2005. The two men admired one another and saw each other as participants in the same battle for freedom, human rights, human dignity and respect for the cultures of Eastern Europe.
In an interview with a Polish Catholic news agency in 2000, Havel said, “John Paul II is someone very close to me, who continually startles me with his personality and inspires me.”
“His language, constantly stressing human dignity and recalling the rights of man, has been a novelty in the papacy’s history. If the pope had been someone else, from another part of the world, without the historical experience of Poland, he probably wouldn’t have had such a clear attitude to totalitarianism. John Paul II’s services in this area are undeniable,” he said.
He also told the interviewer that in April 1990 he made his confession to Pope John Paul during the pope’s first Czech pilgrimage while under the spell of the pope’s “charismatic personality.”
“I suddenly realized I was in fact confessing in front of him, even though I’m not accustomed to going to confession, since I’m not a practicing Catholic. I felt the need because of the great will to understand the other person that emanates from the person of the pope,” Havel said.
L’Osservatore Romano, the Vatican newspaper, noted that Havel attended a Mass of thanksgiving in St. Vitus Cathedral immediately after his inauguration in 1989, restoring a practice Czech leaders had followed for centuries until the communists came to power.
“That ceremony was not only the recovery of an ancient liturgy that united politics and tradition, culture and religion, but represented the beginning of a new history, a history of freedom of which Vaclav Havel was the most important symbol,” the newspaper said.
And what has become of ‘freedom‘ in the West? Daily spiritual warfare in the public square has, alas, become our present reality. Traditional “Freedom” (Jn. 8:32; 2 Cor. 3:17) is being transvalued, even beyond the hallucinations of Robespierre and Sade.
Catholic Critique 