Over the past five decades, the Czech priest, philosopher and theologian Tomas Halik has served as a prominent voice in contemporary debates in the church and civil society on subjects ranging from ecumenism and interreligious dialogue to atheism, political Christianity, postmodern belief and more. He has published over 40 books, both in his native Czech and in many other languages.
Born in 1948 in what was then Czechoslovakia, he converted to Catholicism at the age of 18 and was secretly ordained a priest in communist-controlled East Germany in 1978. Father Halik worked for many years as a psychologist in the Eastern Bloc and was also active in the underground church in Eastern Europe before the fall of communism. His written work (including two essays in America: “Ukraine, World War III and Pope Francis’ Roadmap for the Church” and “Christianity in a Time of Sickness”) incorporates the insights of thinkers across multiple genres and religious backgrounds, placing him in dialogue with figures inside and outside the church on contemporary issues.
In 2024, he published The Afternoon of Christianity: The Courage to Change, a reflection on challenges facing the church and contemporary believers. Multidisciplinary in its scope, the book suggests that Christianity is not necessarily in decline but instead entering a time of maturity. Nevertheless, Father Halik writes, Christians run the risk of falling into irrelevance and marginalization unless we face the challenges of faith in a postmodern world with honesty, deep spiritual reflection and an openness to other cultures and beliefs—aiming toward the “universal fraternity” of which Pope Francis often spoke.
America asked five theologians—Erin Brigham, Michael Kirwan, S.J., Brent Little, the Rev. Robert Imbelli and Rita George-Tvrtković—to reflect on The Afternoon of Christianity and its relevance for the contemporary Christian. Their responses are below. — James T. Keane, senior editor
Toward a renewal of the faith
Tomas Halik’s The Afternoon of Christianity is an articulate, clear-sighted appraisal and advocacy of the pastoral theological project of Pope Francis. Its impulse is the same as that of the Second Vatican Council: a centrifugal, Spirit-led movement away from defensive insularity to dialogue and engagement. Father Halik seeks to establish the “conditions of possibility” for a resurgence of the Christian faith. This is “kairology”: a reading of the signs of the times so as to be able to respond to a privileged moment of opportunity. Christianity is not benighted or eclipsed. Just the opposite: It is—potentially—enjoying its “afternoon.”
The book is for me the intellectual equivalent of a college reunion, with many familiar names—Paul Ricoeur, Charles Taylor, Richard Kearney, Teilhard de Chardin, Karl Rahner—cited in support of Father Halik’s expansive project. I would ask whether his “canon,” so familiar and accessible to a baby boomer theologian like myself, carries the same weight with younger readers, as none of the thinkers listed here come without complexity or qualification.
Father Halik’s argument rests on transposing Carl Jung’s metaphorical “afternoon,” a description of the individual’s growth journey, onto the history of the church. “Morning” corresponds to the church’s identity formation, from its beginnings to the cusp of modernity. The “noonday” crisis denotes the painful unravelling in modernity of this necessarily protective construct. Once successfully negotiated, however, an “afternoon” of mature integration can take place.
Threefold structuring myths can be invaluable (even if we hesitate about Jung’s version). One can instance Paul Ricoeur’s “second naïveté,” or Karl Rahner’s “three epochs of the church,” or Richard Kearney’s “anatheism” (a stance after theism and atheism). Challenged to name God “in an age that cannot name itself” (David Tracy), we need all the help we can get.
For church-affiliated believers, The Afternoon of Christianity is—in equal measure—consoling and challenging. Two major crises, the clerical sex abuse scandals in the Catholic Church and the Covid-19 pandemic, have seismically affected the church’s self-understanding and self-confidence. But Father Halik writes as a public theologian, seeking also to address unbelievers and seekers in all their complexity while recognizing the paradox of the intended dialogue partners being, at best, “curious but disinterested.”
For this reason, two further challenges merit greater attention. First, Father Halik calls out the dismal phenomenon of President Donald Trump, whom he is not afraid to call “fascist.” If he is serious about this, however, then the distorting and corrosive religiosity of too many of Mr. Trump’s followers (Catholics included) surely needs greater and more urgent diagnosis.
