"Pope Francis is starting a new era of the Church"

This is a full transcript, in the original English, of my interview with Fr. Tomás Halík. The published version can be found here, in Portuguese.

Esta é uma transcrição completa, no inglês original, da minha entrevista com o Pe. Tomás Halík. A notícia pode ser lida aqui.

Pope Francis has been a strong critic of what he calls self-referentialism. Is there anything more self-referential than an autobiography? Does this worry you?

I think my book is a testimony. It is inspired by St. Augustine's “Confessions”. It is the combination of a theological reflection and autobiography. It is not only an autobiography, it is not only about my life story, it is also about the history of the Church in our country, and not only in our country. There are many of my life experiences, from the time of the hard persecution of the Church and the transition, and there are some which I felt I should share with other people. 

You have become a very popular writer and spiritual reference. Your books are translated in many languages, you have won awards, you mingle with important and successful people. How do you keep from being affected by vanity and pride?

There is a nice story from the Desert Fathers. One told people to go to the cemetery and think very good things about the people there. They did so and when they returned the spiritual father asked them what the dead had replied. And they said: “nothing”. 

So, he said “Go again and think terrible things about the people there, blame them”, and so on. They did so and when they returned he asked them what they had answered. They said: “nothing”. 

So, the master told them they must be like this. If people are attacking you, if they are glorifying you, you must be like the dead people. 

I think that what God thinks about us is more important than what other people think about us. 

You say that the persecution in Czechoslovakia was worse than in the rest of the communist bloc. Why?

I think that the communists chose Czechoslovakia as a terrain for the total atheisation of a country, because of the very dramatic Czech religious history. Jan Hus, the reformer who was burned in Konstanz in 1415, then the Hussite wars, the crusades against the Czechs and the violent Catholicisation in the XVII Century, then the link between the Catholic Church and the Habsburg Monarchy. There are some wounds in the history of our country, and there were tensions between the Catholic identity and the national identity. 

It is the opposite of Poland. In Poland the Catholic Church was always an instrument of national identity, but not in our country, because of these tensions and these anti-Catholic feelings from before the Communist times. And the communists tried to use this, but the effect was rather the opposite, because Czech people are always sympathetic to the persecuted, so during the persecution the moral authority of the Church increased.

In the first few pages you mention several times the importance of Jan Hus for the Czech mentality. Who was he, why was he so important and why do so many Czech Catholics seem intent on restoring his standing as a Catholic? Would you like to see that happen?

Yes! When I first met John Paul II, in 1989, the day before the fall of the Berlin wall, one of his first questions was "what should we do with Jan Hus? I rehabilitated Galilei, perhaps it is time for the rehabilitation of Jan Hus. Remember that the Polish delegation was the only one which defended him in the Council of Konstanz”. 

So, I returned to Prague and I visited our Archbishop Cardinal Tomasic, and I told him about this, but the Cardinal was very reserved, because he spent his youth in the time of the first republic and at that time Jan Hus was a symbol of the anti-Catholic tensions. So, we had to wait. But when the Holy Father came to Czechoslovakia for the first time, I was in Rome to help him prepare, because it was his first visit to the post-communist world, he spoke about Jan Hus in a very positive way, and then, on the eve of the new millennium, there was a symposium in Rome about Jan Hus and the Pope made quite a remarkable speech there, and many other figures were present as well. 

Something happened there, because St. John Paul said a very important thing. "Hus was a sign of our division, between Catholics and Protestants, and now he may become a bridge between Catholics and Protestants", because he was a Catholic priest his whole life, and he didn't want to fight against Rome, he wanted to reform the Church, but many of his ideas were developed in a more radical way by Martin Luther and the German Reformation, but he was not in such tension as the German reformation. 

A friend of the Holy Father, a Polish Theologian and Historian, wrote an article called "Jan Hus: Heretic or precursor of Vatican II?". He wrote about some of Jan Hus' ideas which were fulfilled by Vatican II, a poorer and more modest Church, without triumphalism. I think Pope Francis is the type of Pope Jan Hus would like very much. 

The Church is going through a period of division now, and it sometimes seems like those close to Pope Benedict XVI are against Pope Francis. But you have been a strong defender of Pope Francis and you were also close to Pope Benedict. How do you interpret this current division in the Church?

