Czech Cardinal Vlk calls for search for spiritual roots

CeskeNoviny: Velehrad - The Saint Cyril and Saint Methodius year is an opportunity to start a deep search for spiritual and cultural roots and their close connection, former Prague archbishop Cardinal Miloslav Vlk said today.

"First Czechoslovak President Tomas Garrigue Masaryk used to say that nations stay alive by the ideas with which they were born. As a result, it is not out-fashioned to look back at our beginnings and to ask where our rich roots are," Vlk said.

"On the contrary, the effort corresponds with major present-day world trends of search for spiritual values, sense of life, a link between the spiritual and civilian spheres," Vlk said in his homily.

The biggest Catholic mass is held as a part of the National Pilgrimage held traditionally on the holiday of Saint Cyril and Saint Methodius who were among the first missionaries to spread Christianity on the area of present-day Czech Republic and Slovakia.

Saint Cyril (827-869) and Saint Methodius (825-885), "the apostles of the Slavs," were two Greek brothers from Thessalonica. They translated the Holy Scriptures into the Old Church Slavonic and designed a Slavic alphabet called Glagolithic. Its descendant, called Cyrillic, is still used by all Slavs in the Orthodox Church.

They came to the Great Moravian empire in 863 AD.

The mass, attended by 10,000 people, was served by Vlk's successor, Prague Archbishop Cardinal Dominik Duka.

Vlk said the two missionaries' effort could not be separated from their cultural work and organisation of the public and state administration.

Vlk went on to speak about the year 1985 when the Communist regime tried to turn the celebrations of the 1100th anniversary of Saint Methodius's death a into cultural and state affair and to push the reality of belief and religion to the background.

"However, due to the regime's effort, the celebrations turned into an anti-Communist rally," Vlk said.

Vlk said even at present, belief and spiritual values could not be separated from culture and the public life "without the danger that the public life will be mutilated and undermined as one can see it today," Vlk said.

He said by the two missionaries' arrival, "our nation entered Europe."

"At that time, we outstripped many European nations because we received a scripture as a vital condition of the development of written culture, but there was also available a number of books, primarily liturgical ones, in the comprehensible Slav language, of a high literary level, admired by experts until now," Vlk said, adding that the two brothers were probably the most educated men of the East and their mission was a gift from the heavens.

Vlk said Saint Cyril and Saint Methodius had linked the East and the West, which characterises the fateful role of Bohemian and Moravian lands.