Tomáš Halík

Tomáš Halík is a priest, professor, author and one of today’s most influential Catholic thinkers. Halík was a student of Jan Patočka and a friend of Václav Havel. During the Communist period, he was banned from university teaching and persecuted by the secret police as ‘an enemy of the regime’. Clandestinely ordained a priest in Erfurt in 1978, he worked in the ‘underground Church’ and he closely cooperated with the country’s future president, Havel. Pope John Paul II appointed him advisor to the Pontifical Council for Dialogue with Non-Believers (1990); Benedict XVI named him Honorary Pontifical Prelate (2008). His many books, including Night of the Confessor (2005), Is God absent? (2017) and Touch the Wounds (2023), have been published in twenty languages and won international awards.