Welcome address of the rector of Charles University in Prague prof. Václav Hampl o occasion of the meeting of His Holiness Pope Benedict XVI with the academic commu ****************************************************************************************** * Welcome address of the rector of Charles University in Prague prof. Václav Hampl on the meeting of His Holiness Pope Benedict XVI with the academic community ****************************************************************************************** Vladislav Hall of Prague Castle, 27th of September 2009 Your Holiness, Honoured Mr. President and Mrs. Klaus, Your Eminences, Excellences, Magnificence, Spectabiles, Honorabiles, cives academici, distinguished guests, ladies and gentlemen, It is a very great honour for me to welcome you in the name of Charles University, and in academic communities of the other universities of the Czech Republic, here in the Vladisla Castle. It is symbolic in this context that just by opening the door in its Eastern side w hall - the place of the ceremonial inauguration of the head of the Czech state - with the All Saints, once the private chapel of the founder of Prague University, the Emperor and K To this day this chapel has an associated chapter whose canons have traditionally been app ranks of clergy who were also university professors.  We have convened here for this unique meeting on the eve of the Feast of St. Wenceslas, th saint of the Czech people - a holiday that the Czech Republic officially celebrates as the Statehood". We might say that precisely here, in the precincts of Prague Castle and in thi the spiritual traditions of this country converge and meet. Just a few metres divide us fr St. Wenceslas, Saint Ludmila, Saint Adalbert and Saint Prokop - and also from the last res the secular founder of our university. In the hustle and bustle of ordinary life we often Central European acropolis contains places that are strongly and inseparably linked with t of our academic community. A renowned cathedral school existed here for many years before of the university, which is traditionally dated to the 7th of April 1348, when the King an Charles IV issued the founding act for Prague university. It was not by chance that shortl Prague Castle provided a refuge to the first students who came here seeking - in the words founding charter - a "richly spread table of knowledge".  Even before the promulgation of teaching had started in important Prague monasteries and in the Cathedral of St. Vitus, We Adalbert. Although Prague Castle has long ceased to be considered academic ground, today it becomes the renewed, if symbolic, meeting of the secular and spiritual power, without the favourab of which it would hardly have been possible for the oldest university north of the Alps an Rhine to be founded all those centuries ago. Your predecessor Pope Clement VI desired that mentioned city of Prague a studium generale should flower in every permitted field for all A papal bull of the 26th of January 1347 thus guaranteed that all the then cultivated disc be represented at the new university - and that graduates of the university would be permi other European universities. From the very beginning it was envisaged that the university faculty at that time considered the first and the highest of faculties - a faculty of theo The oldest seal of our university, dating from around 1350 (and to this day used as its "l the secular founder, the King and later Emperor Charles IV, giving the founding Charter of University into the hands of St. Wenceslas. In this way Charles IV emphasised that St. Wen not just the patron saint of the land and the state, but also the patron saint of Prague u The motif of this seal represents the academic community as a whole, reminding us of the i of the community of masters and scholars, which may have been interpreted and accented in centuries in rather different ways, but never entirely undermined as a living ideal. Just and communication between different disciplines and subjects was never entirely broken. Th this communication today are entirely new and modern, but it is of course among the positi of development since the historic year 1989 that the university has been consciously stren identity, its aspiration ad unum versum (= ad universum), and even in a certain respect it For example, the re-incorporation of the theological faculties into the union of Prague Un is something that we see not simply as a just act of rehabilitation, but also as a way of integrative potential of the traditional university disciplines and subjects. As I have already said, Prague Castle is the setting for academic gatherings only on speci occasions.  In 1990, for example, it was here that the appointment of the first freely ele of Czech and Slovak universities took place. In the same year, it was here that Pope John representatives of the Czech and Slovak academic public. His state and pastoral visit was expression of the depth of all the fundamental changes that had just been initiated in thi the time - the then president rightly called it a miracle. Most of us did not consider the exaggerated.  In his speech, Pope John Paul made it clear that he saw science and scholarship, the educa academic elites as having a special responsibility and significance in the process of soci just beginning at the time. His words are a constant memento and an urgent challenge to us whether that expectation has been or could have been fulfilled - and how each one of us ha to fulfilling it. One symbolic point of his speech, also important for ecumenical dialogue churches, was a reassessment of the once Rector of Charles University Master Jan Hus, and was thoroughly and openly taken up and pursued in subsequent years. Experience of this dia have reconciled all the different views, but it has nonetheless helped to bring all the pa closer to each other. At our Alma Mater this is expressed in lively and concrete co-operat three theological faculties which represent the three fundamental Czech religious traditio Protestant and Hussite. Important state holidays inspired by our rich Christian past are t even by the highly secularised Czech society as a gallery of mutually complementary histor collective memory: the day of the Slav missionaries St. Cyril and St. Methodius (5th of Ju the burning of Master Jan Hus (6th of July) and the Czech Statehood Day - the Feast of St. of September). In Czech spiritual history, the relationship between reason (ratio) and religion, science thinking and believing have generally been important themes of philosophical and theologic and were so long before these pairs of concepts started to be artificially considered to b in contradiction.  Even after the 1st World War, after the establishment of the new Czecho they dominated not only university lecture halls or meetings of academic senates but also parliament. These were often sharp and even confrontational, but they undoubtedly drew the public to wider social horizons and stimulated public perceptions. Today we lack such insp Our society has come "back to Europe" but without having more deeply reflected on the valu that it wishes to share with Europe. Political elites have given up on the formulation of goals and visions - and are relatively indifferent to the urgency of the Christian message always perfectly conveyed by the Czech churches. In such a social atmosphere the concept o itself, essentially dynamic and open, is often technocratically reduced to mere "research, innovation".  We therefore value all the more the fact that it is you, Your Holiness, a distinguished sc occupies the  "cathedra - the chair of St. Peter", that is a teaching office which represe with the very foundations of Christian culture and civilisation. Undoubtedly the productiv of leading universities helped to inspire you to your major texts on these themes - texts reflected and thought of around the Globe. Today, then, you have come here to the academic ground of Prague - yet possibly not many i realise that you visited it before in 1992 to give your first lecture on our territory at Theological Faculty in Prague. We welcomed you then not only as a cardinal of the Catholic important clerical dignitary, but as a famous, sometimes even disturbing learned man and i power of your words and your judgement has always been praised even by your opponents. And again we look forward to your words - with great anticipation and hope.