HANS KUNG |
Father Hans Kung is one of the greatest theological minds in the modern Catholic Church. But for his honesty and integrity he has been sidelined and punished by people in the Church who are not fit to polish his shoes. He is one of my heroes. He is a modern prophet - and like all true prophets he has not been accepted by his own people.
It is the eternal shame of people like Joe Ratzinger (the retired Pope Benedict) that Father Kung has been persecuted and mistreated.
I hope the God that both Hans Kung and I believe in will reward him for his courage and integrity. And when the names of his enemies are forgotten may the name of Hans Kung be held in the highest esteem.
+Pat Buckley. 17.2.2015
Swiss theologian Hans Küng has been a voice for reform in the Catholic Church for decades on issues such as papal infallibility, the celibacy of priests and euthanasia. His advocacy cost him his license to teach Catholic theology and has led many to brand him a heretic. As the 85-year-old suffers from Parkinson's disease and other ailments, he watches the church under Pope Francis and contemplates many of the reforms he has long championed. He recently sat down with SPIEGEL for a wide-ranging conversation about his life and hopes for the future of the church.
SPIEGEL: Professor Küng, will you go
to heaven?
Küng: I certainly hope so.
SPIEGEL: Some would say you're going to hell because
you are a heretic in the eyes of the church.
Küng: I'm not a heretic, but a critical reform
theologian who, unlike many of his critics, uses the gospel instead of medieval
theology, liturgy and church law as his benchmark.
SPIEGEL: Does hell even exist?
Küng: Alluding to hell is a warning that a person can
completely neglect his purpose in life. I don't believe in an eternal hell.
SPIEGEL: If hell means losing one's purpose in life,
it must be a pretty secularist notion.
Küng: Sartre says that hell is other people. People
create their own hell -- in wars like the one in Syria, for example, as well as
with unbridled capitalism.
SPIEGEL: In his essay "Fragment on the Subject of
Religion," Thomas Mann admitted that he thought about death almost every
day of his life. Do you?
Küng: Actually, I expected that I would die at an early
age because I thought that, given the wild life I live, I wouldn't make it to
my 50th birthday. Now I'm surprised to be 85 and still alive.
SPIEGEL: You went skiing for the last time in 2008.
How does it feel to know that you're doing something for the last time?
Küng: It certainly makes me feel a little
melancholy to think about that last time, when I standing up there in Lech, up
in the Arlberg range. I love the clear, cold air in the Alps. It's where I used
to air out my often tortured brain. But I accept my fate. In fact, I'm happy
that I was still able to go skiing at 80.
SPIEGEL: You are an elderly, sick man. You have acute
hearing loss, osteoarthritis and macular degeneration, which will destroy your
ability to read.
Küng: That would be the worst thing, no longer
being able to read.
SPIEGEL: You were diagnosed with Parkinson's disease a year
ago.
Küng: Nevertheless, I still work very hard every
day. And yet I interpret all of these things as warning signs of my impending
death. My handwriting is getting small and often illegible, almost as if it
were disappearing. My fingers are failing. It's a fact that my general
condition has deteriorated, and yet I also fight it.
SPIEGEL: How?
Küng: I swim a quarter of an hour every day here in
the building, and I do physiotherapy exercises on the floor, as well as voice
exercises and finger exercises, and I focus on new tasks. Besides, I take
various pills every day.
SPIEGEL: You have written more than 60 books, and you
were always a highly productive man who liked getting into arguments. In your
memoirs, you ponder whether you will soon be nothing but a shadow of yourself.
Küng: Of course, the diagnoses and prognoses of doctors
are imprecise. My vision, for example, is deteriorating more slowly than
predicted. Two years ago, my doctor said that I would only be able to read for
another two years. And now I can still read! But I'm living on short notice and
am prepared to say goodbye at any time.
SPIEGEL: Your Parkinson's disease will progress.
Küng: Muhammad Ali, who also has Parkinson's,
appeared at the opening ceremony of the Olympics in London last year. He was
paraded before the entire world, vacant and silent. It was appalling. I think
it's a horrible notion.
SPIEGEL: Your friend, the writer and intellectual
Walter Jens fell into a rapidly deteriorating state of dementia nine years ago.
He died this year.
Küng: I visited him several times, including a
visit shortly before his death. Up until a few years ago, his face would still
light up when I came to see him. But, in recent years, he could no longer
remember whether I had visited him the day before or a month ago. In the end,
he no longer recognized me. It was depressing to think that Jens, one of the
most important intellectuals of the postwar era, had fallen back into a
childhood of sorts.
SPIEGEL: Was the dementia hard on Jens, too, or just
on his relatives and friends?
