An inveterate rattler of cages, Hans Küng spent more than half a century calling for a grass-roots revolution in the Catholic Church. Even his last book, Can We Save the Catholic Church? (2013) published when Küng was 85, exhorted the faithful to rebel against papal authority.
It was as if he was addicted to controversy. At 51, his licence to teach theology was removed by Pope John Paul II after he had repeatedly attacked the idea of papal infallibility, the teaching that when speaking on faith or morals, a pope cannot be in error. A letter denouncing Küng was read out in the pulpit of every church in Germany.
He nearly had a breakdown, but critics later suggested he enjoyed the publicity. Küng did, after all, keep a two-metre high statue of himself in his garden, and knew how to generate a media storm such as when in 2013 he announced he wished to die via euthanasia, which is against Catholic teaching, at the Dignitas clinic in Switzerland.
Worldwide, he was esteemed for his 50-odd well-researched and bestselling books on Christianity, Catholicism and world religions. Never diffident, he did not confine his opinions to theology: when Tony Blair entered the Iraq War, Küng wrote to him to say his collaboration with George W Bush was “a historical failure of the first order”. Blair replied via a hand-written note, thanking Küng but saying his views on Iraq were made according to his own conscience rather than a desire to please America. Küng also said Blair’s conversion to Catholicism was “a mistake” and that he should have used his role as a public figure to reconcile the Anglican and Roman Catholic churches.
Küng was a dapper figure who wore tailored suits and ties rather than dog collars. His appearance seemed to reflect his unorthodox views and made him an international media star. “Call me just plain Hans Küng,” he would say, before adding that the title “Father” was not used in his homeland. He could be wry about his origins. When nervously asked once in America what language he was intending to deliver his lecture in he replied: “German will be easiest for me; English for my audience. But perhaps I should speak in Latin, so that they can understand every word when it is reported back to Rome.”
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For those of a liberal disposition, Küng was a prophet, a world-class theologian who from his hill-top home in Germany bravely campaigned for a more open Church and spoke out about endemic corruption. He not only questioned the Church’s opposition to birth control, abortion and homosexuality he also called for an end to the vow of celibacy by priests and equated Catholicism with communism. “Are not both absolutist, centralist, totalitarian — in short, enemies of freedom?” he asked.
For conservatives, he was simply a heretic and “the biggest threat to the Catholic Church since Martin Luther”. Some wondered why, given his views, he was allowed to remain a priest at all.
Hans Küng was born in 1928 in Sursee, Switzerland, and named after his father, a shoe salesman. His mother, Emma, was a farmer’s daughter. He had five younger sisters. He also had a girlfriend who he kissed once before deciding at the age of 11 to become a priest. He trained in Rome, then took his doctorate at the Sorbonne in Paris. Already he was becoming known for stirring things up. In his thesis he sought to show that the doctrine of justification of sinners by faith alone, which the reformers had considered the test of a true church, was compatible with Catholic teaching. His dialogue partner was the leading Calvinist theologian, Karl Barth, who acknowledged that Küng had presented his teaching fairly. The Vatican, less impressed, opened a file on him.
In 1960, aged 32, he was appointed a professor in the Catholic faculty of theology at the University of Tübingen in Germany. He and Joseph Ratzinger (the future Pope Benedict XVI) were the youngest periti, or advisers, at the reforming church council Vatican II (1962-65). Before it had started Küng produced The Council and Reunion, a book said to have influenced the council agenda. Yet while Ratzinger is remembered by some present for his peacefulness and affability, Küng is recalled for “incendiary” outbursts and for driving through Rome in a red Mercedes.
They nevertheless became friends and in 1966, Küng was responsible for Ratzinger being appointed a professor of dogmatic theology at Tübingen. Then came 1968 and social unrest: Ratzinger, horrified, became conservative, a future enforcer of Catholic doctrine as the head of the Vatican’s Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, originally known as the Inquisition. Küng would compare Ratzinger in this role to the head of the KGB and later criticised Ratzinger, when he became pope, for “swank” and wearing luxurious priestly vestments. Despite this, Pope Benedict invited Küng to Rome for convivial dinners, and they reconciled, although they would never share the same stance theologically.
