Sometimes you need to catch your breath when a Vatican official’s speaking echoes a theologian’s writings. Which way is this going to go? Not long ago, the Vatican secretary of state, Cardinal Pietro Parolin, echoed a 50-year-old passage from a book by … wait for it … Swiss theologian Hans Küng. Speaking on Spain’s church-owned Read more
Hans Küng, the contentious Roman Catholic theologian who died at 93 on April 6, once explained his combative nature by pointing out that he was Swiss. “I come from the land of William Tell and we weren’t brought up to be subservient,” he said. “Why should we always crawl? Standing tall suits a theologian too.” Read more
Swiss theologian Hans Küng says Pope Francis has set no restrictions on a request for a free discussion on the dogma of papal infallibility. But Fr Küng is refusing to release the text of a letter he said he received from Pope Francis on the subject last month. The theologian cited the “confidentiality that I Read more
Since Pope Francis took office in March, almost everything he has said and done indicates that he is bent on carrying through a thorough reform of the Roman Catholic Church, beginning with the Vatican itself. Scarcely a month after taking office, he created an international group of eight cardinals to advise him on reform of Read more
Rebel theologian Hans Kung, who at the age of 85 is suffering from Parkinson’s disease, has revealed he is considering seeking help to take his own life. In the final volume of his three-part memoirs, he says he has macular degeneration as well as Parkinson’s disease. He will soon be blind, and can hardly manage Read more
Who could have imagined what has happened in the last weeks? When I decided, months ago, to resign all of my official duties on the occasion of my 85th birthday, I assumed I would never see fulfilled my dream that — after all the setbacks following the Second Vatican Council — the Catholic church would Read more
In a recent book of the same title, Can the Church Be Saved? (2012), this question was posed by Swiss-German Hans Küng, one of the best known and prolific theologians in the Catholic fold. Along with his colleague from the University of Tübingen, Joseph Ratzinger, he enthusiastically advocated for a renewal of the Church. Küng Read more
The Pope has been calling for unity since the beginning of his Pontificate and in the last Chrism Mass he dealt with the issue of the disobedience of Austrian priests belonging to the Pfarrer-Initiative movement. Yet it is Benedict XVI himself who is being accused by his lifelong dissenting colleague, Hans Kueng, of “provoking” disobedience. Read more
Famed theologian Fr. Hans Kung has called for a “peaceful” revolution by world Catholics against the absolutism of papal power. He made the call in a video message on June 10, the first evening of a conference of the American Catholic Council in Detroit. “I think few people realize how powerful the pope is,” Kung said, Read more
According to theologian Hans Kung, the Catholic Church is seriously ill, possibly terminally, and only an honest diagnosis and radical reforms will cure it. Introducing his new book “Can the Church Still Be Saved?”, Kung argues that the malady of the church goes beyond recent sexual abuse scandals. According to him, the church’s resistance to Read more