Even if you don't agree with all he writes (and I don't) Hans Küng is a theologian of great learning, distinction and experience. He's forgotten more theology and church history than I will ever know. And even if you don't agree with all he writes in his open letter to the world's bishops, it is well worth reading. (I could have done without the grandiose "pastoral letter" trope, addressing his remarks to the "Venerable Bishops," but c'est la théologie.) In light of what he calls "the worst credibility crisis since the reformation," Küng lists several missed opportunities , and then makes his suggestions: 1.) Do not keep silent; (2) Set about reform; (3) Act in a collegial way; (4) Unconditional obedience is owed to God alone; (5) Work for regional solutions; and (6) Call for a council. The former colleague to Pope Benedict begins in a personal vein...
Joseph Ratzinger, now Pope Benedict XVI, and I were the youngest theologians at the Second Vatican Council from 1962 to 1965. Now we are the oldest and the only ones still fully active. I have always understood my theological work as a service to the Roman Catholic Church. For this reason, on the occasion of the fifth anniversary of the election of Pope Benedict XVI, I am making this appeal to you in an open letter. In doing so, I am motivated by my profound concern for our church, which now finds itself in the worst credibility crisis since the Reformation. Please excuse the form of an open letter; unfortunately, I have no other way of reaching you.
I deeply appreciated that the pope invited me, his outspoken critic, to meet for a friendly, four-hour-long conversation shortly after he took office. This awakened in me the hope that my former colleague at Tubingen University might find his way to promote an ongoing renewal of the church and an ecumenical rapprochement in the spirit of the Second Vatican Council.
Unfortunately, my hopes and those of so many engaged Catholic men and women have not been fulfilled. And in my subsequent correspondence with the pope, I have pointed this out to him many times. Without a doubt, he conscientiously performs his everyday duties as pope, and he has given us three helpful encyclicals on faith, hope and charity. But when it comes to facing the major challenges of our times, his pontificate has increasingly passed up more opportunities than it has taken:
Missed is the opportunity for rapprochement with the Protestant churches: Instead, they have been denied the status of churches in the proper sense of the term and, for that reason, their ministries are not recognized and intercommunion is not possible.
Missed is the opportunity for the long-term reconciliation with the Jews: Instead the pope has reintroduced into the liturgy a preconciliar prayer for the enlightenment of the Jews, he has taken notoriously anti-Semitic and schismatic bishops back into communion with the church, and he is actively promoting the beatification of Pope Pius XII, who has been accused of not offering sufficient protections to Jews in Nazi Germany.
The rest of the letter is here.
James Martin, SJ
Why, with the advantage of forethought, pick a prostitute for one illustrative example involving the ''humanization of sexuality''? The ''world's oldest profession'' has been around a lot longer than the Catholic Church and is not likely to die out or change behavior before the Church does.
Does it make a difference in the moral judgment, and why, if:
- the prostitute's customer is male or female?
- the person with whom the prostitute is interacting is spouse or customer?
- the prostitute is acting altruistically to avoid infecting others or selfishly to avoid becoming infected?
It is now well known that, for a healthy, fertile woman, the ''transmission of life'' is absolutely impossible about 80% or more of the time in every month, year, and decade. Human nature as God created it is usually contraceptive. Yet, the Church's requirement does not forbid conjugal acts during those intervals. The acts cannot ''remain open'', as required, since they aren't open in the first place. Major clarification is required, a la Fr. Rhonheimer. Informing the world is rather easy in the 21st century, given a clear message that is understandable by its intended recipients.
