Czech Culture: a Way of Life in the Light of Faith.”

ANTHOLOGY CU CH LTU ZE R C E From the proceedings of the conference presented by Center for Faith and Culture University of St. Thomas February 8-10, 2002 Nold Education Center St. Mary’s Seminary 9845 Memorial Drive Houston, Texas 77024 Copyright 2003 Center for Faith and Culture University of St. Thomas All rights reserved. This book, or any part thereof, may not be reproduced or utilized in any form, or by any photographic or mechanical, or by any sound recording system, or by any device for storage and retrieval of information, without the written permission of the Center for Faith and Culture, University of St. Thomas, Houston, Texas. Orders may be addressed to the publisher: Center for Faith and Culture University of St. Thomas 9845 Memorial Drive Houston TX 77024-3498 Voice: 713-686-6844, x229 Fax: 713-957-3174 E-mail: [email protected] TABLE OF CONTENTS OPENING REMARKS Donald S. Nesti, C.S.Sp., S.T.D. 1 PRESENTATIONS Tomas Kraus, J.D. 5 Dominik Duka, O.P., S.T.L.. 20 Milan Opocˇensky´, Ph.D. 33 Peter Esterka, D.D., S.T.D. 45 HOMILY Most Rev. Peter Esterka, Bishop of Czech Catholics in Diaspora . 61 SPEAKER BIOGRAPHICAL INFORMATION. 64 ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS. 66 1 OPENING REMARKS by REV. DONALD S. NESTI, CSSP On behalf of the University of St. Thomas, Center for Faith and Culture, I welcome you to this conference on the subject of “Czech Culture: A Way of Life in the Light of Faith.” The Center for Faith and Culture, founded in 1993, seeks to understand and affect the relationship between the worldview of Catholic faith and culture. It specifically desires to study the vision and values, symbols and codes of the Gospel embodied in Catholic teaching and relate these to various cultures. The Center was approached by members of the Czech community and requested to develop an event which would permit the Czech community to enter into a reflection on its cultural roots and the three major faith groups in Czech history – Catholic, Protestant and Jewish. After all, one of the largest ethnic groups in Texas with Central European roots is the Czech community. It was decided that the goal of the conference would be to reflect on history of the relationship between faith and culture in Czechoslovakia. It was also agreed that the conference should be ecumenical in its structure and content, incorporating presentations from representatives of the Catholic, Protestant and Jewish communities. Each of the three presenters was to address the following: * The historical development of their faith in relation to Czech culture, * How Czechs sustained their faith and their culture through periods of oppression and times when there was no Czech homeland, and * Implications for the contemporary situation in the Czech Republic. The Concept of Culture As we begin the conference it is good for us to reflect on what we mean by the word culture. Very often when we think of culture we think in terms of what some call “high culture,” i.e., the art, architecture and music of various classical, renaissance, romantic or contemporary periods of history. At other times we think more in terms of folk arts, dress, dance, music, etc. Sometimes 2 we conceive of it in terms of popular culture of any given period. When using the term in the context of this conference, probably the best way to describe culture is in terms of how a people looks at the world, their window on the world, their worldview which consists of three essential and basic components: their understanding of God or the element of mystery, their understanding of what a human person is and what the world itself is. Based on their perception of these three realities and the relationships between and among them, societies construct for themselves a shared way of life. This shared way of life is what we call a culture. In this shared way of life (culture) are contained their shared vision of existence, the values they espouse, the expected ethical norms of their interaction and behavior and their symbols. It determines the way they structure their institutions and how they think institutions are related to individual and common good; whether institutions such as family, education, religion, government, etc., are contexts in which they develop as persons or whether they are impediments to it; whether they are the means to developing the common good or not. It is their worldview that determines the form of their civic and political life, governmental structures, their economic system and their legal system. This shared way of life is what forms the attitudes or dispositions of the heart of a society or a people. It cultivates the members of the society and shapes them in a way of life. Faith and Religion Because the human person is an infleshed spirit, the life of the spirit or soul is at the heart of every culture or way of life. Thus it is that culture and cult are intimately interwoven in the fabric of society. Even when people espouse a worldview that tries to deny, ignore or suffocate the dimension of spirit in its way of life, this too is a reflection of a dimension of the human person that clamors for attention. In a culture, a people are cultivated and ultimately have to address the question of cult, no matter what shape or form it takes. The life of faith or religion always stands before a people as a challenge and a promise. What we are concerned with in this conference is to see how this life of the spirit has influenced the way of life of the Czech people, how it has influenced and affected all the components of their way of life which we have described above. Faith is the response of the human person, as individual in community, to the numinous dimension of existence; religion is what binds people of faith together in a community of belief. It is the personal and corporate response of 3 people to God. In the case of the Czech people our conference was interested in seeing how, in fact, the Judeo-Christian tradition – as expressed through Jewish, Protestant and Catholic faiths – affected their way of life. People of faith presume that their faith vision will impact their way of life (their relationships with each other and with the world) and the lives of others whose world of faith may differ from theirs. How is it that they live their faith relationships so as to affect their everyday life and vice versa? Our underlying pre- sumption in this conference is, therefore, that there is a constant interaction going on between our lives of faith and the culture that we form and that forms us. Cultures are human creations; humans are responsible for the ways of life that they create. Being such, every way of life is as flawed as the humans that create it. Judeo-Christian tradition in its various faith forms is a positive response to the Living God’s self-revelation and is understood to bring an expanded vision to limited human perceptions of the world. It offers the opportunity for the human person and human communities to transcend their limited perceptions of ultimate happiness. The Design of the Conference Given these observations, we can see that we have invited our presenters to fulfill an impossible task. No one person – no group of people – can begin to understand the complexity of the relationship between faith and any way of life of a people. The relationship between the two is, in a sense, unfathomable. Yet, unless we enter into a communal, dialogic process of trying to understand how the two have interrelated throughout history and how they interact in the present context we shut the door to what the Living God is inviting us to do, namely to live lives of deeper mercy, compassion and justice. We neglect the opportunity to reflect the very image of God in which we have been created and to grow in the likeness of God as he intends. It is for this reason that some sociologists describe culture as an ongoing conversation about meaning. Essentially it is meaning that we will be dis- cussing throughout the sessions of this conference. We have invited our speak- ers to dialogue among themselves and with us. They have courageously responded to our invitation to begin our dialogue, to challenge us, to engage us in what we hope will become an ongoing dialogue both here and in the Czech Republic concerning the life and health of the relationship between faith and culture. 4 This is especially true in light of what the world experienced on September 11, 2001. In his remarks to the leaders of world religions when they met in Assisi, Pope John Paul II said: Religious traditions have the resources needed to overcome fragmen- tation and to promote mutual friendship and respect among peoples. ...[T]ragic conflicts often result from an unjustified association of religion with nationalistic, political and economic interests, or concerns of others kinds. ...[W]hoever uses religion to foment violence contra- dicts religion’s deepest and truest inspiration. Religions are at the service of peace. It is the duty of religions and of their leaders above all, to foster in the people of our time a renewed sense of the urgency of building peace. These words capture the deepest challenge of our conference. As we reflect on the history of our various faith traditions and their attempt to find new life in a post-socialist Czech Republic, we will be required to have to prac- tice the demanding asceticism required by persons who wish to dialogue in seeking truth.

Load more