Bruised Believer Casts Stones at Power of Popes

Hans Kung is the ultimate Roman Catholic Church insider, a Swiss priest whose career has swung from the church’s center to its margins during a remarkable, turbulent career. In 1962, John XXIII named him a theological consultant for Vatican II; by 1979, his progressive views caused the Vatican to ban him from teaching as a Catholic theologian. He ruffled quite a few ecclesiastical robes when he argued that papal authority was unsupported by Scripture.

Regardless of his censure, Kung remains a Catholic. “Despite all my experiences of how merciless the Roman system can be, the Catholic Church, this fellowship of believers, has remained my spiritual home to the present day,” he writes in “The Catholic Church: A Short History.”

What Kung presents here is a church history written by a bruised believer who hopes for reform. He wishes to be neutral, to avoid any personal animus. To ensure that, he bases his assessment solely on how well the church has adhered to the Gospels over the centuries.

The name of Jesus Christ, Kung writes, “is something like the golden thread in the tapestry of church history. Though often the tapestry is torn and grubby, that thread is constantly worked in again.”

On tracing that thread’s early development, Kung succeeds. Jesus did not found a church, he writes, but his rising from the dead and his teachings united a group of believers who saw themselves as distinct from Judaism. He deftly sketches their grass-roots organization and reminds readers that “Jesus radiated a democratic spirit”; when his followers’ referred to their “ecclesia” (church), they didn’t mean an institution, only “a community gathering at a particular place.” But a hierarchy--a clergy with decision-making power for this Catholic (katholikos, whole) Church--was soon established to define dogma against the seductions of pagan heresies.

Central to Kung’s account of this split into clergy and laity is the rise of the bishops of Rome (Siricus in 384 first used the title pope, as in “father” or “papa”), and here his impartiality begins to wear thin. Starting in the 4th century, he writes, they shamefully used the Gospel stories of Peter’s primacy among the apostles, as well as their financial clout in the empire, to “conclude . . . that Roman jurisdiction over the whole church was the will of God.” Medieval popes would see the world as theirs to rule, on behalf of God. When the German King Henry IV insisted on appointing bishops, Pope Gregory VII taught him a lesson: He excommunicated and deposed him. The history of the popes, as told here, is the story of a naked bid for power that climaxes in Pius IX’s 1869 declaration of papal infallibility at Vatican I.

Papal legitimacy, for Kung, has been cyclical, dropping to extreme lows that were followed by councils seeking, but not always bringing, crucial reforms. Although the Council of Constance (1414) repaired the damage caused by three rival popes, and Vatican II (1962) gave some power to the laity, the Council of Trent (1545) failed when it ignored Martin Luther’s plea for reform and retreated into a strict code of uniformity. Trent would echo in Vatican I’s attack on modernity and science.

In depicting the distortions of papal power, however, Kung teeters early, and often, intoname-calling. For him, Augustine was a propagandist for Rome; Thomas Aquinas was a papal lackey and a weak theologian (“He was no Luther,” he says); Pius IX showed “the symptoms of a psychopath.” In so short a book, attacks like these pile up, ruining a chance to let instances of abuse speak for themselves.

Was Pius IX a psychopath for asserting that his decisions were infallible or that all members of the church were legally bound to Rome? No. Was he a reactionary? Well, yes, but shouldn’t a history try to avoid caricatures? As Darwinism and communism attacked his church’s theological foundation, Italy’s unification swallowed the Papal States, leaving Pius the ruler of a city. Would any ruler react calmly in this situation?

Since Vatican II, Kung believes, the church has been headed toward another low point because of John Paul II, a pope who has ushered in more conservative views of sexuality and women’s ordination. Nothing less than a new council can improve the situation, and he calls for all Christians--Catholic, Orthodox and Evangelical--to transcend their differences in the interests of the world. Yet, near the end, he also maintains his support of the papacy, envisioning a pope who is “not lord of the church, but in succession to Peter, a servant to the servants of God.” It’s valid to ask for reform, but one wonders how the papacy would have survived--or will--if it were kinder, milder or less ambitious. In cataloging papal abuses in “The Catholic Church: A Short History,” Kung makes more of a case for opponents of the Vatican who would dismantle it, brick by brick.

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Nick Owchar is an assistant editor of Book Review.