A year after Pope John Paul II was elected pope, Hans Kung's permission to teach as a Catholic theologian was withdrawn by the Vatican, to the huge dismay of his readers around the world. The University of Tubingen, where he had been professor of Catholic Theology since 1960, promptly gave him a personal chair in Ecumenical Theology and confirmed him as director of its Institute for Ecumenical Research.
Since then, Kung has continued to write and lecture and has remained in his own words, "a Catholic priest in good standing". His latest book, The Catholic Church: A Short History, as well as being a masterful synthesis of extensive research written by an ecumenical theologian of first rank, is a remarkable example of sustained historical writing.
The reader is tempted to open at the section dealing with the summoning of Vatican Two in 1962 to the end of the century, 26 pages of lucid commentary on the most significant pope of the 20th century, Pope John XXIII, the council he called and the aftermath of reactionary defensiveness on the part of the Roman Curia. He writes with critical acumen about the faltering leadership of Pope Paul VI and describes Pope John Paul II as the most "contradictory" pope of the century, who "with his charismatic radiance and the acting talent which he has preserved from his youth, gave the Vatican what the White House would soon also possess with Ronald Reagan", charm, the gift of communicating whatever he wished, the use of symbolic gestures and the aura of sportsmanship.
However, the wise reader will begin at the beginning, that is with the chapter that affirms the proclamation of the Kingdom of God by Jesus Christ, whom his followers perceived was the long-awaited Messiah. Jesus did not found a church in his lifetime and Kung proceeds to investigate his own bold question: did Jesus of Nazareth found a church at all? The rest of the book is his answer. Already in his preface he has warned his reader that his short history has a three-fold purpose: to supply basic information about the complex development of the Catholic Church; to undertake a critical stocktaking of 20 centuries of the Catholic Church; and to issue a concrete challenge for initiating reform in the Church's direction for the present and future.
Kung submits that the Church was not founded by Jesus but its foundation was an acknowledgment of Jesus as the Messiah. With enviable economy, he traces the development of the Church from its simple Jewish beginnings in Jerusalem, where Peter was leader, to its ascendancy in Rome after the martyrdoms of Peter and Paul there. The break between Jews and Christians occurred as early as 70 AD. The first use of the word "Catholic Church", meaning "whole" is attributed to Ignatius of Antioch at the beginning of the 2nd century. The division between laity and clergy followed quickly and with the Hellenization of Christian thought the invention of theology as a science became associated with male specialists.
Kung's swift narrative is enlivened by scintillating studies of pivotal milestones in the spread of the Catholic Church. The contribution of Augustine (354-430), with his interpretation of the Trinity, his doctrine of grace and his notion of original sin with its connotations of sexual concupiscence, was central to the self-understanding of the Catholic Church, which he pitted as the City of God against the earthly state, the City of Man.
It was, Kung claims, "the Augustinian distinction between `objective office and subjective holder', who could be quite unworthy, that allowed the papal institution to survive in the first millennium" and, one supposes, permitted it to declare papal infallibility by the end of the second millennium. Within the Catholic Church, Hans Kung has been the strongest critic since Lord Acton in 1870 of the consequences of the papal claims to infallibility, actually condemned by a previous pope and revived by Pope Pius IX in the First Vatican Council. Kung's critical scrutiny of his later successor, Pope Pius XII, and his attitude to the Jewish Holocaust places the reader as judge and advocate at the bar of history.
Was the Second Vatican Council, 1962-5, the "irrevocable turning point" Kung claims, a paradigm shift of vast proportions which will continue to change the expectations of what membership of the Catholic Church means for men and women? Time will tell. This small volume is indispensable as a reference tool. It can also be read as a personal odyssey of a great contemporary theologian who reminds us that as humans we institutionalise our best values, and then proceed to corrupt them by the misuse of power. One of the lessons of his study of the Catholic Church is that some institutions, such as parliaments, law courts, universities and probably he would claim, the Catholic Church, have an inbuilt principle of stability that survives both the corruption of power and poor leadership and, somehow, manages to bestow on us mortals systems of values and beliefs that make a chaotic world meaningful.
Margaret Mac Curtain is a historian and a member of the Dominican Order