They persuaded me to become president after Václav Havel, Tomáš Halík said

Catholic priest, theologian and psychologist Tomáš Halík, who seriously considered running for president, revealed that one of the main reasons why he did not decide for her in the end was the realization that for a part of society he embodies everything they hate, he said in an interview for Seznam News.

Photo:

David Hora

Description: Tomáš Halík at a lecture in Písek

In 2002, Václav Havel invited Halík to run for president, and several political parties came to him with the same proposal. Halík explains that it didn’t work out in the end because many people hate him. “I realized that for a significant part of society I represent exactly what they hate. There is a part of society, and not a small one, that hates Praguers, hates priests, hates former dissidents, hates Václav Havel’s friends, hates intellectuals.

I am all of these in one. You won’t find a person who embodies everything these people hate. It’s not the majority of people, but it’s a very vocal part that would start terrible things in the election campaign,” says Tomáš Halík in an interview for List of Messages with the fact that it encounters resistance even among a large part of the Czech Catholic Church.

He agrees with the recently published opinion of the writer Pavel Kosatík that Halík’s ideas resonate more abroad than in the Czech Republic, where his books are widely published and where he won, for example, the Templeton Prize for 2014. He thus joined the ranks of laureates such as Mother Teresa and the Dalai Lama. The prize is awarded to living personalities who, through their work, deepen the perception of the spiritual world. It is unofficially called the Nobel Prize for Religion. This is also why, according to Kosatík, he is not very popular with part of the Czech society. “It seems that his education did not bring him closer to many Czechs, but distanced him,” wrote Kosatík.

“I thought to myself, I’m not interested in power, I’m interested in my thoughts somehow inspiring and serving society. And maybe if I say it in such independence that it is a certain advantage that I can do more good in this role than if I was connected to the political one,” he added regarding his decision not to fight for the Castle.

“There was a moment when I seriously considered it, I told myself all the pros and cons. There was a tendency that in Czech consciousness the president is understood more as a moral and intellectual authority, that was Masaryk, Havel, I might follow up on that in a certain way, maybe more than anyone else. But then it turned out that the situation has changed following all, that people only want this type of president in certain critical situations. Today the situation is different, today it wouldn’t fit there,” says Halík.

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author: Natalia Brozovská

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