PRAGUE– Cardinal Dominik Duka, a previous Archbishop of Prague that was maltreated by the communist regimen and later on aided bargain settlement for churches for residential or commercial property confiscated throughout that age, has actually passed away.
Duka passed away very early Tuesday at a health center in Prague, the Prague Archdiocese stated in a declaration. He was 82. The reason of fatality was not offered.
He was birthed as Jaroslav Václav Duka on April 26, 1943, in the city of Hradec Králové.
After the Communists took power in 1948 in Czechoslovakia, the Catholic Church and various other churches encountered tough mistreatment from the state. Churches were taken, forthright clergymans incarcerated or perhaps performed and those permitted to lead solutions did so under the careful eye of the secret cops.
Duka covertly signed up with the Dominican Order in 1968 and embraced the name of Dominik in its honor.
He was blessed 2 years later on however was outlawed in 1975 from doing priestly funcitions. He still proceeded in the church tasks for which he was punished to 15 months behind bars in 1981.
Duka was incarcerated in the Bory jail in Plzeň, where he hung around with Václav Havel, after that an unorthodox dramatist that later on led the 1989 anti-Communist Velour Transformation and ended up being the nation’s head of state.
Duka led the funeral mass for Havel at Prague’s St. Vitus Sanctuary when he passed away in December 2011.
Th previous year, he resolved a lasting conflict with the state over the possession of the largest Czech sanctuary.
Duka functioned as Prague Archbishop in between from 2010 and 2022 and was called a cardinal by Pope Benedict XVI in 2012.
Throughout his time as archbishop, the Czech Republic– a nation thought about among one of the most nonreligious in Europe– authorized a legislation to return spiritual residential properties seized throughout the Communist age, an effort to attract an additional line under the nation’s distressed past. Under the strategy, the Czech federal government consented to pay some $3 billion to the Czech church in settlement over three decades.
Duka was recognized for his conventional sights and was implicated of minimizing situations of clerical misuse.
A number of courts, consisting of the nation’s greatest lawful authority, the Constitutional Court, rejected a legal action he brought versus 2 debatable plays organized at a movie theater celebration in 2018 that buffooned the Catholic Church.
Head Of State Petr Fiala stated he appreciated Duka’s “fearlessness and tasks while of totalitarianism and valued his essential function in the revival of the church in an autonomous culture.”
