Original scientific paper
Željko Mardešić: witness to a forgotten dialogue. Testimony to a dialogue between believers and non-believers with a view of the present status of the dialogue
Tonči Matulić
Abstract
The contribution is an updated and extended version of a paper presented at the scientific symposium on the »Spirit and Thought of Željko Mardešić: Metamorphoses of the Sacred in Modern World« that took place in Zagreb on 17 June 2011, on the occasion of the fifth anniversary of the death of Željko Mardešić. The author analyses in detail Mardešić’s testimony to his personal involvement in the dialogue between believers and non-believers under godless communist regime, followed by Mardešić’s and the author’s diagnosis of the status of the dialogue in today’s Croatian society and the Church. The article is divided into several sections in which the author fully analyses Mardešić and together with him develops his ideas about the relevance and value of dialogue to faith and Christianity and to secular society. In the first section the author points out the novelty and importance of the theological discovery of dialogue at the Second Vatican Council, a fact that played an essential role not only in Mardešić’s personal life as a believer, but also in his professional life as a scientist. These contemplations are followed by a brief but vital thought about theological and ecclesial purpose and meaning of dialogue as serving in love, again a fact that essentially defined Mardešić’s activity and research. In the next section the author analyses Mardešić’s experience of dialogue opening by the Church at the Council. This is followed by analyses of Mardešić as an active participant in the dialogue with Marxist non-believers in the former state and a presentation of Mardešić’s critical evaluation of the dialogue (non-)realised with non-believers or in modern Croatia after the democratic changes. In this context the author examines the answer to the question already asked by Mardešić: where have suddenly the believers disappeared after the democratic changes? The author goes on to contemplate the challenges of the dialogue with a prospect of the future that is not governed by man but by God, which is the essential message of the spirit and letter of the Council that opened the Church to dialogue i.e. God. Christian dialogue is, consequently, not tactics, and even less a fad, it is an eminently Christian task required by the evangelic conversion in staying faithful to Jesus Christ and the Church. Finally, the author makes his conclusions that have their biblical and theological foundation, in order to more poignantly encourage the reader to recognise and accept the essential Christian assumption of dialogue among believers in the Church and with the world, and this is the evangelic conversion. Mardešić emphasised the conversion to Council Christianity, meaning the evangelic conversion to which the universal Church returned at the Second Vatican Council.
Keywords
God; world; dialogue; believer; non-believer; Church; Second Vatican Council; Marxism; modern values
Hrčak ID:
74603
URI
Publication date:
25.11.2011.
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