Benjamin Ivry looks at the Czech leader’s complicated relationship with Catholicism.
This year marks the 30th anniversary of the election of the Czech author Václav Havel (1936 –2011) to the presidency of his homeland. Havel’s rapport with Catholicism was, as he readily admitted, a work in progress, intertwined with fascination for the lives of the saints.
As a teenage stagehand at the ABC Theatre in Prague, Havel was already convinced that theatre “must be a living spiritual and intellectual focus, a place for social self-awareness”. Spirituality and morality were essential weapons for fighting a tyrannical Communist regime.
In his 1978 dissident manifesto “The Power of the Powerless”, Havel advised readers to “live in truth” to best combat a totalitarian system built on lies. As examples of truth-seeking, Havel looked to the saints.
In 1999, when he received a prize named in honour of Saint Adalbert of Prague, Havel identified with that religious leader’s political failures, claiming: “In fact, [St Adalbert] was permanently unsuccessful in his earthly actions, persecuted by fate and environment, little understood” as “one who articulated certain values and ideals without being able to visibly enforce them or project them into social facts”.
Havel extended his private appreciation of saints as exempla for all. When Pope John Paul II visited Prague in April 1990, Havel commented that months earlier, the nation had “rejoiced in the canonisation of Agnes of Bohemia”, the medieval Bohemian princess who chose a life of charity and piety. Yet Czech political blogger Martin Fendrych would object: “How many people in our country really rejoiced at the canonisation of Agnes of Bohemia?”
Historically, unlike its neighbours, the Czech Republic has been wary of mixing Church and state, and comprises fewer devout believers than other East European nations. Untroubled by such resistance, Havel sought enlightenment, including from saints-in-the making. In a 2000 interview with Poland’s Catholic Information Agency, Havel described John Paul II as a “close friend” who had helped by “inspiring and emboldening” anti-Communist activism: “I remember the moment we heard news of [John Paul II’s] election – we cheered and shouted with joy, celebrating till late evening. We felt instinctively this was a monumental prop for all freethinkers – those fighting for freedom.”
Affinities between the two went farther than the fact, underlined by all biographers, that both had theatrical experience. In a memoir, Havel confided that each time he met John Paul II, “every conversation was like a confession… Afterwards I felt I had been born anew.”
At the same time, Havel never claimed to possess belief that he had not yet attained. Instead, in 1990 he told The Christian Century: “I accept the Gospel of Jesus as a challenge to go my own way.”
Four years earlier, in Disturbing the Peace, a book of conversations, Havel stated: “I certainly have not become a practicing Catholic: I don’t go to church regularly… I took part in secret masses in prison, but I didn’t take communion… Genuine conversion, as I understand it, would mean replacing an uncertain ‘something’ with a completely unambiguous personal god, and fully, inwardly, to accept Christ as the Son of God, along with everything that entails, including the liturgy, and I have not taken that step.”
When Havel’s friends, the Archbishop Dominik Duka and Bishop Václav Malý, celebrated his funeral Mass at Saint Vitus Cathedral as an official state event, there were rumbles of discontent from others who had known Havel over the years.
The Czech journalist and activist Petr Uhl told Lidové noviny newspaper that he preferred to attend a funeral ceremony for close friends and family held at the Strašnice crematorium, bypassing the cathedral event. Uhl objected that Havel was neither a Catholic nor a Christian; in addition, the presidency of the Czech Republic was unaffiliated with any Church, and should not be appropriated by religious organisations or political parties on public occasions of mourning.
Despite such controversies, when Havel was in a final stage of illness, the result of health damaged by five years of political imprisonment, he asked Archbishop Duka if nuns from the Sisters of Mercy of St [Charles] Borromeo nursing order might attend him at his country home.
He was acquainted with this order from the Pod Petřínem hospital, where he had been treated previously. The support team was led by Sister Angelika Pintířová, who informed Barbar! magazine in July 2017 that she took the opportunity to thank Havel for inviting John Paul II to visit what was then Czechoslovakia.
Sister Angelika said: “Havel told me that he had invited the Dalai Lama for the same reason. He wanted us to turn away from the economy, to stop thinking about the economic base, and not to consider spirituality as a superstructure, to rise from material matters, to focus on other people and the relationships between them.”
Indeed, the last major religious leader whom Havel saw, around a week before his death, was the Dalai Lama, who visited his wheelchair-bound Czech friend. An ecumenical approach to spirituality was key to Havel’s philosophy, which possibly reached its apogee in Letters to Olga, a collection of letters written from prison to his wife. From a cell which he shared with a dissident Jesuit priest, Havel informed his spouse: “I want to retain my interest in other people and my love for them.”
All change, he repeated in a missive from August 1982, started with individual choice: “I agree with [philosopher Emmanuel] Levinas when he says that responsibility cannot be preached, but only borne, and that the only possible place to begin is with oneself. It may sound strange, but it is true: it is I who must begin.”
These beginnings were urgent because during the wasted years of totalitarian rule, as Havel remarked in his New Year’s presidential speech for 1990, the “spiritual potential” of his nation had not been “meaningfully exploited”.
His friend Tomáš Halík told Deník newspaper in March 2012 that wisdom distinguished Havel from others in the political arena: “Havel had his faults and weaknesses, but there was much that was wise in what he said… As [Czech author Karel] Čapek wrote: cleverness is a quality, wisdom is a virtue.”
Part of this wisdom was caring deeply about the wellbeing of others. Bishop Václav Malý recounted how, during one imprisonment in the 1990s, Havel was offered expatriation to New York, but he refused any get-out-of-jail offer if any of his fellow dissidents would continue to be detained.
In 2007, long after his presidency, the ailing Havel joined a one-day hunger strike in solidarity with a Kurdish doctor and human rights activist Yekt Uzunoğlu, who had been jailed by Czech officials at the direction of the Turkish government. Eventually, all charges against Uzunoğlu would be dropped; Havel’s participation was a singular occurrence for a former president of any nation.
This type of action, even more than his close ties to independent-minded Czech Catholic thinkers such as Zdeněk Neubauer and Radim Palouš, suggests that wherever one wishes to place Havel on the spectrum of doctrinal belief, his life and work were indelibly inspired by Catholic ideals.
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