PAPAL INFALLIBILITY: KUNG'S BRUSH WITH ROME
Schalk, Adolph
PAPAL INFALLIBILITY RUNG'S BRUSH WITH ROME ADOLPH SCHALK Was the monitum a slap on the wrist? The long-awaited declaration by the Sacred Congregation of the Faith against the well-known Swiss...
...These declarations have refuted nothing that I have theologically established," the embattled Kiing said in an interview on West German TV...
...I will not tolerate," he has said, "being prevented from pursuing my theological service to my fellow man...
...He squirms whenever he hears of using machine parts and cosmetics or a plexiglass chalice at an experimental Mass...
...One evening after final exams I was finally able to release pent-up tensions at a party where I met a pretty coed and asked her where she lived...
...Others say the same thing, meaning it as a criticism...
...The Congregation knows only too well that a severe disciplinary measure against Kung would have unleashed an international furor and possibly even caused serious division in the Church...
...Another theologian might be called a Pentecostaiist in the Roman . Catholic Church...
...The proceedings against Kung, who had served as peritus for the German bishops participating in the Second Vatican Council, were prompted by two of his books, The Church (1967) and Infallible...
...If he is regarded as avant garde, then not as a maverick and always as the Christian community's loyal adherent...
...Work is part of his secret...
...He wishes to restore not destroy, to recover not reject, to renew not abolish...
...He was simply the one to have taken them up and to have put them up for discussion...
...23, 1974) was driven to resignation from his post as theology professor at the University of Fribourg by the restrictions imposed on his teaching on sexual morality...
...Indeed, the simplicity, clarity and forceful style that characterize most of Kting's works account to a large extent for his immense popularity...
...It is believed that Archbishop Jerome Hamer, the Faith Congregation's executive secretary, is pressing for sterner measures against Kung...
...The former Dominican Stephan Pfurtner (Commonweal, Aug...
...He charged that he was never given the right to examine the files, of his case and that the Congregation secretly appointed the Benedictine Father Magnus Lohrer as his defender without his knowledge or consent...
...In his book Kung stresses that he regards his theology not as the work of an "outsider" but of one "writing in solidarity with his community, bound to its great tradition, obliged to its leaders and teachers...
...He has repeatedly assured Franjo Cardinal Seper, director of the Sacred Congregation for the Faith, that he would gladly withdraw his theses if good reasons for so doing were demonstrated...
...defined by the Council of Florence (1438-45) was completely annulled by Vatican II, which declared that salvation is open to all men everywhere...
...This is stressed throughout his newest book, Christ Sein (Being a Christian), which has been No...
...Kting's writings are often dismissed as "too journalistic" (and hence implying superficiality) by theologians blissfully unaware that their own writing as often as not sheds more obfuscation than light...
...But in the end the product is entirely his...
...The long-awaited declaration by the Sacred Congregation of the Faith against the well-known Swiss theologian, Father Hans Kiing, plopped on February 20th, not like a bombshell but like an egg shell...
...Why,' she said, astonished, 'in the same boarding house you do!'" Another false impression about Kung is his alleged aloofness from social issues...
...10 and 11) and all the more a possible conviction ensuing from such proceedings, contribute to an intensified polarity in our Church, endanger the credibility of ecclesiastical authority and put an added burden on the ministerial office and on ecumenical cooperation...
...The declaration of the Roman Faith Congregation is rather a public admission that the secret proceedings against me have proven to be unfeasible and now had to be discontinued...
...And he revolts against a Mass text which might read, "Jesus, on the eve of his liquidation...
...The Conference of German Catholic Bishops, who were the ones to be entrusted with the release of the communique announcing the Faith Congregation's monitum at their annual meeting in Bad Honnef, for a long time were indecisive in passing judgment on Kung's works...
...Meanwhile the Swiss bishops have publicly supported the Vatican admonition...
...But what is to stop them from harassing lesser-known theologians who can be circumscribed with impunity...
...If there is a word to describe Kting's theology it is restorative, not progressive, and it must above all be based on sound scholarship...
...Kung insists that in all the years of the investigation procedure he was never granted the privilege of appointing his own counsel for the Rome hearings, which he flatly refused to attend for this reason...
...Kung was backed by the Tubingen canon law professor J. Neumann, who condemned the secret proceedings of the Faith Congregation (which has yet to live down the reputation of its historic predecessor, the Inquisition), without the right of self-defense, as a "modernized inquisition" in an article in the West German newsweekly Der Spiegel, entitled, "As in Moscow...
...You can depend on it-every word he published, he writes himself...
...His seminars are studded with such burning topics as liberation movements, counter-culture, Zen Buddhism, Catholic Pentecostalism, Freud, Jung, Max Weber, racism, abortion, neo-Marx-ism, minorities...
...But there is in effect very little the Congregation can do...