Küng: At the beginning of his illness, when you asked him
how he felt, he almost always said "terrible" or "bad." At
the same time, he became appreciative of small things, such as children,
animals and sweets. I used to bring him chocolate. At first, he would eat it by
himself, but later on I had to put it in his mouth for him. We can't possibly
know what Jens experienced at the end. But I can't be expected to accept being
in a condition like that.
SPIEGEL: In 1995, you and Jens co-wrote the book
"Dying with Dignity." As a Christian, are you allowed to put an end
to your own life?
Küng: I feel that life is a gift from God. But God has
made me responsible for this gift. The same applies to the last phase of life:
dying. The God of the Bible is a god of compassion and not a cruel despot who
wants to see people spend as much time as possible in a hell of their own pain.
In other words, assisted suicide can be the ultimate, final form of helping in
life.
SPIEGEL: The Catholic Church considers euthanasia a
sin, an encroachment on the sovereignty of the Creator.
Küng: I didn't appreciate it when the spokesman for the
bishop of Rottenburg promptly declared that what I had written represented the
teachings of Mr. Küng and not the teachings of the church. A church hierarchy
that has been so wrong on birth control, the pill and artificial insemination
shouldn't make the same mistakes now on issues relating to the end of life.
After all, our situation has changed fundamentally in the 21st century. The
average life expectancy 100 years ago was 45, and most people died an early
death. I'm 85 now, but that's an artificial extension of my lifetime -- thanks
to those 10 pills I take a day, and thanks to advances in hygiene and medicine.
SPIEGEL: Are you afraid of a long, lingering illness?
Küng: Well, I have written a carefully worded advance
directive, and I recently joined an assisted suicide organization. This doesn't
mean that I aim to commit suicide. But, in the event that my illness worsens, I
want to have a guarantee that I can die in a dignified manner. Nowhere in the
bible does it say that a person has to stick it out to the decreed end. No one
tells us what "decreed" means.
SPIEGEL: You have to go to a different country to have
access to assisted suicide.
Küng: I'm a Swiss citizen.
SPIEGEL: How exactly does it work? Do you call up and say:
'I'm on my way'?
Küng: I don't have a roadmap yet. But I did write
my own personal dying liturgy in the last volume of my memoirs.
SPIEGEL: A priest won't be allowed to administer the last
rites to you.
Küng: I will have a friend with me who is a priest and
one of my students.
SPIEGEL: In Goethe's "The Sorrows of Young
Werther," the protagonist kills himself for love. The book ends with the
sentence: "No priest attended." That's the position of the church.
Küng: I've always objected to my position on dying
being seen as a protest against church authority. I don't want to provide any
general rules, and I can only decide for myself. It would be ridiculous to
stage one's death as a protest against the church's authority. What I do want
to achieve, however, is that the issue is discussed openly and amiably. The
subject of "active euthanasia" has been taboo in Germany since the
Nazis' mass killings of the handicapped.
SPIEGEL: But what person with an incurable disease
will want to impose a burden on his relatives once assisted suicide has become
socially accepted?
Küng: Of course there is the risk that you
describe. But, today, assisted suicide takes place in a gray zone because it's
banned. Many doctors increase the morphine dose when the time is right, and in
doing so, they run the risk of being convicted of a crime. There are some
patients who, when they cannot find such doctors, jump out of hospital windows.
That's intolerable! We can't leave this issue up to the discretion of each
doctor. We need a legal regulation, in part to protect doctors.
SPIEGEL: Don't we cling to life too much at the end, so that
we miss the right moment?
Küng: That's possible, of course.
SPIEGEL: Do you cling to life?
Küng: I don't cling to earthly life because I
believe in eternal life. That's the big distinction between my point of view
and a purely secular position.
SPIEGEL: You write in your memoirs: "My heart
aches when I consider all the things I am supposed to give up."
Küng: That's true. I'm not saying goodbye to life because
I'm a misanthropist or disdain this life, but because, for other reasons, it's
time to move on. I am firmly convinced that there is life after death, not in a
primitive sense but as the entry of my completely finite person into God's
infinity, as a transition into another reality beyond the dimension of space
and time that pure reason can neither affirm nor deny. It's a question of
reasonable trust. I have no mathematic and scientific evidence of this, but I
have good reasons to trust in the message of the Bible, and I believe in being
taken in by a merciful God.
SPIEGEL: Do you have a concept of heaven?
Küng: Most ways of speaking about heaven are pure
images that cannot be taken literally. We are far removed from the notions of
heaven in the period before Copernicus. In heaven, however, I hope to learn the
answers to the world's great mysteries, to questions such as: Why is something
something and not nothing? Where do the Big Bang and physical constants come
from? In other words, the question that neither astrophysics nor philosophy has
answers for. At any rate, I'm talking about a state of eternal peace and
eternal happiness.