With some trepidation, I interpret much more cynically than you may, Father, the ''personal vein'' in which the letter begins. To me, the pompous subtext is clear: ''When my old colleague (see, I can call him that, since I'm the only person left in the world who's his intellectual rival), the Pope, invited me to have dinner with him, I was encouraged that he finally seemed to understand how right I've been about everything having to do with the Second Vatican Council. But since he hasn't seen the error of his ways every time I've written in to correct him and admonish him, I have no other choice than to assassinate his character and mangle his systems of thought with dramatic lies and exaggerations in a letter addressed, let's face it, not so much to you bishops, but to the Catholic public to whom it will be leaked and with whom I'll undoubtedly be much more popular.'' Maybe I'm being unfair here, myself, but even if I'm mistaking Kung's character (after all, I've never met him!), one thing is certain: in the absence of any meaty explanations or justifications of his claims, this angry little manifesto is thoroughly intellectually dishonest.
As a physician, I am sad that the leaders in our Church seem more interested in protecting their own jobs and the reputation of "Holy Mother Church" than in protecting the innocence of children. To think that the penalty for the priest is to be lowered to the lay state! What an insult to us lay people, especially since Vatican II acknowledged that all the faithful belong to the priesthood of Christ!
Yes, we need reform! I pray that the Bishops, and the Pope if he is willing, will call a Council to be held in Galilee, not in Rome! Galilee is where Jesus walked and taught and healed. I pray that the Council will be a gathering of all of the followers of Jesus, Protestants and Catholics, women and men, married and single. In future, I pray that there will be another international gathering in the Holy Land which will include Moslems, Jews, and Christians (and all others who are interested) to celebrate our belief in God and to give Him glory!
Thankyou, Fr. Hans Kung for your excellent recommendations and for not giving up on our Church. Thankyou, Fr. Martin and to all in the AMERICA staff for your honesty and concern for the problems in our Church which need to be addressed.
Sincerely,
Rosemary Eileen McHugh, M.D.
mchughrosemary@gmail.com
It is supremely ironic that one of the most urgent advocates for radical change of the pre-Vatican II Church (which had no sexual abuse crisis which we know of) is now begging its leaders to call another council to clean up one of the messes left in its wake. Of the two of them, Ratzinger is the only who has been able to admit that the period following Vatican II has been decidedly unfavorable for the Church. We may need another council, but Kung is the last person who should be calling for it given his track record of dissent and defiance.
We are at a crossroads. The Church has a government designed for the 16th through 18th centuries. This government is inacapable of facings the problems of the 21st, or even 20th centuries. The successful countries of Europe have all become democratic - either republics or constitutional monarchies -while the Catholic Church remains the last absolute monarchy. This monarchy will not survive for long. Either the church will fragment as it did in the Reformation or its governance will change to a more modern form. The change can be peaceful or violent, depending on how the pope responds, but the change is inevitable. I hope the pope will listen, for the sake our Church.
Aside from the ham handed attacks on Kung (e.g., "thoroughly intellectually dishonest," " he barely qualifies as a Christian") I didn't get a sense that his detractors on this site have actually read any of his work, just other blogs with short barbs. I remember reading Kung thirty years ago as an undergraduate and thinking, "Now this is theology for grown ups!"
Whether Kung is sincere in his love for the Church - a Church whose historical transmutations he has studied extensively and which he would like to say transmutated some more - is between him and God. I would hope that we can challenge Kung's theology, and perhaps point out the arrogance of a gesture like this one, without resorting to the tired conservative ''who's Catholic and who's not'' judgment calls.
(Oh, and Jeff, I was with you in parts of your first paragraph, but honestly, I detect more than a whiff of homophobia in your final salvo, which makes me a little uncomfortable...I'm sure you didn't mean anything by it, but it's one of the prejudices that progressive theology can perhaps be very helpful in freeing us from.)
Peace.
What if the sense of emergency attending the degree of self-monitoring required to know whether a "tiny hole" has formed just is the evil spirit entering?
