Obituaries

Hans Küng obituary: Modernising priest the Vatican could not tame

Given a choice between silence or uneasy internal exile, he would not bite his tongue

Küng in 1968. He did not like to use the title ‘Father’, and often preferred suits to clerical garb. Photograph: Getty

Thu Apr 22 2021 - 14:52

Born: March 19th, 1928
Died: April 6th, 2021

The Catholic priest and theologian Hans Küng, who has died aged 93, was only 11 months younger than Pope Emeritus Benedict XVI. For three years in the mid-1960s the two worked harmoniously together at the University of Tübingen in southwest Germany; Küng had recruited Fr Joseph Ratzinger, as he then was. But in terms of their views on the church of which they were members, they were centuries apart, Küng remarked in 2013. Benedict, by that time Küng’s boss, was, he said, “living intellectually in the Middle Ages”.

There are some Vaticanologists who like to speculate that, had things worked out differently, it might have been the clever, charismatic, engaging Küng who ended up in charge at the Vatican rather than the shy, unworldly, donnish Ratzinger. In 1962, just eight years after being ordained, Küng had sufficiently impressed to be named by Pope John XXIII as a peritus (expert adviser) at the landmark Second Vatican Council, which over the next three years set about the task of reforming the church.

Historians of the gathering later judged that, despite his relative youth and lack of seniority, Küng was influential in shaping its final statements that sought to bring Catholicism into the modern world. While the council was in progress, he was appointed to the newly created chair of dogmatic and ecumenical theology at Tübingen, and also became the first director of the university’s institute for ecumenical research; before that he had been a professor of fundamental theology there (1960-63).

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The need for Catholicism to build bridges and equal relationships with other churches and faiths was one of the keynote themes of the council. To that end, working with the young Ratzinger, he founded the journal Ecumenical Studies. But the high hopes created by Vatican II were quickly dashed. In 1968 Küng took a dim view of the insistence of Paul VI, John’s successor, that all “artificial” contraception (that is, anything that worked) was sinful. The pope, it was said, had previously tried to tame Küng by offering him a post in the Vatican. He declined. It might have been the first step on a ladder to the top, but he had more about him than that. The gap between Küng and Rome widened.

Fallible pope

In 1971 his book Infallible? An Inquiry dismissed the official teaching (though only since 1870, Küng pointed out) that in certain matters of faith and morals the pope could speak infallibly. It resulted in an eight-year wrangle with the Vatican’s Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith that he described as akin to being targeted by the Inquisition. In 1979, under the relatively new and theologically conservative Pope John Paul II, Rome withdrew Küng’s licence to teach theology at a Catholic university.

It was undoubtedly a blow. The decision was widely criticised. More than 1,000 students held a candlelit vigil at Tübingen, while the Church of England and the pan-Protestant World Council of Churches expressed serious concern at the implications of Rome’s actions on inter-church discussions. The Vatican, though, would not change its mind, so the authorities at Tübingen had to remove Küng’s chair from the Catholic faculty there and put it, as well as the ecumenical institute he headed, under the jurisdiction of the university senate.

By this means he continued to teach there until his retirement in 1996. For the rest of his life, his martyrdom on the altar of an intransigent church leadership elevated Küng into the voice of the many Catholics (in some surveys, the majority of them in the West) who remain within the fold but cannot in good conscience follow the official line opposing female priests, married priests, sex outside marriage and same-sex relationships.

Though he never liked to use the title Father, and eschewed clerical garb in favour of well-cut suits, Küng continued to serve as a priest within the church. The extent of his influence is hard to measure, but in a recent interview the comedian Frank Skinner quoted Küng’s remark that “the church is on the road to truth but goes down cul-de-sacs on the way” as part of the reason he remains a practising Catholic.

“For many Christians,” Küng’s biographer, the British journalist Robert Nowell, wrote, “perhaps especially for those not in communion with Rome, there was always something too good to be true about Hans Küng. He combined the very qualities that many of the Catholic Church’s detractors have regarded as totally incompatible: a passion for truth and loyalty to Rome, an open-minded willingness to accept the fruits of critical inquiry, and adherence to what from the outside was seen as a closed dogmatic system.”

Intellectual abilities

Küng was born in the town of Sursee, northwest of Lucerne in Switzerland, the oldest of seven children, two of whom were boys. He was named after his father, a shoe merchant; his mother, Emma (nee Gut), was a farmer’s daughter. At the age of 11, he felt called to the priesthood and, he recalled in his 2002 memoir My Struggle for Freedom, thereafter stopped sitting next to his girlfriend on the train to school, having previously kissed her just once.

He studied at the Gregorian University in Rome, where his intellectual abilities were quickly recognised during his training. The two subjects he chose for his thesis – the atheistic humanism of Jean-Paul Sartre (at that time on the church’s index of forbidden books) and the theology of the Swiss Protestant theologian Karl Barth – were an early sign of his broad perspective on faith.

Ordained in 1954 in St Peter’s, he did further academic work before spending 18 months in parish work in Lucerne. Propelled into the spotlight by the Second Vatican Council, the photogenic Küng (he also drove a sports car) undertook international lecture tours and attachments to various theological institutes in the US. While there, he was invited to the White House to meet President John F Kennedy, the first Catholic holder of the post.

In 1968, at the height of the Europe-wide student protests, Küng and Ratzinger parted company, with the latter so unsettled by the unrest that he retreated to a more conservative university. By the time they met again, over lunch at the papal summer villa at Castel Gandolfo in the summer of 2005, it was at the invitation of the new Pope Benedict XVI. John Paul II had refused more than a dozen times to see Küng, but Ratzinger was keen to signal that the church under his leadership could be a bigger tent than before.

Does God exist?

It was not, however, big enough to accommodate Küng, whose interests had grown considerably wider since his licence had been removed. His literary output was always prodigious, with more than 50 titles to his name, but after 1979 he was increasingly drawn to look beyond his own backyard, with studies of Islam, Mozart, the relationship between science and religion, and the biggest question of all for those in his line of work: whether God exists. On his retirement in 1996, he established the Stiftung Weltethos/Global Ethic Foundation at Tübingen to promote co-operation and dialogue between the faiths around the world.

Despite the impression that this self-confident, clever and ever so slightly vain priest may have given, Küng was not one of nature’s rebels. His chosen approach would have been to work from within, but the Catholic Church in his heyday was intolerant of such dissenting voices among its priests. If the choice was silence or uneasy internal exile, he was not going to bite his tongue.

When challenged about his maverick role in the history of modern Catholicism, he remained fond to the end of quoting one of his heroes, Pope Gregory the Great: “If scandal is taken as the truth, then it is better to allow scandal to arise than to abandon the truth.” – Guardian

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