This year’s Prof. Piťha´s Saint Wenceslas sermon caused some sharp reactions, which did not come from the top of the Catholic hierarchy, nor from regular Catholics. Prof. Piťha has since been aggressively attacked by activists from the progressive group of liberal democrats headed by Tomáš Halík.
Halík’s critical text contains absurd statements that require a response. It is not a gentle theological polemic that can only be discussed by the chosen ones. It is a fundamental controversy over the character of our time, our place in it and our future.
Tomáš Halík considers Petra Piťha’s sermon to be “really scandalous” and says that (of course, unnamed) “legal experts believe that the fact of the crime of spreading alarming messages has been fulfilled.” But was it not a rather courageous polemic with propagators of destructive gender theory and deniers of a classical family?
It is remarkable that Halík thinks that without “Francis´s reform the Church would become a marginal embittered sect”. This is an argument of a political and extremely leftist activist, not a factual analysis of the present world and the position of the churches in it.
Halik’s thesis states that “during the Second Czechoslovak Republic the resistance of the part of Catholics to liberal democracy … has brought them near fascism”, which is an insult to the Catholic Church and is not based on any serious historical facts. Liberal democracy did not even exist before World War II, it is just a fashionable ideology of militant ecologism, genderism, feminism, and homosexualism. It is neither liberal nor democratic.
Halík calls “invariable human nature” as an “unsustainable ahistoric conception.” By questioning the immutability of human nature, Halík supports a radically feminist program of destructing the world of normal men and women and of destroying the natural relationships between them.
Leftist progressivism of Halík´s type is a danger to an entire society, especially to the Catholic Church. An attack on the most intimate human sphere – on sexual identity, on relations between a man and woman, on the family as a bond of man and woman – denies the essence of the Church’s teachings. To retreat its pressure, or even to accept its attitudes and opinions does not result in (perhaps necessary) modernization of the Church, but destruction of Christianity as such.
