Prague, Jan 16 (CTK) – Pope Francis should not accept an invitation from Czech President Milos Zeman to come and pay tribute to the victims of the Lidice tragedy, Catholic priest and theologian Tomas Halik, winner of the prestigious Templeton Award and Zeman’s critic, said on Monday.
Zeman has repeatedly invited the Pope to the Czech Republic at the end of last week.
Halik told CTK on Monday that Zeman does not aim at commemorating the victims of the Lidice tragedy, but he wants to abuse the Pope’s popularity in his election presidential campaign.
Jiri Ovcacek, Zeman’s spokesman, said Halik should stop listening to the voices from the Hell.
The Central Bohemian village of Lidice was razed to the ground the Nazis in 1942 in retaliation for the assassination of Deputy Reichsprotektor of Bohemia and Moravia Reinhard Heydrich by Czechoslovak paratroopers in May 1942. Its male inhabitants were shot dead and women and most children taken to concentration camps. Some children were taken to Germany for re-education.
Zeman will announce whether he will seek re-election on March 10. His five-year-term expires in March 2018.
“I am profoundly convicned that the Pope should not accept the invitation, and I hope he will not accept it,” Halik told CTK.
Halik and Zeman represent different streams of thinking in Czech society. They often come out against one another in the media.
Zeman has indirectly ranked Halik among the “pseudo elite whom no one elects,” and whom he often criticises.
Zeman has criticised Halik’s intention to run for president, which he has never confirmed, however.
Halik criticises Zeman’s inclination towards China and his attitude against migrants.
The Presidential Office released on Friday, January 13, a letter Zeman sent to Pope Francis. In it, he painted the Lidice tragedy and its symbolic importance for the countries which are now afflicted by war.
Halik said Lidice is a symbol of suffering, but this symbol was ideologically abused during the communist period already.
“And it has been again discredited again in the past, when the memory of Lidice was ‘privatised by strongly problematic people like Jana Bobosikova and the compromised leadership of the Czech Freedom Fighters’ Union, which has drawn protests by many real victims of Nazism, including the last surviving Lidice women,” Halik said.
“I believe that the Bishops’s Conference, the Prague Nunciature and the Pope’s advisers are aware that the first visit by Pope Francis should be thoroughly prepared as a spiritual and pastoral event and it should not degenerate into a clearly abusable political propaganda event,” Halik said.
If the visit is postponed by one or more years, there is a real chance of that the Pope will meet a more dignified representative of the Czech State at Prague Castle, Halik said.
Zeman met Francis in April 2015 in the Vatican. After the meeting, Zeman said the Pope accepted an invitation to visit the Czech Republic “in the near future.”
Zeman repeated his invitation through Cardinal Pietro Parolino, head of Vatican diplomacy, last September, and in December, when he sent a telegram of congratulation to the Pope on his 80th birthday.
