Address to an International Symposium on John Hus
The speech in which John Paul II, receiving scholars who had studied the case of Jan Hus, expressed deep regret for the cruel death inflicted on him and for the division that followed among the Czech people.
The symposium was the work of an ecumenical commission set up by the archbishop of Prague to study the place of Jan Hus among the reformers of the church. Receiving its members in Rome on 17 December 1999, John Paul II praised Hus’s moral courage and said that he felt the need to express “deep regret” for the “cruel death” inflicted on him and for the conflict and division it left among the Bohemian people.
The address does not lift the council’s sentence or pronounce on Hus’s teaching. It is cited in the Council of Constance and the Burning of Jan Hus as the Catholic Church’s own later statement about his death.
Cited in
- 1414 to 1418, firm date