Second, the absence of any mention of artificial intelligence is a disturbing indicator of how recently we are realizing the implications of this technology. Large numbers of people are now seeking intimacy, consolation and wisdom from a “non-human other,” with varying degrees of awareness that their significant “relationship” is essentially hollow. The theological task of confronting this new reality has fallen to Pope Leo.
These two threats—the catastrophic debasement of religious faith through political extremism and the existential threat posed by the technological reshaping of humanity—are ones before which no sane person can remain “curious but indifferent.” Is it possible that reading these two “signs of the times” may provide new common ground between religious belief and humanist good will? If so, believers and unbelievers alike may find a new place where the journey to the depths, to which Tomas Halik summons all of us, can be undertaken together.
Michael Kirwan, S.J., is an associate adjunct professor at the Loyola Institute at Trinity College Dublin.
Moving beyond nostalgia
Tomas Halik dedicates The Afternoon of Christianity to the late Pope Francis, and so it is unsurprising that his book harmonizes with much of Francis’ papacy. The book is an exhortation for the church and its members to move beyond nostalgia for an irretrievable past, remember tradition as a living, developing dynamism and engage the world with a humility firmly rooted in the Gospel of the crucified Christ.
It is also a beautiful theology of faith. Moreover, his ecclesiology is built on it. Father Halik distinguishes between faith and belief: If belief is what one holds (or hopes) to be true, faith is “a certain attitude of life, an orientation, a way of being in the world and how we understand it.” A person’s life reveals their faith much more than their words do, for the way one lives reveals “their emotional richness, their imagination and creativity, their sense of beauty and sense of humor, their capacity for empathy, and a host of other qualities.” A person’s faith, therefore, involves their entire identity in a way conceptual beliefs do not. One can claim to believe in the teachings of Jesus, only to mirror political and economic systems that prize profits and power above the dignity of fellow human beings created in the image of God.
Father Halik resists any attempt to reduce faith to a mere list of propositions. Faith cannot be measured by a poll; to believe otherwise is a misunderstanding that the theologian Terrence Tilley has memorably dubbed the “Gallup fallacy.” Father Halik also challenges any American Catholic who wants their faith to be a shelter from the world, a justification for political domination or an avoidance of fearful uncertainty. Pope Francis frequently remarked that a person who clings to certainty has created their own idol. Father Halik would rebuke this form of idolatry as well as others. (I sense he would agree with William Cavanaugh that strident nationalism is also idolatrous.)
Idolatry, of course, is neither a lack of faith nor atheism nor agnosticism. It is the worship—consciously or not—of a false god or gods. If we are honest, we are all probably idolaters in some way, at least with how we structure and prioritize our lives. We frequently claim to hold beliefs that are contradicted by our actions.
Father Halik’s book, then, articulates how a healthy form of Catholic faith might be lived in the world today. He remarks that earlier categories of belief and unbelief “are no longer able to encompass and reflect the diversity and dynamism of the spiritual life of our time.” I would observe further that the “diversity and dynamism” of a person’s spiritual life may be driven by a host of factors, synthesizing various sources of meaning, for good or ill.
A Catholic’s faith is certainly formed by the celebration of the Eucharist, but it probably bears the imprint of numerous cultural norms, social media trends, the political milieu, consumerist culture, other religious, spiritual, artistic and intellectual traditions, and so on. This mixture is not necessarily bad. Ideas and values ostensibly outside the church can sometimes prompt personal and institutional critique, thereby becoming a catalyst for conversion. This mixture also seems to be the norm for more and more of us.
How do we determine if the faith that we live (and not just the faith that we believe) is an authentically Christian faith? How do we discern when elements of our faith are idolatrous? No doubt this is a perennial challenge. But my hunch is that Father Halik would advise us to begin any self-critique with a return to an explicit identification of Jesus’ divinity in the Gospels: when Thomas touches the wounds of the resurrected Christ. We “touch the wounds” of Christ so we can be present to the wounds in those around us to better live a faith faithful to the Gospel.
“Here, in the wounds of our world,” he urges in The Afternoon of Christianity, “we can authentically see the invisible God in a Christian way and touch an otherwise barely touchable mystery.” Any faith, then, that does not touch the wounds of the world fails to live out a Gospel revealed in the wounds of Christ.
