UNITED STATES
National Catholic Reporter
Leonard Swidler | May. 1, 2014
VIEWPOINT Note from Jamie Manson, NCR books editor: Swiss theologian Hans Küng has written more than 70 books that have influenced not only the ongoing quest to reform the Catholic church, but also theologians and practitioners who engage in ecumenical theology and interfaith dialogue. We asked noted scholar Leonard Swidler and veteran journalist John Wilkins to guide us in our appreciation of the vast scope of his corpus. Not only are Swidler and Wilkins experts in Küng’s thought, both have read the third and final volume of Küng’s memoir, which has yet to be translated from the original German. Both retrospectives also offer reflections on his latest title, Can We Save the Catholic Church?/We Can Save the Catholic Church! (William Collins, $16.99) Today, we offer Swidler’s reflection; Wilkins’ will run Friday. Both ran in the April 28-May 8, 2014, edition of NCR.
There are a number of reasons why it is particularly apt that I would be writing about theologian Fr. Hans Küng’s latest writings. To begin, we are both 85 years old — one year younger than that of a former colleague of ours on the Catholic theological faculty of the University of Tübingen, Joseph Ratzinger, now Pope Emeritus Benedict XVI. Secondly, I was at Tübingen even before Hans in the late 1950s, as a student working on my doctorate in history from the University of Wisconsin, and my Licentiate of Sacred Theology from the University of Tübingen.
I arrived in Tübingen, Germany, in the fall of 1957. During the summer semester of 1958, I attended an interesting course offered by the Protestant theology faculty on a newly published book that compared the doctrine of justification according to 20th-century Swiss Protestant theologian Karl Barth with the doctrine of the 16th-century Catholic Council of Trent. The book dramatically concluded that they were essentially the same.
The author was a brash newcomer on the exciting theological scene, the young Swiss Catholic Hans Küng. I didn’t know who he was then, nor did hardly anyone else — except Ratzinger, who was a fellow assistant to Professor Hermann Volk of the Catholic theology faculty of the University of Münster. It was the same Volk who, as cardinal archbishop of Mainz, Germany, grilled Hans about his best-seller On Being a Christian. At one point, Volk blurted out: “Herr Küng, Ihr Buch ist mir zu plausibel!” (“Mr. Küng, your book is too plausible!”)
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