...After studying the infallibility book for six months they commented laconically, "Several fundamental elements of the Catholic understanding of Faith and the Church are not upheld in this book...
...And this, it seems to me, has very much to do with the question of infallibility...
...The questions raised by Professor Kung are not simply problems which he himself created...
...We are both working toward the same goal...
...The declaration admonished him and his followers to stop teaching on the disputed points, and critically to review both the method and content of their theology and to propagate the "true doctrine" of the Church...
...Just to give one example: The doctrine of the unattainability of eternal life for pagans, Jews and heretics solemnly adolph schalk, an American journalist living in Switzerland, is the author of The Germans (Prentice-Hall...
...It is difficult to understand just how the Congregation is able to define "true doctrine" so clearly, and on what basis it proceeded against Kung...
...The American Michael Novak once wrote a book review of Kting's The Church with the comment that he did not see how one man could have done it...
...Kting...
...Several months ago, the president and vice-president of the Swiss Bishops' Conference, Most Rev...
...That is putting it mildly," one student said...
...An Inquiry (German original, 1970...
...And traditional ecclesiastical morality in turn is related to the authority of the teaching office...
...Kung rejoined that they had been "deceived" in Rome and that their statement was "seriously misleading" to the Swiss public...
...But throughout the centuries this rule has in fact undergone frequent and even drastic alterations...
...Such inquisitorial proceedings contradict the Gospel, human rights and the spirit of the 'Holy Year of Reconciliation...
...What good," he says, "does it do to ask others to do something about overpopulation, if we as Christians are not prepared first of all to demand of the Church that it clarify its own thinking on the matter...
...My concern is to proceed from the center of pristine Christian thought and proceed outwards...
...This in turn is typed and discussed night after night with his assistants and students, who act as his sounding board...
...The last thing he wants is to propagate a "new" kind of Christianity...
...at the same time rigorously curtails this freedom within its own domain...
...Or, they can suspend or excommunicate him...
...Of all the criticism Kting received on that book," one of his former students has recalled, "that one really got him mad...
...The mere mention of 'theology of revolution,'" another Kting student has observed, "will drive him up the wall...
...It completely avoided anything suggesting excommunication or any other disciplinary measure, such as prohibition to write or publish further works, and did not even ask him to recant those theses which it admonished him to avoid henceforth...
...Hans Kung can be called a Reformed theologian in the Roman Catholic Church and I mean that as a compliment...
...Kung's close friend and mentor, Karl Rahner, S.J., in a bristling review of the infallibility book in the Jesuit monthly Stimmen der Zeit charged Kung with contradicting Catholic theology in its entirety "at least since the Reformation...
...And precisely here is the great danger of the Church, that it isolates itself at once from both God and man because it has not only fallen behind the times but behind its mission...
...The question of overpopulation is related to birth control, the question of birth control is related to traditional ecclesiastical teaching and traditional Catholic morality...
...In the main, observers regard the kid glove character of the monitum as an overwhelming victory for the controversial dogma professor and ecumenist at West Germany's Tubingen University...
...He has been called everything from a dangerous radical to a modern Luther tidying up the unfinished business of the Reformation...
...From early morning until late at night on his non-class days, he will spend incredibly long hours writing and rewriting the text of a book chapter or article in long-hand...
...The chief thesis under fire is Kung's claim that no papal pronouncement is totally free from the possibility of error but that the pope's authority is best described as "indefectible"- i.e...
...In a joint statement read over Vatican Radio the two bishops said they were told Kung had been informed he could bring his own defense counsel with him and that he had in his possession all the pertinent documents...
...Only two options are open to them...
...After a lapse of time they could point to Kung's failure to take the monitum seriously as a justifiable argument to penalize him severely...
...Institutional churches may still officially hold hard and fast beliefs, but the movements within the churches are cutting across all confessional frontiers and destroying confessionalism...
...Hans Kung defies easy classification...
...Others may find it best to work first from the periphery to the center...
...One can no longer say he believes in such-and-such because he is a member of such-and-such a confession...
...He thus was spared the fate of other theologians who were given the hard-line treatment just months earlier...
...But for Kung all social reform will come to naught if in the end man loses sight of his spiritual destiny...
...Ironically, he once gave a copy of Kung's book The Church to a friend as a present back in the days when Kung was not yet enfant terrible at the Vatican...
...Being a Christian is not primarily a matter of Christian teaching or doctrine but Christian conduct, being, implementation the business of Jesus is the business of God in the world...
...The real danger now is that dust will be allowed to settle on the Faith Congregation's investigation of Kung's works and that the inquisitorial practices of this and countless other cases will continue unchecked...
...Many of Kting's confreres and students in Tubingen regard him, if anything, as downright conservative...
...This admonition," he said emphatically, "in no way reflects on the overall integrity of Professor Kung as a priest and theologian...
...in some respects he is a Neanderthal Christian...