I don't know whether Kung is a luminary of Catholic thought of the rank of Rahner, von Balthasar, et al. I haven't read enough of him to be able to say. I do think that some of his ideas are powerful, and having read a fuller, book-length treatment of his ecclesiology (called "Theology for the Third Millennium," or something like that), I can say that his willingness to study the Church's history (anchoring our pious abstractions in the concrete and time-tested lived experience of Catholics) is quite valuable. For instance, his long meditation on the figures of Luther and Erasmus as case studies of diametrically opposed ways of dissenting from the Church's teaching during a moment of historical crisis (one, dramatic and proud to the point of schism, the other, self-effacing to the point of abdicating his responsibility to be an effective and respected internal reformer) is, in my opinion, quite brilliant. (It's also touching; it's clear from the way he discusses the two figures that as much of an outsider as Kung must sometimes feel, he longs to remain within the Church.) This historical perspective could probably serve the modern Church quite well; if only Kung hadn't become so bitter somewhere along the line and begun settling for screeds such as the present letter!
I would think that some of the "ultra-Catholics" on this list would be more familiar with the prophesies of St. Malachy. No matter how you WANT reform to look - you have to admit that it is happening (unless you really think the world is about to end). More importantly, the Vatican is full of Malachy watchers and I can bet that most are running scared. They probably go into palpatations anytime the Pope rings up the Ecumenical Patriarch in Constantinople - since they know what is inevitable. Part of that inevitability is likely either an American national Church or an English linguistic Church. Such a Church will not long be able to resist most of the reforms called for by the laity - especially those concerning women.
Whistle in the dark all you want. Change is inevitable. The only question is will it happen because of the Pope (with the help of Father Kung) or in spite of him. My bet is on the former, which will be much to the chagrin of the more Catholic than art thou set.
There's already a lot of heat in the comments string here but, if I can add my two-cents, I guess the reason why some people are very supportive of Kung while others are vehemently against him is found in what Kung himself explains at length in his works such as ''Christianity'' (Eng. 1994) - the different paradigms that coexist in Catholicism. Paradigms are particular ''ways'' to view the world which we interiorly accept as correct and rarely question anymore. It is so difficult to understand, more so even, to talk with each other when we don't have a grasp of the whole (''whole'' here meaning the different ''grand paradigms'' that have become dominant in Catholicism and which still continuously coexist in the contemporary church).
What people could do better before they condemn each other is to withhold evaluation and judgement of the ''other'' first and take some time to learn better the ''big picture'' of Christian history in order to grasp that different people come from radically different places in their convictions and comments.
Coming from one who has professionally studied Kung, just let me say that I think Kung is one of the great theologians of our time who deeply loves the church more than many of us here.
http://www.firstthings.com/onthesquare/2010/04/an-open-letter-to-hans-kung
Kung is not the theological equal of Ratiznger, nor is he the equal of the Church's teaching office. His writings should be viewed with great caution.
I agree with the posts herein which call for, in world of Hans, a little less Kung and a lot more von Balthasar.
I suppose a humble person's criticisms of the Church might have more initial appeal, other things equal. Is there a particular way Kung lacks humility that is frustrating his reasoning? Does this lack of humility amount to not performing the act "religious submission of intellect and will" in a CDF-approved way? If so, is that a way of lacking humility that systematically distorts one's judgment of what will promote the common good of the church? Even if it did, would that justify the sense of alarm being voiced over the event of Kung's article being recommended as something to read? I have doubts. That's where I'm at.
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I may have had a bad experience with Ignatian stuff, but I'm only an n of 1. I apologize to you and to others who observed me being unfair to Ignatian stuff.
What a sad statement Fr. Jim, you gotta do better than that (tongue-in-cheek) and I hope you're doing something about it, because it seems from the open letter that Küng has forgotten enough theology and church history to the point of remembering nothing. Nothing authentically Catholic anyway.