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Küng, a tireless advocate of progress, championed the new openings provided by Vatican II, lauding its promotion of ecumenism with non-Catholic Christians and firm repudiation of antisemitism. Some drew back, Küng pressed on. His lecture tours attracted overflow audiences and he became an international media celebrity. Küng said other theologians were jealous, attributing his television success to keeping in good physical shape and wearing suits and ties. “I rarely overestimated my abilities,” he said.
This bold self-confidence led in 1970 to the ground-breaking text Infallible? An Enquiry (1970), published to mark the centenary of the proclamation of papal infallibility as an official Catholic dogma. Fierce controversy followed. Some joked that Küng could never be pope, because then he would lose his infallibility.
In the 1970s he sought to expound the Christian faith in the setting of modern culture and agnosticism. Hundreds of pages on belief in Jesus Christ formed the heart of his hugely successful On Being a Christian (1974). However, the German bishops felt disquiet, fearing that Küng downplayed the divine identity of Jesus and skated over belief in the empty tomb.
Another, longer volume followed in 1978, Does God Exist? Beginning with studies of Descartes and Pascal, it went on to critique Kant, Hegel, Feuerbach, Marx, Nietzsche, and Freud. The range was vast, the knowledge impressive, the style lucid and succinct.
By this time his difficulties with the Church authorities were coming to a head. The Vatican’s Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith had urged Küng not to repeat his views on papal infallibility. He ignored Rome, and in October 1979, in an article published internationally, offered a highly critical assessment of the first year of John Paul II’s papacy. In December, the Vatican and the German bishops’ conference withdrew his mandate to teach as a Catholic theologian. Küng’s composure and insouciant air deserted him for a time. In his memoirs he recalled: “I, who in any situation am hardly lost for words, can’t bring myself to utter a single sentence the whole evening . . . I need tablets to sleep.”
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The university supported him and created a chair of ecumenical theology in which he could continue to exercise his professorship. He broadened his remit to Christianity and other faiths in the 1980s and 1990s, publishing well-regarded books that explored and evaluated Judaism, Islam, Hinduism and Chinese religions. In Christianity: its essence and history (1994), he summed up religious prospects for the third millennium: “No peace among the nations without peace among the religions. No peace among the religions without dialogue between the religions.”
Convinced of the need to find a global ethic common to all world religions, he found it in what he called the golden rule: do as you would be done by. To distil this, he wrote a musical libretto titled Weltethos (Global Ethos). Set to music by Jonathan Harvey, and containing texts from Confucianism, Hinduism, Buddhism, Christianity, Judaism and Islam, Weltethos was performed as a choral work in 2011 for the first time with the Berlin Philharmonic orchestra with Sir Simon Rattle.
In 1995 he set up a Global Ethic Foundation, based in Tübingen from where he regularly criticised capitalism as value-free, placing profit above people. Seven years later he published the first volume of his memoirs, My Struggle for Freedom. A reviewer quoted Küng as saying that on a first visit to a city, he would look for the highest point to obtain an overview, so as to be sure, the reviewer suggested, that he only had God above him.
The second volume, Disputed Truth, appeared in 2008. Two years later, he added What I Believe, in which he mapped out a journey to the core of faith. It was like swimming, he said, a favourite pursuit of his: plunge in, and you will find yourself supported.
He also disclosed that at the age of 85 he was suffering from incipient Parkinson’s disease and macular degeneration. As these advanced, they would deprive him of the two faculties on which he had depended throughout his life, his hands for writing and his eyes for reading. Deeply affected by the early death of his younger brother from an inoperable brain tumour, he coauthored a study of the case for euthanasia entitled A Dignified Dying.
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Küng argued to the end that the future of the Church depended on implementing the reforms of Vatican II. He believed that the crisis which overtook the Church as it faced a tsunami of claims for sexual abuse of minors proved that he had been right all along in warning against Roman absolutism and clericalism, and he welcomed the advent and different style of Pope Francis.
Hans Küng, Roman Catholic theologian, was born on March 19, 1928. He died on April 6, 2021, aged 93