...And Father Karl Rahner's successor at the University of Innsbruck, Jesuit Father Franz Schupp, was condemned for his interpretation of the creation...
...After investigating Kung's works for nearly seven years, the Congregation singled out Kiing's widely-discussed opinions on the dogma of infallibility of the pope, on the Church and on the Eucharist...
...The unflappable Father Kung has made it publicly known that the "praise-with-faint-damnation" censure by the Faith Congregation will make absolutely no difference whatever regarding his freedom to teach according to his conscience...
...Professor Gustav Ermecke of the University of Bochum categorically stated that Hans Kung "is no longer Catholic and cannot be regarded as such...
...In news stories Kting is usually tagged "progressive," but even this word requires elaboration...
...she will end in a crisis...
...Indeed, the mildness of the present monitum is largely attributed to the intervention of the German bishops, notably Julius Cardinal Doepfner, Archbishop of Munich and chairman of the German Bishops' Conference...
...2 bestseller (next to Solzehnitsyn's Archipel Gulag II) on the German market for months...
...But Jesus is so totally concerned about man because in the first place he is concerned about God's plan in the world...
...They can withdraw the missio canonica, a priest's permission to teach theology...
...But they do sometimes leave the highly unjustified impression that his writing flows as easily from his typewriter as water from a spring...
...One lay theologian recalls this incident: "Kung drove us so hard that I was totally oblivious to everything else but theology...
...The Congregation justifies its action by stressing the regula fidei, rule of faith, the body of Catholic truths supposedly unchanged and unchangeable, with whose guidance the Congregation claims to distinguish between true and false teaching...
...So you see, by being concerned with infallibility, I am also concerned with the Third World...
...What Kung has going for him more than anything else is his impeccable reputation as a devoted priest and loyal son of the Church...
...If the truth be known, Hans Kting eschews every form of free-wheeling adventurist theology...
...rather they affect a wide public...
...Cardinal Doepfner, as he read the statement containing the Faith Congregation's moni-tum at a press conference, was downright apologetic...
...The problems such questions evoke can only be solved in an open dialogue, and not by a mere unilateral show of power...
...Then the diocesan synod of Basel on June 16, 1974, referring to the above resolutions, passed the following decree: "Such proceedings, which are not in accordance with these conditions, and thereby not in accordance with human rights (UN Charter, Art...
...Albert van den Heuvel, an official of the Dutch Reformed Church and former communications director at the World Council of Churches, sees Kting this way: "Confessionalism is dead...
...In so doing, they are in effect contradicting the recommendations which they adopted at the General Swiss Synod in February 1974 in regard to the teaching office and theological research: "In any case the one concerned ought to have the right at doctrinal proceedings to choose his own defense and to inspect all records...
...Reporters inevitably raise the question of laicization or formal withdrawal from the Church in their interviews with Kung, to which he always replies with a firm, unequivocal, "No...
...At most he would have to give up teaching seminarians...
...True enough...
...But such drastic steps would surely create more problems for the Congregation than they could solve...
...it is the Church as a whole which is upheld in truth despite occasional lapses into error in particular instances and by particular individuals...
...We are both working toward the same goal...
...Kung works like a colony of ants...
...It has become fashionable today that Jesus' greatest concern is man...
...Some observers even see in the mildness of the Faith Congregation admonition an international tactic to slap a heavier disciplinary measure against Kung at some later date...
...Lohrer, in fact, is himself progressive and pro-Kung, but there is a principle at stake...
...And the same holds true in reverse...
...In addition, more than 20,000 Swiss lay Catholics signed a petition to the Congregation stating that KUng be treated with justice and impartiality...
...An earlier declaration issued by the Faith Congregation in 1973, without mentioning Kung by name, Mysterium Ecclesiae, warned that "whoever professes such opinions, unless he retracts them, finds himself automatically outside the Church...
...challenges the infallibility doctrine not because it is too orthodox but, rather, because it is not orthodox enough...
...Nestor Adam of Sion and Most Rev...
...He has of course taken great pains to show that he takes very seriously the Congregation's admonition critically to review both the method and content of his teaching and writing...
...Much of the credit for the softened stand may also be attributed to the joint appeal made by 1,350 theology professors from more than 53 countries that the Holy Office drop proceedings against Kung and discuss the issue on a scholarly level in a context of "freedom of theology...
...It is a highly questionable sense of justice when a Church demands for itself religious freedom from nations and...
...Wherever the Church exercises power over men instead of serving them, wherever her institutions, laws and teachings become an end in themselves...
...Cardinal Seper, according to the respected progressive Swiss monthly Offene Kirche, reportedly once observed, "There is nothing in the Gospel about human rights...
...Anton Haenggi of Basel (Kung's "home" bishops) took off for Rome in Kung's behalf...
...But since Kung enjoys tenure at the University of Tubingen, a secular institution, he cannot be dismissed...
Vol. 102 • May 1975 • No. 5