I think that John Paul II and Pope Benedict ended – with great honesty and in a very positive way – a long period of Church history. It was a long period where the main task was confrontation with modernity. I think the happy end of this confrontation was the famous interview of Cardinal Ratzinger, the year before he was elected Pope, with German philosopher Jurgen Habermas. They both agree with the statement that Secular Humanism and Christianity need each other to overcome one-sidedness.

Also, Pope Benedict had a wonderful speech during his flight to Portugal, I always say that his best speeches were in the airplane... Perhaps because he was so near to heaven! And this speech about the compatibility of secular culture and Christianity was very profound and very courageous. 

I think it marked the end of one long period of Christianity. But now modernity is over, we live in the post-modern global age, the age of internet, of radical plurality, and we need something different. And I think Pope Francis is starting this new era of the Church, and every time somebody starts something new, such as happened with many saints in History, they found trouble in the Church, they were attacked, but they keep the fidelity to the Church, and I think that the supporters of Pope Francis want, and have the sensitivity, to read the signs of the times, and I think Pope Francis really discovered in a new and profound way, the very heart of the Gospel, which is mercy, solidarity with the poor, the struggle for Social Justice and responsibility for nature.

I think this is a very important thing. These things have been a little bit overshadowed by things to do with sexual morality, which are important questions, but they are not the most important questions. The most important is solidarity, mercy, justice and this is the focus of the message of Pope Francis.

At one point you say that you would not be comfortable in a society which is overtly Christian. Is this just a question of personal sensitivity, or do you think there is something inherently wrong with more overt expressions of popular devotion, as we see in Latin or African countries, for example?

I think that sometimes people in the countries where religion is taken for granted have the temptation for superficial religiosity, conformism. But in the secular situation we must make a personal choice.

I think that in the countries where religion is very traditional, and is taken for granted, there is a temptation for religiosity to be superficial, just keeping the traditions, turning to the past, but in the secular society we must decide, our faith is our free choice, and we must think about faith, and rethink many things, so what I support is the idea, which is expressed for example by the American philosopher Richard Kearney of Irish origin, who speaks about “anatheism”, to believe again, not to return to the past, to pre-modern religiosity, to take seriously the criticism of religion by many modern thinkers.

After this criticism this could be a time of purification of faith, purification of idolatry, and then we can believe again, after the crisis, and believe deeper, not just return to the past. I think our faith is the faith of Easter, and Easter is the mystery of death and resurrection.

Sometimes our faith, in our personal history, but also in the history of the Church, must be crucified and withstand the “dark night of the Soul”, Must withstand the moment in which Christ was crying “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me”. And then after the Good Friday we can be open to the Easter morning. There is no resurrection without the Cross. 

I was struck by something… You were an only child, and although you had many uncles and aunts, it seems that most of them either never had children or had very few. Looking around the world one does seem to notice that countries that draw away from God seem to have fewer children. Does that explain what happened in the Czech Republic in your time? Does it have a deeper meaning?

I think this phenomenon is more recent, that people are not willing to have families and rear children. I think it was not like that in the generation of my parents, it is more now that the family is in crisis.

We should rethink many things. I am a little bit afraid of the Feast of the Holy Family, because I have heard many sermons for this feast and Holy Family was spoken of as an ideal patriarchal family from the XIX Century, a bourgeois family, and the family of Nazareth was not like that.

Our situation is also not like this. We cannot turn to this model of the traditional patriarchal family of the XIX Century. Now we live in another time, and it is not easy to find a proper model for the family of our time. I think we should think deeply about the spirituality of the family, about the role of women, the relation between the generations, we cannot just keep, or try to return to, the past.

There is something substantial about the family, the love between men and women, and procreation and education of children, but the history and the context is always changing. I admire the young people who, in this situation, have the courage to not only found a family, but I am digressing…

You explain conversion as a sunrise. This is a very profound image… Could you elaborate?

Faith is, for me, not just a worldview, some sort of philosophy. It is an existential orientation, and conversion is the transformation of the whole personality. I think that people who were brought up in the traditional family must also experience this sort of conversion, because the faith of children is nice, but there is always a time when that children's faith is in crisis. And I think that education in the Church, and pastoral work, is not prepared to work with this crisis, as a challenge to go deeper. For many people this crisis ended in atheism or a “apatheism”, where people are apathetic to the Church, and we need to accompany people through this crisis, not to push them back to the faith of their childhood, this is often a type of fundamentalism, this attempt to go back to the style of my faith as it was in my childhood, or in the past of the Church.

