The Catholic Church in the Czech Republic has temporarily relinquished its long-standing demands for an immediate return of properties confiscated during the Communist era, following a visit to the country by Pope Benedict XVI. The move has dismayed Prague’s Cardinal Miroslav Vlk.The Vatican Secretary of State, Cardinal Tarcisio Bertone, accepted the Government’s proposal momentarily to halt property negotiations just hours after the three-day papal visit began in Prague on Saturday.
“The Catholic Church is ready not to initiate the talks now, to put them off and wait for an economic recovery,” Czech premier Jan Fischer told journalists after a meeting with the cardinal. He said an agreement to regulate Church-State relations in the country, similar to a concordat, was also put on hold.
The postponements were a moral defeat for Cardinal Vlk, who has spent the past two decades demanding a resolution of both issues, including the return of his own cathedral.
“After 20 years, say, on the Czech ecclesiastical-political level I achieved next to nothing,” a sombre Cardinal Vlk told Czech Television after the Vatican made the temporary concession.
“Property restitution has been put on hold, an amendment on the Church law has not been passed, St Vitus Cathedral remains in the hands of the state and there is no treaty between Prague and the Vatican,” he said.
The cardinal, who will be 78 in May, is expected to retire in the coming months.
Parliament blocked a bill last year that would have returned about a third of the property the Church lost in 1948, plus the equivalent of some £3bn in compensation over the next 60 years. With interest, that settlement would have actually cost the government nearly £10bn.
The temporary halt to negotiations was the first tangible result of a papal visit to the Czech Republic in which Benedict XVI urged all of Europe to rediscover its Christian roots.
In nearly a dozen speeches and homilies, the German-born Pope doggedly re-stated his conviction that the Old Continent would end up impoverishing itself if it continued to marginalise religious faith and ignore the demands of objective truth as the basis of its laws and social life.
His visit included a Mass on Sunday for some 120,000 people who gathered at an airport outside of Brno, the major city in the country’s most Catholic region of Moravia. More than 10,000 of those on hand were from neighbouring Slovakia, Poland, Germany and Austria.
Another Mass on Monday for the Czech Republic’s national holiday of St Wenceslaus drew some 40,000 faithful, many of whom were young people. The Pope told the country’s much reduced Catholic population “to make its voice heard” through joyful and credible witness to Christ.
Earlier on the trip, in two separate meetings with politicians and academics, Pope Benedict repeated one of the main themes of his pontificate – that only “fidelity to the truth” could be “the guarantee of freedom and integral human development”.
He began his visit on Saturday morning by honouring the famous statue of the Infant of Prague at a church that was confiscated from German Lutherans in the seventeenth century and which stands as a national reminder of the Hapsburg re-Catholicisation of the Czech Republic.
The Pope never mentioned that bitter past in a low-key ecumenical meeting on Sunday. But he did recall it during his farewell speech on Monday, saying he realised the “importance of ecumenical dialogue in this land that has suffered so much as a result of religious division at the time of the Thirty Years’ War” (1618-48).
He said scholars had an “important role” in helping to heal past wounds through their “uncompromising search for the truth”.
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SIC: Tablet