GERALDINE FAGAN

Tomáš Halík has good reason to describe From the Underground Church to Freedom as “not just an autobiography, but half a century of Czech history.” The first four decades of Halík’s life coincided almost exactly with the duration of Communist rule in his homeland. Particularly as the regime unraveled in the late 1980s, Halík was also a linchpin between leading dissident intellectuals— including the writer Václav Havel, who would go on to lead then-Czechoslovakia as its first post-Communist president—and Catholic leaders, including Pope John Paul II, whose historic 1990 visit to Czechoslovakia Halík was instrumental in arranging. In one choice vignette, Halík is a dinner guest at the Vatican two days before the fall of the Berlin Wall on 9 November 1989, as swelling crowds of demonstrators are broadcast on television. “This is the end of Communism, and not just in East Germany,” he recalls the Polish pope as saying. “Get ready: you too will soon be free!” The regime was gone just three weeks later. Insider glimpses of how Catholic clergy and largely secular dissident intellectuals joined forces over shared principles in order to resist the Communists in Czechoslovakia are an obvious appeal of this book. But while Halík is not the only individual able to offer such a vantage point, his status as a secretly ordained priest allowed him to oscillate between the two circles to a singular degree. Halík dared not risk telling his own mother that he was a priest, or even Cardinal František Tomášek—then leader of the Catholic Church in Czechoslovakia—until as late as 1988, by means of a scribbled and then hastily destroyed note. Thrilleresque episodes such as this are further highlights. A sense of danger is palpable as Halík recalls another exercise in evading secret police surveillance: a three-hour walk through Prague in the early 1970s with Fr. Václav Dvořák, then working at an antiquarian bookstore after years spent in prison. This is when Halík learns for the first time of the existence of a strictly secret underground community of priests in Czechoslovakia, all working in secular occupations.

Today, Halík is best known as the author of accessible theological works stressing the need for Christians to engage with seekers of faith wherever they might be—to build bridges with secular society, and for clergy in particular not to present themselves as having a ready answer to every question. In summary, he writes,

I am convinced that if the Christian church is to stand the test in the current transformation of civilizations and in the transition from the modern to the post-modern epoch, it cannot simply concern itself with the orderly sheep in its fold, or with traditional mission work whose aim is to turn seekers into dwellers and squeeze them into the existing institutional and mental confines of the churches. It has to step outside its boundaries and seek to “accompany seekers” with mutual respect, without proselytizing intentions, with the rule that not only they, but we too, will be transformed, because we do not possess the whole truth, the truth is our common goal. The truth that is given us in Christ is not a static object and set of formulae but the way and the life, something that is dynamic and constantly calls on us to “put out into deep water.” 

It appears a persuasive argument: Halík estimates having baptized or confirmed around 2,000 adults—mostly university students or lecturers—after lengthy preparation. 

Detractors, criticizing Halík’s stance as a compromise too far with loose Western secularism, may point to the Catholic Church’s conservative identity as key to its endurance under Communism. Intriguingly, however, Halík demonstrates in his autobiography that a radically reformist attitude—including support for the starkly modernizing changes introduced into the Church in the early 1960s by Vatican II—was shared by prominent older clerics who had survived brutal terms of imprisonment in the 1950s. Instead of yearning to return to how things were in the Church prior to 1948, he writes, they treated the totalitarian conditions in Czechoslovakia as an opportunity for priests to acquire new experience through immersion in secular life, believing that this would prove valuable in a future free—but considerably deChristianized—society. 

Halík was raised in the early Communist period, when religious persecution was at its most vicious in Czechoslovakia and such clerics were still in prison. Yet on his path towards faith, we see how he, like them, is propelled not by the rigidity of tradition—on first examining a Bible, he observes simply that it “neither poses nor answers the question of whether God exists”—but through interaction “with a world of mystery, beauty, and the spirit.” Halík’s teenage realization that he had converted to Christ comes after a lone hike to a ruined and locked rural church, where he spends time in prayer. 

Indeed, Halík’s continued spiritual development relies upon remaining “a modern thinking and feeling person” after his conversion, fully engaged with the secular world. He is reassured by the selection of works one of his mentor priests, Fr. Bonaventura Bouše, keeps on his desk: the Bible, a life of St. Francis of Assisi, Stories of the Desert Fathers, Nietzsche’s Thus Spoke Zarathustra, and Kafka’s novels. It is this sensibility that motivates Halík’s dissident activism. For him, the 1968 Prague Spring becomes not just an internal Communist Party struggle over reform but “a spiritual and moral confrontation about the very moral and cultural basis of our nation.” In turn, Halík identifies his act of placing the death mask of Jan Palach—a young man who set himself on fire in 1969 to protest against the Soviet crushing of the Prague Spring—into a niche from which students had removed a bust of Lenin, as his first step towards becoming a priest. 

A weight of lived experience thus supports Halík’s critique of Czech Christians who came to depend upon Communism as a needed enemy, and who lately have found the “decadent West” (ironically, a term also used by the Communists) to be a convenient replacement for the old atheist regime. It also underpins his plea to  Western Christians not to praise the Catholic Church in the former Czechoslovakia as a Sleeping Beauty who “blissfully slept through the periods of turbulence and Vatican II” during Communism to wake into the “delightful immaculate state of the premodern church.” Those who vaunt the fact that they do not have tooth decay, he warns, should first ask themselves if this is perhaps because they have dentures instead of real teeth. 

From the Underground Church to Freedom will naturally be of greatest interest to those interested in how the Catholic Church fared in Communist Czechoslovakia. To a wider audience, however, it also offers deep insights into the mechanisms of how personal spiritual and moral reflection can precipitate historic political change.

Geraldine Fagan is editor of the East-West Church Report