We must go through this crisis and discover the deeper dimension of the faith. It is a transformation, it is not just a situation where we add something to our worldview, but it is real, like a sunrise, and now we see everything in a new light, from a new perspective, and I think we all need this perpetual transition, this perpetual conversion.

The sign of the times today is to move from being Christian to becoming Christian, it is a long-life process.

You express the moment when you, yourself, went through this conversion. But is this something which happens only once? When was the last time you experienced a sunrise such as this, which changes the way you see reality?

I think it was at the beginning of the pontificate of Pope Francis. I realised that there was something new in the Church, a new way to read the Gospel and to take it and the radical challenges, the radical message of the Gospel very seriously. So, when I meditate, practically every day, on the preaching of the Holy Father in Santa Marta, which can be found on the Internet, which is sometimes very simple, but it has something new and fresh, the spirit of somebody who is deeply involved with the heart of the Gospel.

This was a wakeup call for me and led me to read the Gospel in a new and more radical way.

"I have a very strong sense that Portugal has an important mission to the whole world"

This is a full transcript, in the original English, of Cardinal Raymond Burke's interview to my colleague Aura Miguel. The interview took place during the presentation of the Portuguese edition of his book "Divine Love Made Flesh". The news story, in Portuguese, can be read here.

Esta é uma transcrição integral, no inglês original, da entrevista da minha colega Aura Miguel ao Cardeal Burke. A entrevista foi feita à margem da apresentação da edição portuguesa do seu livro: "O Amor Divino Incarnado". A notícia pode ser lida aqui.

Why did you write this book?

In the USA, where I was a bishop, there was a great crisis in Eucharistic faith and also a great crisis in the participation of Catholics in the Holy Mas. Pope St. John Paul II, at the end of his pontificate, directed himself in a very strong way to the whole difficulty of the loss of Eucharistic faith and abuse of the Sacred Liturgy, and then he convoked a Synod in 2005, on the Eucharist, to address this, but he himself was not able to preside at the synod, because he died in April of 2005. But then Pope Benedict XVI succeeded him, and he wrote Sacramentum Caritatis. 

So I decided for the faithful in my care – I was bishop first in Lacrosse, Wisconsin, then in St. Louis, Missouri – that I would write a careful commentary on the encyclical of John Paul II Ecclesia de Eucharistia, and on the post-synodal apostolic exhortation Sacramentum Caritatis. And so I wrote those commentaries over a two year period, in the diocesan newspaper and then people encouraged me to put them together into a book. 

So I did that also with the encouragement of Catholic Action for Faith and Family, an apostolate in the USA, they actually published the book, it is run by Thomas McKenna, who is with me as I am presenting the book. 

People have told me they find the book very helpful to understand more deeply the objective reality of the Holy Eucharist, and that it helps them to love more the Holy Eucharist and Our Lord as he gives himself to us in the Holy Eucharist. 

How do you explain the crisis in mass attendance and confession?

The crisis came about, I believe, through a crisis of the Sacred Liturgy. After Vatican II, and contrary to the teaching of the Vatican II, there was a liturgical renewal which damaged greatly the expression of the transcendent nature of the Sacred Liturgy, in other words, that Christ himself acts in the sacraments to sanctify us.

And there developed the idea that the Holy Mass and the other liturgical rites were human activities, and people began to experiment and to do things which eventually distanced the contemporary rites from those rites which had been in the church for centuries, basically the rite of the mass from the time of Pope St. Gregory the Great, and in a very particular way since the Council of Trent. 

That, I believe is at the heart of the loss of Eucharistic faith and practice. What can we do? What we need to do, and that is the purpose of the book, to start to study again the great gift of the Holy Eucharist as it has been handed down to us in the Church through the centuries. The doctrine, but also the beauty of the Sacred liturgy. There, regarding the beauty of the sacred liturgy, Benedict XVI had a very strong idea of the need to celebrate freely both the Extraordinary Form of the Roman Rite, and the Ordinary Form, so that people would see the continuity of the two forms, and there would be this mutual enrichment, as he called it, and that the ordinary form of the Roman Rite would be celebrated with a deeper, stronger sense of the divine reality present, which he often referred to the Holy Mass as the meeting of Heaven and Earth.

Utilização da Capa Magna pelo Cardeal Burke
entre outras coisas, já motivou muitas críticas.

What do you say to those who consider the recovery of the Traditional mass a little bit strange?