I did not find the open letter "well worth reading," in any meaningful sense, except that it did make reading the following response (consistent with Nicholas's and Bill's comments) on the Ignatius Insight website thorougly enjoyable:
"Uh, that's the "Hans Küng Catholic Church," not "the Roman Catholic Church" See http://www.ignatiusinsight.com/index.asp
Fr. Jim, we know from the Spiritual Exercises of St. Ignatius that if we create even a tiny opening the evil spirit will enter. In this regard, any time I hear a Catholic (especially a priest, JMJ pray for us!) talking about how the Church needs to change, I can't help but think that a tiny opening has been created in that individual or priest, as the case may be. The truth of the matter is, as evidenced by no one better than Küng, that it's usually the person clamoring for the Chruch to change who needs to change himself. (Remember Henry VIII clamoring for the Church to change its stance on divorce? Now look at the Church of England, with no leadership, no authority, but in earnest finding its way back home to union with the One, Holy, Catholic, and Apostolic Church).
Let's not create any tiny openings by calling Küng's diatribe "well worth reading."
Carl Olson has a witty take on Kung's megalomania over at Ignatius Insight. Here is one funny excerpt:
"How touching that Kung is so concerned about the Catholic Church when he, by any fair measure, barely qualifies as a Christian, at least not in any traditional sense of the word (you know, as someone who believes in Jesus Christ, true God of true God, etc.). But the bottom line with Kung seems pretty clear to me: it's all about him and his popularity. "His later writings," notes Steichen, "especially his autobiography, My Struggle for Freedom, suggest that his pretentious rhetoric may not, after all, reveal a pathetic hunger for praise but rather a delusion of breathtaking arrogance. Mercifully, we have it on the highest authority that his audacity is doomed to failure." Rumor has it that Küng is still working on a three-volume, 2,153-page "My Letter to My God: My Under-Appreciated Struggle to Change the Divine, Save the Cosmos, and Bash Ratzinger" (the audio version, sources tell me, will feature Deepak Chopra, Maya Angelou, Barney, Matthew Fox, the living members of the Grateful Dead, and a 100-member gay men's choir led by Gene Robinson).
One need not read his utterly verbose collection of writings to know how far he has drifted from Catholicism. He may want to start his own Church at this point, given his indisputable "brilliance" - - putting aside his absurd contentions regarding Pius XII and Ratzinger's actions on the liturgy.
He is like a new Martin Luther. We have Lutherans and maybe some day we will have Kungites.
I haven't followed Kung much lately, and it wasn't my doing that his faculty to teach as a Catholic theologian was stripped from him. My point really is that it's amazing that someone who has urged such a defiant attitude toward authority for so long, is not presuming to lecture Rome on how to regain its moral authority. If it were not for his impressive sounding name (kind of like an English accent), no serious Catholic would view him as a luminary of Catholic thought - - however good a person he may be. We have so many others, Hans Urs Von Balthasar, de Lubac, Gilson, etc.
None of what I have said has anything to do with the current, sorry state of the Vatican bureaucracy and their autocratic method of appointing ineffectual bishops. Until the ultramontanist movement of the mid 1800's, bishops were typically chosen by their local communities and presented to the pope or metropolitan primate for approval and ordination. In the 1700's the voice of the local community was the nobility or the king; today it is the people through democratic election. Both methods are appropriate in their day; neither is more or less authentic or holy. The only method that is unholy is the current practice of Rome making all appointments and then moving bishops around to keep them detached from the communities they are supposed to be serving.
As I read what our bishops in America are saying and what is coming out of the curia in Rome, I cannot help but see that they have forgotten the story that was told in the beginning. If it were not so, how could they have responded so callously to the abuse scandal and how could they be so wrong on the health care legislation?
More of the same old rantings of a man who wanted to remake the Church in his own image and is upset that he didn't succeed. Sad and pathetic! We younger Catholics are tired of these "has beens" and are more interested in the Truth that Christ brings. I've seen the damage that the “progressives” (I'd say heretics in some cases) have done to the Body of Christ. Give us the Truth, not opinions and not deluded nightmares.
