Today: a conversation with Number 399/57i. That’s the file number he keeps for life in the offices of the Inquisition. The 57 refers to the year it was first opened, 1957, the yearof his doctoral dissertation

Swiss theologian Hans Küng is probably the world’s leading Liberal Catholic thinker. He was just about to celebrate the 50th anniversary of his ordination to the priesthood when I visited him in his home in the German university city of Tübingen a few weeks ago.

Made Professor at Tübingen at the age of 32, Hans Küng’s famous book, ‘Structures of the Church,’ helped set the reform agenda for the Second Vatican Council. An opponent of the doctrine of infallibity, his licence to teach was revoked in 1979, but he was defended by the University and his contract upheld.

Hans Küng recently published the first volume of his memoirs, ‘My Struggle for Freedom,’ and it’s unputdownable . It tells the story of a young insider who knows when he’s right, and who is willing to take up a fight.
But I wanted to know whether it also the story of a very arrogant young man who suddenly finds the path he’s chosen is that of the outsider.

Hans Küng: Well first, I do not consider me as an outsider. I am a man of the vanguard if you want, but not an outsider. I am more in the middle of the church than many bishops, and I was not looking for conflicts. I quoted Jack Kennedy - I do not know how it is in correct English but the meaning was “Don’t look for conflicts, but if they are put on you, then try to settle them in a thorough way”. I don’t think I was ever arrogant, but I’m straightforward, that is true, and sometimes I’m blunt. I was always studying the things very carefully - until today I never have taken up a topic in public without having studied it - but when I have studied the issue, then of course I do not give up so easily.

Stephen Crittenden: The Second Vatican Council is right at the centre of this first volume of your memoir, and you tell the story of the Council being undermined right from the very beginning by the Roman Curia. And unlike many progressive people in the Catholic church, you’re critical of Pope Paul VI. You see him as a Curia man. Has the legacy of the Second Vatican Council gone on being undermined? Is the Curia perhaps less Italian and more international, but still just as powerful as ever?

Hans Küng: Well there is no doubt that the most important people in the Curia, they were opposed to the Second Vatican Council. That is not my invention, that is I think the evidence. And they tried from the beginning to hinder Pope John XXIII to have a real renewal. I think I was fair to all the Popes I met, Pius XII, John XXIII, Pope Paul VI, and I just tried to evaluate their problems. And I must say that of course, for all three Popes the Curia was a problem. But Pope Pious XII was in concordance to a great extent with the Curia; John XXIII by-passed it very often; and Pope Paul again was afraid of the Curia, and did not have the courage to make a thoroughgoing reform. The problem was that he wanted to have reform, but he used the cabinet of his predecessor, [which] was already against the reform, and so got into troubles. Personally I must say, Pope Paul - and I’m describing an audience I had with him - was very sympathetic. He had great sympathy for me personally. I was a young man, a young theologian, when he met me the first time; he was often on vacation in Switzerland; he knew about my work on the great Swiss Protestant theologian, Karl Barth; and I think he would have liked that I would have entered the curial service. But that was not possible under these circumstances, because to enter the Curia would have been, I would have sold my soul. And I would only have co-operated if it would have been a serious reform, but not to enter in the present system.

Stephen Crittenden: What about the Curia under the present Pope? Has the Curia under this Pope been working against the Second Vatican Council?

Hans Küng: Very definitely. It is obvious that they tried everything to turn the clock back. It is of course not any more possible, but they were using especially two methods: first, the appointments. You can observe all over the world a lot of curially minded bishops - some are competent, but a great deal are incompetent. There are even people like this Cardinal Groer of Vienna, and this other bishop in Austria,
who are a great scandal, and there are a lot of bishops who are appointed only according to party lines. It’s not theological competence, it’s not their spiritual depth, it’s not their knowledge, they are faithful to the Roman system.
And the second method is to publish again and again, documents which are not at all in accordance with the Council - which are quoting the Council, but always in a very selective way, and they try just to use the Council to publicise the Roman system.

Stephen Crittenden: Has the present Pope written too much?

Hans Küng: No, I don’t think he has written too much. He has not written all the good things a pope could write in such a position. He was most probably offended when I wrote an article, ‘One year John Paul II’, indicating that he never studied seriously New Testament exegesis, he did not study the history of dogma and theology. He is a man of what I would call the mediaeval, anti-reformation, anti-modern paradigm of the church, and he tried to convince the whole church to join him in re-establishing this mediaeval papacy, and to insist on the law of celibacy - everything which was practically introduced in the church in the 11th century in the Middle Ages. He did not succeed in that, but he blocked everything. And now we are just waiting and waiting, what would come afterwards.