SPIEGEL: Today, physics can explain the dark cosmos,
with its billions of stars, much better than it could in the past. Has this
shaken your faith?
Küng: When we consider how enormous and dark the universe
is, it certainly doesn't make things easier for faith. When he wrote his Ninth
Symphony, Beethoven could still hope that "above the canopy of stars must
dwell a loving father." We, however, must accept how little we ultimately
know. Ninety-five percent of the universe is unknown to us, and we know nothing
about the 27 percent of dark matter or the 68 percent of dark energy. Physics
is getting closer and closer to the origin, and yet it cannot explain the origin
itself.
SPIEGEL: You want your funeral to end
with the hymn "Now Thank We All Our God."
Küng: Because it expresses that my life has not
perished but has been completed. It's something to be happy about, isn't it?
SPIEGEL: What is currently happening at the Vatican is
what you spent your life fighting for: a liberalization and reform of the
church. This is happening at a time when you are becoming old and feeble. Is it
an irony of history?
Küng: The irony is more applicable to my former colleague
(Joseph) Ratzinger than to me. I did not expect to see a radical shift in the
Catholic Church in my lifetime. I had always assumed -- and had come to accept
-- that Küng would depart and Ratzinger would remain. That's why I was so surprised
to see Benedict go and Pope Francis assume
office on March 19, 2013, my birthday and Ratzinger's name day.
SPIEGEL: How could it happen that a college
of cardinals made up of conservative and generally backward-looking men elected
a revolutionary to be the next pope?
Küng: First of all, they didn't even know how
revolutionary he is. But aside from the hard core of the Curia, many cardinals
knew that the church is in a deep crisis, which is epitomized by corruption in
the Vatican, the cover-up of abuse cases and the Vatileaks scandal. The cardinals
were often confronted with tough criticism by their home congregations.
SPIEGEL: Can one person even revolutionize an institution
like the Catholic Church?
Küng: Yes, if he receives good advice as pope and has a
capable staff. Legally speaking, the pope has more power than the president of
the United States.
SPIEGEL: But only within the church, because, for example,
his decisions are not subject to the approval of a legislative body.
Küng: There is also no supreme court. If he wanted to,
the pope could immediately abolish the celibacy law introduced in the 12th
century.
SPIEGEL: Could the Arab Spring be followed by a Catholic
Spring?
Küng: It's already here, but there is the same risk
of setbacks and counter-movements as there have been with the Arab Spring.
There are powerful groups in the Vatican and the church around the world that
would like to turn back the clock. They're worried about their privileges.
SPIEGEL: Does it bother you that you can no longer get
involved in these debates?
Küng: I take it calmly. It's more important to me that
the pope reads what I send him than that he invites me to Rome.
SPIEGEL: He recently wrote to you that he likes
reading the two books you sent him, and that he remains "at your
disposal."
Küng: I have already received two handwritten and
very friendly letters from him. The return addresses on the envelopes simply
read "F., Domus Sanctae Marthae, Vaticano," and he signed the letters
"with brotherly greetings." Even that is a new style. In 27 years,
John Paul II didn't deem me worthy of a single response.
SPIEGEL: With whom can Francis be compared?
Küng: Probably John XXIII, but he lacks one of his
weaknesses. John XXIII made reforms in passing and without an agenda. He made
serious administrative mistakes.
SPIEGEL: The question is whether Francis only impresses
people with gestures, or whether there is more behind it than that.
Küng: The simpler clothing, the changes to the protocol
and the completely different tone of voice -- these aren't just superficial
things. He has introduced a paradigm shift. With this pope, we see the service
character of the papal office emerging once again. He wants priests to get out
of the church and encounter people. He recently sent a survey to the bishops to
obtain the views of laypeople on family subjects. His first trip took him to
the refugees on Lampedusa. All of this is a departure from the way in which
Benedict interpreted the office. The call for a poor church also leads to a
different way of thinking. Under Benedict, the extravagant bishop of Limburg would
probably still be in office.
SPIEGEL: But Francis has also reconfirmed Archbishop Gerhard
Ludwig Müller, a hard-liner, as head of the Congregation for the Doctrine of
the Faith, the Vatican's watchdog and enforcer on issues of accepted doctrine.
Küng: I could imagine that Benedict strongly campaigned
for keeping Müller in the position. But the litmus test will be whether the new
pope continues to allow him to play overseer of the faith and grand inquisitor.
SPIEGEL: Francis has announced the canonization of John Paul
II, a restorative pope who strengthened controversial groups such as Opus Dei
and the Legion of Christ.