Brent Little is an associate professor of Catholic studies at Sacred Heart University in Fairfield, Conn., and the author of Acts of Faith and Imagination: Theological Patterns in Catholic Fiction.
Wisdom for a post-secular age
Writing from my context at a Jesuit university in a largely nonreligious city, San Francisco, I found Tomas Halik’s approach to secularization in The Afternoon of Christianity to be relevant and hopeful. As a sociologist, Father Halik describes the secular context as one in which religion is transformed, not extinguished. As a faithful Catholic, he invites us to join him in imagining what kind of transformed religion and church might provide a space for Christianity in a postmodern, post-secular period—a time Father Halik describes as its afternoon.
I teach students who relate to faith in a variety of ways—from those who identify as spiritual but not religious to those who experience more traditional ways of religious belonging. Father Halik speaks to this context with openness and curiosity, affirming the experience of faith beyond religion. For Father Halik, faith is best understood as a dimension of human existence, a capacity for and experience of self-transcendence and a longing or deep desire for that mystery which some of us name God. The book evokes hope because of the sincerity of his engagement with nonreligious seekers and his deep commitment to Christianity that comes through his personal narrative woven throughout the text.
Father Halik embraces a spirit of dialogue, convinced that religious and nonreligious people can mutually enrich each other, while also acknowledging the barriers to this exchange. Specifically, he criticizes fundamentalist religions that reduce faith to a set of doctrines or diminish God as an object rather than an ultimate mystery. He also criticizes forms of atheism that reject the experience of mystery as part of what it means to be human.
Through historical analysis, Father Halik argues that Christianity informed the most cherished ideals that, in turn, informed the secularizing event of the Enlightenment: the dignity of the person. At the same time, he invites us to consider if Christianity has sufficiently learned from the fruits of secularization to mature into this afternoon stage of history.
Such learning depends on a mutually enriching dialogue among religious and nonreligious people on faith. Father Halik lifts up universities as one of the privileged spaces for spiritual accompaniment, as they embrace the resources of religion in a nonecclesial context. One of the challenges I face as I teach theology to students who relate to faith in different ways is finding a language that is publicly accessible but also honest about its particularity. Jürgen Habermas, whom Father Halik mentions in the book, has challenged the idea that religion should be bracketed off from public discourse and favors a process of mutual learning among religious and nonreligious people.
This challenge invites us to suspend what we think we know about the experience of those who are spiritual but not religious as well as that of those with a more traditional approach to religion. Despite Father Halik’s humble and curious posture, he makes some assumptions about the “anonymous faith” of nonbelievers and about the experience of Catholics who lean toward traditional expressions of faith. I am curious what an honest and sustained dialogue among these groups would reveal about faith and religious belonging.
Perhaps synodality offers a context for cultivating skills for such dialogue and a way to embody the all-encompassing ecumenism he envisions. Synodality is built upon deep listening and inclusive participation that honors difference and reflects the humility and openness of faith that Father Halik describes.
The Synod on Synodality (2023-24) endorsed a methodology of spiritual conversation that facilitates depth and honesty, which I think is essential for the dialogue needed for mutual learning and maturing within and beyond the church. Everyone invested in the possibilities of the synod should read this book.
With Father Halik, I hope synodality will move the church to embody the field hospital Pope Francis envisioned, one that is not self-referential but embracing of its mission to embody Jesus’ self-emptying love, especially for people on the margins. If the Catholic Church, a global community that has traveled through many stages of religious history, can figure out how to foster spiritual belonging amid many ways of relating to faith, it will serve as a model for navigating the post-secular context.
Erin Brigham is the director of the Joan and Ralph Lane Center for Catholic Social Thought and the Ignatian Tradition at the University of San Francisco, where she teaches in the department of theology and religious studies.
Concerns and ambiguities
Having read Father Tomas Halik’s Patience With God and I Want You to Be: On the God of Love, I am no stranger to the force of his writing and the passion of his pastoral concerns. Let me mention a few of those concerns as they appear once again in The Afternoon of Christianity.
Father Halik’s ongoing challenge to his fellow Christians is that their faith be personally appropriated and not merely a notional affirmation of doctrines. Hence, he constantly appeals to spirituality as the making real of what believers profess. He goes so far as to say (not without some ambiguity): “Spirituality, a living faith, precedes intellectual reflection [the doctrinal aspect] and institutional expressions of faith; it transcends them and sometimes revives and reforms them in moments of crisis.”