Stephen Crittenden: One of the most interesting periods in the church’s recent history, for me, is the anti-Modernist crisis at the beginning of the 20th century. Does the anti-modernist crisis continue to this day, unresolved? Or, perhaps even more interesting, when this Pope dies, could we see the anti-modernist crisis break out all over again?

Hans Küng: The next election will certainly be very decisive, and there is no doubt that especially all these Cardinals from the Opus Dei, who are favourable for thIS secret organisation which is an authoritarian, Spanish organisation which has a great influence and which was supported heavily already by Karol Wojtyla when he was Archbishop of Krakow. And the whole question will be: will now the Catholic church be dominated again by a clique of people who is in this authoritarian organisation which is, as a matter of fact, living in a mentality of, I would say, the counter-Reformation, of anti-Modernism, or will we have enough bishops who still remember the Second Vatican Council and who see especially the terrible situation in which our church is in, in the present moment? If you see for instance that the Church of Ireland - I know that a lot of bishops and priests in Australia too, come from this beautiful and most constructive Ireland - I mean constructive in a way that they constructed a great deal of churches, especially in the Anglo Saxon world, and I admire very greatly these people, I was often there. But it’s terrible to see what happens to a Catholic country like Ireland, that this country, who was practically sending priests, hundreds and thousands of priests all over the world, they are practically lost now. They had in 1990, they still had 300 ordinations a year. Last year they had eight ordinations. Eight! As a matter of fact, also in other European countries, and this will happen also to other parts of the world, I’m sure also in Australia, practically the celibate clergy is dying out. And we have already in our German speaking countries, more or less half of the parishes who have not anymore a pastor. We are losing the Sunday Eucharist, all because we do not want to have ordained married men, and why we don’t want to have ordained women.

Stephen Crittenden: Now it seems to me that whatever else you say about John Paul II, he’s a great model priest, of a conservative kind, but he has spent this papacy shoring up the priesthood, and yet you’re talking about what we all know, which is that the priesthood is dying out.

Hans Küng: Well I would never question the good intentions of John Paul II. He was certainly a person who thought he can save the world, and he thought if he would preach this kind of Christianity, which is based on very conservative positions with regard to marital ethics, with regard to certain dogmas, with regard to Marian piety, with regard to pontifical absolutism, he really thought that he would convince the world. As a matter of fact, he has not achieved anything in all these matters, because the church is more divided than ever. And there is absolutely no hope now that the great part, even of Catholics, would follow in the controversial issues, the Pope.
So we have - as a matter of fact, he was working to a great extent for - a church of the façade, a church which in big manifestations is presenting the façade of being powerful, a healthy institution. But inside there is a lot of sickness, there is frustration, there is defeatism, and we are losing more and more the young generation, we are losing women, and the intellectuals. I don’t think that from the point of view of domestic policy this was a good papacy. I would agree that he preached the gospel for the poor, he was for human rights in the world. But all this was in blatant contradiction with what he has done in his own church, because he repressed human rights in the church, he repressed the rights of theologians and he reintroduced the Inquisition, he offended very often women because of his Marian piety, exalting the Virgin Mary as an example, and repressing women in the church discipline. So it is a very contradictory pontificate what we have now behind us, and it is just a question whether enough bishops see the extremely dangerous situation of the Catholic church and are electing now a man who would come back to the middle, who will not drift up to the right, but who would go on the way of the Second Vatican Council and resolve the problems we were not allowed to resolve in these days when the Council convened.

Stephen Crittenden: I always think one mark of a fine memoir is how well the author writes about other people. And your book is naturally filled with some very famous people, and there are some memorable sketches, and I would like to choose three if I may. The first is Pope Pius XII, and as a student in Rome, you saw him at very close quarters towards the end of his life. You describe him having his hand kissed by dignitaries and then turning to have his hands disinfected in a basin. You talk about his claim to have experienced a vision of Christ in 1954 and it’s actually one of the funniest comments of your book. You say it would have been the first time Christ had made an appearance since St Paul, and you suggest that as with St Paul, Christ’s words to Pius XII might have been ‘Pius, Pius, why are you persecuting me?’ I think that’s so wonderful!

Hans Küng: They were the words of Karl Barth.

Stephen Crittenden: Did Karl Barth say that?

Hans Küng: Yes, he said that. And you know, I tried also to tell the story how I was deeply impressed by the figure of Pius XII.

Stephen Crittenden: Well, I wanted to ask you whether as a young man watching from those close quarters, whether it seemed to you that you were looking at a Pope who had cracked up?

Hans Küng: ‘Cracked up’ means?

Stephen Crittenden: Gone crazy.

