Küng, original celebrity theologian and liberal muse, dead at 93 (commentary)

Angelus ^ | April 7, 2021 | John Allen

[Marchmain]

When I was a precocious sophomore in high school, I once barged into the office of the Capuchin priest who was in charge of our religion curriculum to inform him that I had serious intellectual reservations about the Catholic faith, and I found the answers being supplied in class unsatisfying.

Father Mike Scully looked at me for a moment with what, looking back, I now recognize as a bemused smirk, and then wheeled his chair across his office and produced a thick book off his shelf: On Being a Christian by Hans Küng.

“Go read this,” Scully told me, “then we’ll talk.”

I didn’t know then that On Being a Christian is regarded as a masterpiece, one of the most daring and provocative explorations ever penned by a Catholic hand on the intelligibility of Christian faith in a modern, secular age. Despite the fact that it’s composed of dense, demanding German academic prose, it became an international best seller...

[Marchmain]

...Küng evoked strong reactions. To admirers, he was the Catholic Solzhenitsyn, a brave dissident speaking truth to power from the ecclesiastical gulag; to detractors, he was a glib snake oil salesman, a traitor who sold out the faith for forty pieces of pop culture silver.

In the popular Catholic mind, Küng likely will be forever linked with the figure who was his erstwhile colleague and, later, his central antagonist and bête noire in the growing divides within Catholicism after the council – Joseph Ratzinger, the future doctrinal czar of the Vatican under John Paul II, who would go on to become Pope Benedict XVI...

[ebb tide]

Fr. Mike Scully is a Jesuit. It’s no wonder he would pimp out Hans Kung to a high school student; and it explains why John Allen, Jr. is the liberal modernist he is today.

[Falconspeed]

“When I was a precocious sophomore in high school...”

John Allen makes me sick. Kung was a heretic and I wish him luck during his interview with the Supreme Judge.

One day Allen will write a book about Bergoglio’s coup of the Vatican. And Kung rejected many opportunities to get straight with the Church.