As he expands this insight, Father Halik shows particular preference for the writings of the mystics who often found themselves on the margins of institutional religion. They everywhere impress upon their fellow believers the urgent need for conversion and transformation of their lives. Indeed, they bear witness to the cost of conversion through their experience of the “dark night,” in which all traditional supports seem to fade. In this regard, Father Halik issues a welcome affirmation of the crucial importance, in an internet-saturated society, of contemplation and the pressing need to cultivate a contemplative habit of life.
The book’s second vital concern is directed toward “spiritual seekers” who fail to find in the churches an adequate articulation of their longing for meaning and wholeness. Conjoined to this concern is the author’s respectful attention to non-Christian religions that embody alternate paths of spiritual richness. Here the inspiration of Pope Francis (to whom the book is dedicated) is patent. Indeed, Father Halik goes so far as to consider Francis’ 2020 encyclical, “Fratelli Tutti,” “to be the most important document of our time, comparable to the importance of the ‘Universal Declaration of Human Rights’.”
My questions about the book, however, surface in its very first chapter, “Faith in Motion,” where Father Halik announces a key methodological choice. He writes: “This is a book about faith as a journey in search of God in the midst of a changing world, about lived faith, the act of faith, how we believe (fides qua) rather than what we believe (fides quae), what is the ‘object’ of faith.” Later he does concede that the two “belong together.” But he clearly privileges the subjective and existential over the objective and doctrinal, speaking of an “ontological proto-faith” that manifests itself as a primal trust. This allows him to accommodate both spiritual seekers and the adherents of other religions, by de-emphasizing explicit confessional commitments.
Father Halik notably favors the apophatic tradition in theology, which seeks to understand God in the negative through establishing what God is not, and appeals to “Mystery” as the horizon of implicit faith and trust. But the risk he thereby runs is either to leave Mystery devoid of specific content or to import presuppositions about the “shape” of ultimate reality surreptitiously—as when he declares Mystery’s nearness rather than indifference. Hence, in its concern to promote ecumenical openness, the book risks advocating a strangely amorphous faith.
Thus arises my paramount concern with the book: Does it preserve the distinctive identity of Christianity? Chapter 11, “The Identity of Christianity,” is central here.
Father Halik asks, “What constitutes the identity of Christianity?” and forthrightly replies that “the Christianness of Christianity resides in faith in Jesus Christ.” The chapter then proceeds to elaborate on what the tradition professes about Jesus Christ, drawing from the Gospels, St. Paul, the Greek fathers, medieval Franciscan spirituality and the mystical cosmology of Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, S.J. Father Halik summarizes Teilhard’s teaching approvingly as the “vision of an omnipresent and almighty Christ, in whom the unity of the divine and human is achieved” and whose Incarnation initiates “the Christification of matter.” Fides quae returns robustly!
One may take issue with one or another of the emphases of the chapter, but the vision set forth is clearly Christocentric. Consequently, puzzlement arises when the author, later in the book, peremptorily declares: “the time has come for the self-transcendence of Christianity” and postulates the need to “transcend the boundaries of the Church’s language game”—presumably the very language game he so lavishly displayed in Chapter 11.
There arises, then, the crucial question: Is “the courage to change,” both personally and ecclesially, that Father Halik references a reform of church structures or a going beyond Christianity itself—and, hence, beyond Christ? A troubling sign, in this regard, is the failure to include the “body of Christ” among the “ecclesiological concepts” that “must be built upon” to meet “the present signs of the times.” Still more concerning is the absence of any substantial treatment of the Eucharist. I have found only two passing references (the book lacks an index). Yet, the Eucharist, as Jesus Christ’s real presence among us, remains the compass, sustenance and goal of our journey of faith.
The book was written over a period of six years, and the author’s views may have undergone change during that time. So my questions are genuine requests for clarification. Seeking this, I am encouraged by Father Halik’s own openness. He concedes that “some of the criticism by educated Conservative Christians of superficial progressivism in the Church and theology provides useful feedback and is worth listening to carefully.”