Hans Küng: Well, he was at the end really isolated. He did not even receive the curial cardinals sometimes, he had his own kitchen cabinet, it’s a little like as it is now. He had German Jesuits, the present Pope has Polish people around him, and it is of course always the danger of megalomania. If you see yourself simply adored by hundreds of thousands of people, you can really have the imagination that you are a vice-god on earth. And if you do not accept criticism, if you are eliminating people who are criticising you, if you will live in a palace, you know, in an artificial world, well, you see only the people down there in the Piazza di San Pietro, and you can feel a little like Caesar on the other side of the Tiber, looking at the people far away, you know, you think you are near to God and you see the people, very small people down there. You receive only people you like to see. He [Pope John Paul II] never for instance wanted to talk to me, he also didn’t want - the present Pope - to talk to Edward Schillebeeckx, or to the Latin American liberation theologians. He liked to talk to film stars or to boxers, but not to people who are, so to speak, in the loyal opposition of His Holiness. That makes it then very difficult to understand the reality of the present world and church.

Stephen Crittenden: The second person I want to ask you to speak about briefly is the great Protestant theologian, Karl Barth, who we’ve already mentioned. These days I think he’s often regarded as old-fashioned and rather harsh, but you paint a moving and gentle portrait of him as someone who is extremely generous to you, and you say that no Protestant theologian of the 20th century has greater authority because of his fight against nazism.

Hans Küng: Yes, he was fighting against nazism, and he was fighting also against some kind of evacuated liberalism we had in Germany just before World War I already. People who supported the First World War in Germany, who signed the petition to the Emperor to go to war etc., all this was for him very revelatory that this kind of liberal theology was lacking Christian substance. And I learned that you have to keep this centre, Jesus Christ at the centre of the church as the great message of the New Testament. Of course I would agree, and I have written it already, that we had of course to go forward. I was never a Barthian. Nevertheless he was a pillar of theology in the 20th century, and a pillar of a church which was not just comfortable, and he stood up whenever it was necessary.

Stephen Crittenden: You say that he was fascinated by the Papacy, repelled by its concrete form and practice, but fascinated by what you call ‘its tremendous possibilities’. What were those possibilities that he saw?

Hans Küng: Well he told me one day, and I’m quoting, that ‘I would have been happy to be Pope only one day’. Then he would have written certainly a document which is concentrated [on] what is really the essence of Christianity, but he would certainly also have ordered all these reforms he also found necessary. He was of course also convinced that the law of celibacy was very bad for the Catholic church, that the Pill cannot be an obstacle to your Christian faith, and he thought he could make so many definitions in one day that the church would not be the same as before.

Stephen Crittenden: The third person is Josef Ratzinger. Cardinal Ratzinger. Once a colleague of yours at the University of Tübingen, once a part of the reform movement at the second Vatican Council, later, as you say, the Grand Inquisitor of the Catholic church. You describe him as a ‘timid’ person, who was deeply affected by the student uprising of 1968.

Hans Küng: Yes. I think he was also a gentle person. And I was myself as the Dean of the Catholic Faculty of these years, responsible that he was called to Tübingen, I proposed him unico loco, as the only person who has to be taken into consideration, and we had a good relationship in this three years. We were both, as a matter of fact, very much under pressure by the student movements, not so much by our own students of theology, but by the political Left who entered our lectures and made troubles. But I think the difference was that he was wounded to a certain extent, in a way that he accepted to go away. Already in ’68 he left Tübingen again and went to Bavaria where it was more quiet, more Catholic, and he had already in mind certainly to enter the way of the hierarchy, and that was now a big difference. I never had this intention, and he started to see, so to speak, the church we have seen from below. Altogether. He started to see the world from above. And then everything looks a little different.

Stephen Crittenden: Was he essentially the architect of your downfall?

Hans Kung: No, I don’t believe that. He was certainly involved. He was certainly working behind the scenery, but I had of course a powerful enemy. I shall write this in the second volume, in the person of the Cardinal of Cologne, Höffner, and of course in the Curia people who thought you have to do something against him, he’s too influential, he has written too many books, and he does not correct his books as they wanted to have them corrected, etc. etc., and I think the main person was certainly Pope John Paul II who –

Stephen Crittenden: And not Ratzinger?

Hans Küng: And not Ratzinger. I think he really felt offended by my article I wrote, ‘One year John Paul II’, where I just was using the six points some famous theologians, among them, Yves Congar and others, we made before the Papal election - what are the criteria for a Pope? And I made, so to speak, a balance sheet, and that was partly good, and partly negative, but he was offended. I knew that, and he gave so to speak the green light to the Inquisition to act.

Stephen Crittenden: One thing that you and Josef Ratzinger have in common is that your theology is, both of you, firmly Christ-centred. You imply in your book that the 20th century Popes have not always been so orthodox. You talk about the new dogmas about Mary. Ratzinger stayed Pope John Paul’s hand on one occasion when he wanted to declare Mary ‘Co-redemptrix of the world’, so the story goes. The other thing was, I’ve always heard that John Paul wanted to make the doctrine on birth control de fide, and Ratzinger stopped that too. That Ratzinger, on this papacy, may have been a moderating influence in fact.