Juan
Isn't it a contradiction to be in touch with how obviously ridiculous Kung is while at the same time holding that the world is very dangerous because evil spirits are moving through ''tiny holes'' and taking people over by means of sneaky, deceptive people like Kung? If he's that slippery, then he'll fool you.
But you are not fooled. Or are you? Time to check your ''tiny hole'' again. Is it really closed? What if it only seems closed? Are you sure you checked correctly last time? Really sure? Fast. Check it. Come on, we're talkin' about demons here! Demons entering you! Demons entering Fr. Martin even, in Pete Lake's first comment. That's what the world's like? Let's hope Colbert's an exorcist. Hold me.
Are you familiar with the prophesies of St. Malachy? Are you aware that they have a tremendous following among the Curia? If not, let me explain. The current pope is the Glory of the Olive. Traditionally, this has been read to mean that his name will be Benedict (which came true), that he will unify the Church - especially with the East (given his relationship with the Ecumenical Patriarch of the Eastern Church, this is likely) and that he will convert the Jews (this is an unlikely pipe dream - although under his papacy, it is coming out that the lost tribes of Israel are actually the Romany people and that they are largely Christian). On the first point - who knows whether Benedict was a Malachy fan and his taking of this name was a self-conscious attempt to fulfil the prophesy. The second interpretation has more weight for this debate - since reunification with the East must be done in a matter which is true to history. Hans Kung and others have pretty much shown that Constantinople is the Ecumenical Patriarchy of all the Christian Churches, not Rome. The chief city of the empire - and hence the successor see of Peter, moved from Rome to Constantinople when the city was established. Rome became a western backwater. Unification must recognize that and the current scandal in the Roman Church pretty much takes away any bargaining power Rome had in the negotiation.
Of late, the E.C. has had to fend of critics of unity in the East who fear that a unified Rome will swallow it up. The Eastern model is for disunited unity, with national Churches. I would expect that Rome as part of the East will follow that model, although it may break along linguistic rather than national lines. For example, I expect there to be one to five English Churches (one African, one conservative in union with Peter the Roman, and one to three for North America and the British Islands - my preference and prediction being a single Patriarch seated in Galway, Ireland). Whatever patriarchy covers N. America will likely be a bit more innovative on issues regarding both women, the laity, the married and gays.
Whether you believe in Roman primacy or not, if you are aware of St. Malachy's next prophesy, you almost must regard the last pope as an anti-pope, since under his reign the terrible judge will return and destroy the city of seven hills (Rome). No Rome, no roman church. I suspect that Peter the Roman will be the leader of a rump faction that disagrees with Benedict's overtures to the East and their accomplishment. This could mean the end of time. I don't think the fate of the world revolves around the fate of the Roman Catholic Church. There is more to the Church Christ established than Rome.
"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)."
Please.
If you want to give the "Ignatian stuff" another try, you may want to pick up a copy of "A Pilgrim's Journey: The Autobiography of St. Ignatius of Loyola." It's a short little book and will give you an insight into the making of a great saint and the origins and purpose of The Spiritual Exercies, which you may then want to pursue later (preferably by way of a retreat, as opposed to just reading, but reading would work too).
Writing to our Pope, Kung says, ''Please excuse the form of an open letter; unfortunately, I have no other way of reaching you.''
''unfortunately, I have no other way of reaching you.''
If I was still in my grad school essay writing days, I could work with that. ''I have no other way of reaching you.''
Perhaps my experience is shaped by the futility I have experienced writing to Jesuit Superior General Adolfo Nicolas - who I have no other way of reaching.
I very deeply understand the immense problems in our church when our pastoral leaders build walls around themselves and make themselves unreachable. Why don't they just step down?
Using Fr. Nicolas as an example again, he wrote back only once, saying he asked the provincial to handle it. Then Fr. Nicolas ignored every single communication in which I told him the provincial did not handle it (and I had already tried that).
''I have no other way of reaching you.'' I understand why thousands of Catholics are walking away, when our pastoral leaders prefer to hide from us.