Robert P. Imbelli is a priest of the Archdiocese of New York. He taught theology for 30 years at Boston College and is the author of Christ Brings All Newness.
The time is now
This is a book about salvation history and church renewal. The themes seemed to me especially apt, as I did my reading during Advent, the season in which I always feel a heightened sense of awareness about time and a palpable longing for the transformation that will arrive with the coming of Christ and the kingdom of God.
The author, Tomas Halik, a discerning reader of the “signs of the times,” presents us with his views of when the church must renew itself, with whom and where.
When. Father Halik suggests that current church crises present us with a kairos, an opportune moment to take decisive action. I appreciate this shift of perspective from what seem to be two extreme forms of inertia today: either a panicky “oh no, religion is dying” or a complacent “whew, religion is coming back.” While one could argue that every moment is a wake-up call—as even Father Halik does—his book does a fine job describing the characteristics of this particular kairos and its urgency by comparing it to defining moments like the Protestant Reformation, the Shoah and other collective “dark nights of the soul.”
The time for change is now, he says, due in large part to the dehumanization that comes from an over-focus on group identity. Christian nationalism (both Eastern European and American varieties) and radical political Islamism are surprisingly similar in their aggressive efforts to widen divides between peoples. Those who see Catholicism as an “ism” are also susceptible to this kind of thinking. In the 1930s, Simone Weil called it “Christian patriotism,” and it was one reason she eschewed baptism.
With whom. Father Halik uses the word ecumenism often in this book, but not according to the standard definition of restoring Christian unity. Rather, he redefines the term to include the broadest group of interlocutors, with the broadest goal: “to turn the world into an oikumene, a habitable space, a home.” His ecumenism involves everyone: diverse Catholics, diverse Christians, all religions, atheists, agnostics, seekers, “nones,” the “spiritual but not religious” and global voices (though he quotes only one African theologian and no Asians or Latin Americans). These are the people with whom the church must engage if it is to renew itself now.
In the 15th century, Nicholas of Cusa suggested a similarly expansive ecumenism in response to another kairos moment, the fall of Constantinople in 1453. As a scholar of Nicholas, I was delighted to see Father Halik refer to him several times throughout his book, including a quotation of what is arguably Nicholas’s most famous line: “una religio in rituum varietate” (“one religion in a variety of rites”), a conclusion reached by a council of leaders from 17 different religions. Nicholas’s council was as inclusive as he could make it, with a Bohemian, Arab, Jew, Indian and Tartar among them.
Would that he had included a “none”! The ecumenical dialogue about which Father Halik offers the greatest insights is that between the non-religious (“nones”) and religious. In Chapter 14, “The Faith of Non-Believers,” he describes personal conversations he has had about unbelief not only with post-communist Czech atheists but also within himself, observing that “the prerequisite for a fruitful dialogue with atheism is to first discover the atheist, doubter, or nonconformist within oneself.”
Where. We know when the church must change (now), and with whom (everyone). But where? A clue can be found in Chapter 15, “The Community of the Way,” where Father Halik revisits key images of the church as a community on the road and at the borders. “Living Christianity is a movement, it is happening, it is becoming, it is still unfinished,” he writes. He argues that we must have the courage to “go beyond the present mental and institutional boundaries of traditional churches, and following the example of St. Paul…venture out as seekers with seekers onto new paths.”
Father Halik includes practical suggestions for how to do this: Read together, encounter the other, listen, build centers of shared prayer, engage in the synodal process, practice Ignatian discernment and create ministries of spiritual accompaniment. These ministries should happen everywhere, he says, not just at parishes—a traditional locus of Catholic life that Father Halik claims is dying. But are they dying? Pope Francis said we should go to the margins, true. But why not thoroughly rethink parishes, not abandon them? A both/and approach might be more fruitful than either/or.
If we seize the “afternoon” kairos of now, engage in dialogue with unlikely partners and do so in unlikely places, Father Halik believes, the church will both “transcend itself” and become its most mature, truest self.
Rita George-Tvrtković is dean and professor at the School of Parish Leadership & Evangelization at the University of St. Mary of the Lake in Mundelein, Ill. Pope Leo XIV recently reappointed her as a consultor to the Vatican’s Dicastery for Interreligious Dialogue.
This article appears in March 2026.
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