Küng: I cannot understand why this pope is to be
canonized. He was the most contradictory pope of the 20th century. He venerated
the Virgin Mary, and yet he denied women offices in the church. He preached
against mass poverty, and yet he barred contraception. I discussed 11 of these
massive contradictions at length in the last volume of my memoirs. His words
constantly diverged from his actions. For instance, he considered the priest
Marcial Maciel, one of the worst molesters of boys and the founder of the
Legion of Christ, to be his personal friend and defended him against all
criticism.
SPIEGEL: And yet you forgive Francis
for this canonization?
Küng: Benedict expedited Wojtyla's canonization,
ignoring all required waiting periods. Stopping the process now would not only
be an affront to Benedict, but also to many Poles. I can understand that Francis
doesn't want to do that. At least he also announced the canonization of
reformist Pope John XXIII. We should also think about whether canonizations,
which are an invention of the Middle Ages, still make sense today.
SPIEGEL: You were depressed?
Küng: Not depressed, but exhausted. Of course, I wondered
whether I should have given in. All they wanted was that I keep quiet. They
said the people in Rome didn't care about my personal beliefs. You can believe
what you wish, they told me. Some people say that if I had backed down at the
time, I would have been made a cardinal long ago. But that was precisely not my
goal.
SPIEGEL: At the time, you were hoping for a
professorship in the United States. Did you want to leave Germany?
Küng: I was enthusiastic about America. I knew President
(John F.) Kennedy, one of his sisters and other family members, and many
universities in the United States invited me to give lectures there. Yes, it
was a dream: a professorship in Los Angeles, for instance, with a house on the
Pacific. But it was unrealistic. I never really wanted to leave Tübingen.
SPIEGEL: Do you expect to be rehabilitated during your
lifetime?
Küng: No. The German Bishops' Conference could begin the
process, and Rome would only have to agree to it. But I no longer anticipate or
expect it. Pope Francis shouldn't jeopardize other important tasks by
rehabilitating me and becoming too close to me.
SPIEGEL: You were accused of vanity your entire life. There
is even an entire chapter about it in your memoirs.
Küng: But I'm probably no vainer than the average
person.
SPIEGEL: You write that other theologians were jealous of
you for being invited to appear on TV shows more often, because you valued
being in good physical shape and wore appropriate clothing, including a tie.
Küng: It actually reads: "occasionally a
tie."
SPIEGEL: Here's another quote: "I rarely overestimated
my abilities."
Küng: If you take it out of context, it actually does
sound vain. But you can read on the same page that I have an aversion to
illusorily overestimated characteristics. I know my limits. I detest posturing
and pomposity. But if I hadn't had any self-confidence in the dispute with
Rome, I would have been lost. To this day, my books are ignored by the
hierarchy and by scholastic theology. Perhaps that's why I repeatedly mentioned
the names of those in academia, politics and the media who quote me
approvingly.
SPIEGEL: You, the son of a shoe salesman, became a professor
of theology in the German university town of Tübingen at 32 and an adviser to
the Second Vatican Council at 34. And then, in 1979, came the serious blow,
when your license to teach as a Roman Catholic theologian was revoked.
Küng: A major media campaign was waged against me
at the time, and in the end, a pastoral letter was read against me in every
church in Germany. You have to imagine that.
SPIEGEL: Part of the reason your license to teach was
revoked is that you questioned whether priests should have to be celibate. Do
you believe that the celibacy rules might be changed under Francis?
Küng: I can't really imagine that this issue will
continue to be deferred seeing that there are fewer and fewer parish priests
every day. I don't know how the church will be able to provide pastoral care in
the next generation. The question has been relevant for some time, and
churchgoers are largely supportive of this reform.
SPIEGEL: Do you live in celibacy?
Küng: I am not married, and I have neither a wife nor
children.
SPIEGEL: There is a woman in the book whom you refer
to as "my ideal companion in life."
Küng: Yes, in the sense of an ideal traveling
companion. We have separate estates, live on separate floors and have separate
apartments. I described all of this in my memoirs, and I stand behind it. I
have nothing else to say about it.
SPIEGEL: Professor Küng, thank you for this interview.
Interview
conducted by Markus Grill
Hans Kung is the greatest living Theologian of our time. His legacy is secure and people will be reading his work for many years to come. His books "Can We Save The Catholic Church" and "On Being a Christian Christian" are two books that will lend meaning to the spiritual journey to anyone who has ears to hear.
ReplyDeleteYou are right, he has been greatly persecuted by right wingers - but I bet that most of them haven't even read any of his work. In fact their wrongly opinionated views of him stems from too much time gossiping over tea in Seminary common rooms.
Hans Kung spends 10 hours every day reading and writing and has done so for the past 60 years, it would take theological years in itself to read all that he has written.
May I recommend his book WHAT I BELIEVE to your readers. it would make a great start in shaping consciences an integrities of many who waffle with no clarity of thought.
Gerry