The reason why people would consider it strange is because they don't know it. When we don't know and understand something it can seem strange to us, and so we need to help all Catholics to understand the nature of the Sacred Liturgy itself as the action of Christ in our midst, through the ministry of the Priest, who is consecrated to act in the person of Christ in the celebration of the mass, in the ministration of the other sacraments, and then to help them to see the great beauty of the way the mass has been celebrated along the centuries.

It seems very striking to me that so many young people, especially young families with many children, but also young university students, are attracted to the Extraordinary Form of the mass, and I believe the reason for that is that they see there is something very deep, very profound, and they want to know it better and understand it better and enter into the action of the mass. 

Do you think there is a risk of routine, of people just going to mass without thinking about the essence?

What happened, I think, is that in the reform of the rite which took place after Vatican II – contrary really to the teaching of the council – the rite was radically diminished, stripped of many of its elements, rendered very simple, and there is the danger, with that, that it becomes ordinary and every day, especially if it is celebrated by the priest in a way that doesn't reflect faith in the action of Christ, if the mass becomes very familiar, then people cease to understand why they should go there and do that. It becomes every day, it seems childish, it seems unimportant, so they go away from the mass. 

What about access to the Eucharist. There are lots of divisions about who should access the Eucharist, some consider it a right... How do you see this?

None of us has the right to receive any sacrament. God's love for us, as it is expressed most perfectly in the sacramental life and especially in the Holy Eucharist is His free gift to us. And for our part, when we recognize by Faith the gift, then we dispose ourselves in a proper way to receive it.

I am not always free to present myself to receive the Holy Eucharist, for instance, if I am not prepared in the sense of reflecting on the reality of the Holy Eucharist, or also if I am in a state of mortal sin, or if I am living in some public scandal, then I am not disposed to receive the Holy Eucharist and I must refrain from doing so until once again my soul is in a state to receive the body and the blood of Christ. 

Saint Paul confronted this situation in the early days of the Church, in Corinth. We hear the account of it in Chapter 11 of his first letter to the Corinthians. The people were eating, drinking and even becoming inebriated in the kind of meal they would have at the same time as the Holy Eucharist and he rebuked them strongly, and told them that nobody should approach to receive the Holy Eucharist without reflecting upon the truth, the reality of the Holy Eucharist, lest they eat and drink condemnation of themselves, not recognizing the Body and Blood of Christ. 

The shepherds of Fátima had a deep love of the Eucharist, even though they were very small. 

It is clear from the preparatory visions that the Angel of Portugal to the Shepherd children… Central to those apparitions was the apparition when the angel with the chalice and the host suspended in the air, communicated the blessed sacrament to the little children.

And then the apparitions themselves, our Blessed Mother also emphasizes with the children the mercy which then calls forth from us prayer and penance in order to be disposed to receive Our Lord in the Holy Eucharist and in reparation for the many ways in which Our Lord is offended, especially in the Blessed Sacrament.

Today I visited the Carmel in Coimbra, and in the chapel there are two beautiful statues, one of the Sacred Heart of Jesus, and the other of the Immaculate Heart of Mary. Both are stunning and both, I found out when speaking to the mother of the Carmel, were designed according to instructions from Sister Lucia. But in the statue of the Sacred Heart of Jesus, the Sacred Heart is holding a chalice in which the blood from His Sacred Heart is flowing into the chalice and He has the host in his hand.

And so we see that the love of God for us is most perfectly represented in the pierced heart of Jesus. When He died for us upon the Cross, he permitted that the Roman soldier to pierce his heart as a sign of his never failing, immense love, that would continue to flow from his heart. That love of God for us is most perfectly given to us in the Holy Eucharist, and so the whole message is centered around the Eucharist and the praying of the Holy Rosary – Our blessed mother was constantly telling the children to pray the Holy Rosary – is a fundamentally a meditation on the mystery of faith which we celebrate in the Holy Eucharist.

Is this why Our Lady said that in Portugal the dogma of the faith would remain?

Yes, I believe that very strongly, and I have a very strong sense that Portugal has an important mission to the whole world, and its preservation of the dogma of the faith, and its presentation of the apparitions and message of Fátima to the whole world.

The shrine at Fátima is so important... I was just there for two days, and there are pilgrims from the whole world. The Mother Superior of the Carmel told me that Lucia received thousands and thousands of letters from all over the world, and that she had a map of the World and she would say: “see, Our Lady's message is reaching all these places”.