 |
| Hans Küng |
I had known he was quite old, and was caught off guard less by his death and more by the fact that it had passed me by.
I had always taken to Hans Küng, not as a theologian but as a progressive thinker. Theology is meaningless to me. From I first encountered his ideas and those of Karl Rahner through Reality at a time when the prison administration hadn't yet deprived those on the blanket protest of religious magazines, I had longed to read more about them both.
Rahner had developed some appealing ideas like anonymous Christianity which to my mind was progressive if not nearly as advanced as Dietrich Bonhoeffer's religionless Christianity. Inevitably, I was more drawn to Küng with his determination to think outside the mould that shaped him.
Shortly after the blanket protest ended and we had access to books I managed to get a copy of Infallible? via the prison library, courtesy of one of the screws working in it who never failed to deliver on a book request, even if he had to use the inter library loan system to do so. Out of all the works on theology I had been reading, Infallible? was the standout, the most interesting, even more so than the liberation theology of Leonardo Boff, Jon Sobrino and Gustavo Gutierrez.
Küng was a scientific thinker, his book The Beginning Of All Things a serious contribution to public understanding. He claimed to take the Bible seriously but not literally. That is in stark contrast to the fundamentalists who read it literally and as a result are not taken seriously. He was also a historian of the Catholic Church, with his The Catholic Church: A Short History, a great companion for a long bus or train journey.
He was very much a moderniser who sought to guide if not drag Catholicism and the Church that promoted it into the 20th Century. He was not gushing with enthusiasm for the reign of Joseph Ratzinger as pope, accusing the German of "living intellectually in the Middle Ages”. He scathingly lambasted the recently deceased former Prefect for the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith:
There is no denying the fact that the worldwide system of covering up cases of sexual crimes committed by clerics was engineered by the Roman Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith under Cardinal Ratzinger (1981-2005).
Earlier, as a young Swiss theologian he was crucial to Vatican 2, having been appointed a special advisor to that council by Pope John XXIII. Ratzinger had also made important contributions to the council deliberations but later rowed back from them and began to denounce Küng for his open dissent from the teaching of the Church. The Ratzinger nose was particularly out of joint over Kung's rejection of papal infallibility, a concept previously scorched by Pope John XXIII who said I am only infallible when I speak ex cathedra but I shall never speak ex cathedra.
Küng opposed the conservative rearguard action fronted by Pope Paul VI who although a practicing gay was no radical apple prepared to fall far from the conservative tree. He labelled sinful all contraceptive methods. Küng was later banned from teaching theology at the Catholic University of Tübingen by the Polish pontiff John Paul II.
No hierarchy careerist, Küng was not to be bought off by the offer of a senior post in the Vatican. He expressed a passion for the truth which did not serve him well in a Church committed to suppressing the truth about its one institutional dimension that caused it more headaches than any other: it functioned as a global child rape regime. Citing Pope Gregory The Great Küng would say “If scandal is taken as the truth, then it is better to allow scandal to arise than to abandon the truth.” This persistent character trait was spotted in the late 1970s by Robert Nowell who would then write a book in 1981 about Küng, Passion For Truth.
It was a passion that endured until his death.
⏩ Follow on Twitter @AnthonyMcIntyre.
It was a passion that endured until his death.
⏩ Follow on Twitter @AnthonyMcIntyre.
Good piece, Anthony. I would go as far to say that Hans Kung was one of the great humanitarian philosophers of the 20th century.
ReplyDeleteThanks Barry - yes, a great mind. Ratzinger and the attack dogs of the modern inquisition failed to stymie his concern for his fellow humans. I suppose with people like Ratzinger snarling at him he felt compelled to write Why I am Still a Christian.
Delete