From the Church Law Society
The 17th Annual Conference on State and Church in Brno Is Being Prepared
The annual Conference
on State and Church is being prepared
by the Department of Constitutional Law and Political Science of the Law School
of Masaryk University in Brno and the
Brno chapter of the Church Law
Review under the leadership of JUDr. Kateřina Šimáčková, Ph.D., and Mgr. Petr Jäger. The Conference
will také place on 6 September
2011 and the theme will be The
Legal Aspects of Church Financing.
Updated information about the Conference
is available at http://www.svobodavyznani.cz/.
Congratulations to the Members
of the Church
Law Society
ThDr. Jiří Svoboda,
IC.D., a leading Czech expert on canon
law, who was the head
of the Church
Court in Prague for two decades, celebrated
his 70th birthday on 20 March
2011. Currently he is Dean of the Metropolitan Capitula of St. Vitus and the vice-official of the
Metropolitan Church Court
in Prague. He is a founding
member of the Church Law
Review and authored articles on legal history and canon law that were
published in the Church Law Review.
Ad multos
annos!
PhDr. Vácslav Babička, the director of the
department of archival administration of the Ministry of the Interior of
the Czech Republic, and the
former director of the State
Central Archive in Prague, received
the Austrian Honorary Cross for Science and the Arts, First Class,
on 28 April 2011. He received
the award from the Ambassador
of the Austrian
Republic, H. E. Mr. Ferdinand Trauttmansdorff.
Brief
News
The New Bishop of Hradec Králové: Mons. Jan
Vokál
On 3 March 2011 Pope Benedict XVI appointed Mons. JUDr. Ing. Jan
Vokál, JU.D., as the new Bishop of Hradec Králové. Mons. Vokál was born in 1958 in Hlinsko in Bohemia and since
2005 has been the honorary canon of the Cathedral
Capitula of the Holy Spirit in Hradec
Králové. Mons. Vokál, a doctor
of both laws
of the Pontifi
cal Lateran University in
Rome (JU.D., 2008), received a doctoral
degree in the fi eld of
law and legal science from the Law
School of Charles
University in Prague (JUDr., 2009). He was consecrated in Rome on 7 May 2011 and assumed
his functions on 14 May 2011 in the
Cathedral of the Holy Spirit in Hradec
Králové. We congratulate him.
The 46th Conference Essener Gespräche zum Thema Staat
und Kirche
The Conference on State and Church, organized by the Essen Diocese every year
in Mülheim an der Ruhr, took place this year on 27 – 29 March 2011. The konference was attended by 125 experts from Germany, Austria,
the Netherlands and the Czech Republic. The theme of the
conference was the area of employment
law that applies in Germany to churches with public law status. A detailed report by
JUDr. Záboj Horák, Ph.D., is published
in this issue of the Church
Law Review.
Teaching Religion in Russia
The internet page
http://www.radiovaticana.cz/clanek.php4?id=14338 announced
the following news on 29 March 2011:
Moscow Religion will be a subject taught
in Russian schools starting in 2012. In the past four months a pilot project was completed
during which religion was taught in selected
Russian schools, and starting in 2012 religion will be taught as a year-long subject in schools throughout Russia. The announcement
was made by the Russian Ministry of Education at a press conference in the presence of representatives of the four major religions who participated
in the project. Religion returns to the school curriculum for the fi rst
time since the fall of
the Soviet Union. Students at elementary
schools and high schools will be
able to choose whether they will
attend courses on orthodox Christianity, Islam, Judaism or Buddhism, or
one of the
general courses “Basics of Religious
Culture” or “Basics of Public Ethics.” “It is
still necessary to solve problems with texts, which
were created very rapidly, and also with the training
of teachers,” said Elena Romanova, who is from the
Russian Ministry of Education. „It did not create any religious confl
ict – not at all; we noticed
a change in the behavior of children
who attended religious courses,“ commented Vsevolod Chaplin, of the department for external relations of the Moscow
Patriarchate. Representatives
of religious minorities in the country have reservations against the initiative,
which they view as an attempt
by the Kremlin to solidify orthodox Christianity as the building block of the Russian
national identity.