Hans Küng: I do not know what are the personal relations of Josef Ratzinger with the Pope in these matters. I only know he is of course intelligent enough to know that a definition, ex-cathedra, in the question of birth control or in a Marian dogma would have a tremendous repercussion and a tremendous reaction. Already Pius XII, in a time when the authoritarian Roman regime was still accepted, faced a great deal of opposition, and then Pope Paul with his Encyclical Humanae Vitae against the Pill - I think this was, as a matter of fact, the end of his universal credibility, everybody criticised him because of that. He was himself shocked by the reaction he got. And Ratzinger knew what would be the reaction if we would have these kind of definitions.

Stephen Crittenden: Well, indeed, your views about papal infallibility are well known. I wonder whether the Papacy has reached a point in fact in its history where although the Popes claim infallibility, they actually can’t exercise that power in a formal way in practice. That the only future for the Papacy now is going to be one of surrendering such claims quietly, rather like Queen Elizabeth II has quietly signed away pieces of the British Empire throughout her reign.

Hans Küng: Yes, it is true. But the British were able to have instead of the British Empire, to have something like a British Commonwealth, but the Catholic church is still the Roman Empire without having a Catholic Commonwealth. So despite the fact that the Pope is not any more using this power of infallible definition, he gives the impression to be infallible.

Stephen Crittenden: But do you agree with my point that maybe he can’t, it’s not possible to get away with formally using it?

Hans Küng: No, also in the Vatican there are enough people are realising that it is counterproductive, and that it does not help. He [Pope John Paul II], as a matter of fact, tried to forbid any discussion of the ordination of women, and they even published a document that this is the infallible doctrine, that God himself does not want to have the women ordained. But that was just not observed. I think that’s anyway the problem of this papacy - they make a lot of documents, they give orders and orders - it’s a little like the late emperors in the Roman Empire, they gave orders, but they were not executed. I remember Cardinal Bernardin of Chicago, who died too early, who told me, “Well in my Archdiocese of Chicago, we have practically a situation of congregationalism. They are just going to a conservative pastor if they are conservatives, they go to a liberal pastor if they are liberals, and they are going their own way.’ That is of course, not the idea of a church as I would see it. In the time of John XXIII –

Stephen Crittenden: You don’t see that as a good thing?

Hans Küng: I don’t think that this is a good thing. It would be a good thing to have a real community as we had it in the time of John XXIII, when we had much greater changes than now. And this polarisation is not a good thing. I hope that the next Pope will be able to reconcile the two fronts, and especially to reconcile the hierarchy with the people. The main schism today is between the Roman hierarchy and the people.

Stephen Crittenden: One of the tragic figures in your book is the French Dominican theologian Yves Congar. He was silenced of course like you - he was silenced in the 1950s - and you quote him writing in his journal almost in despair, ‘Will I always be without anyone and anything, like an orphan?’ How do you feel about your own banishment?

Hans Küng: Well I do not feel as an orphan, not at all. I am in a different situation as he was. First, he never spoke out so clearly in his lifetime. That was also for him certainly more difficult - he was not independent economically and socially. I had the great chance to be Professor of the University of Tübingen already at 32. I had, and I have, a safe position here at the University, and I spoke out. I did not only have to complain in my heart, and I was able to make it known that we have to follow another way than the official church hierarchy, and I make experience that according to all public opinion polls, in Switzerland, in Germany, but also in America, and I’m sure also in Australia, the greatest part of Catholics are with me and my friends in the controversial issues. So I do not feel lonely.

Stephen Crittenden: On the other hand though, I think it’s true that your detractors say Hans Küng is lonely, he wants to be welcomed back, and that in the last few years he’s made signs that he would like to be welcomed back into the family, if you like.

Hans Küng: Well I always gave signs that I am able to dialogue and that I’m not at all obstinate, but I am in the family. As I said, I’m much more in the family than many bishops especially as many curial people. And I think to have rehabilitation is the wish of many, many million Catholics who have read my books, who are in sympathy with me, especially in the countries who have heard my lectures. And it would certainly be a sign that the Catholic church would come back to the Second Vatican Council, to all the things I was fighting for. It’s not for me personally - that I feel marginalised – they were just not able to marginalise me. and I have a more powerful voice than ever, whether some Catholics are listening to it or not.

Stephen Crittenden: Hans Küng, it’s been wonderful talking to you, thank you for being a guest on The Religion Report.

Hans Kung: Thank you, Stephen.

Stephen Crittenden: Theologian Hans Küng. And his book, ‘My Struggle for Freedom’ is published by Continuum.