Rebellious and controversial theologian viewed as enfant terrible of Catholicism

A journey to the core of faith was like swimming, he said: plunge in, and you will find yourself supported.

Hans Kueng Theologian b March 19, 1928 d April 6, 2021

An inveterate rattler of cages, Hans Kueng 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 Kueng 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.

He nearly had a breakdown, but critics later suggested he enjoyed the publicity. Kueng 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 revealed he wished to die via euthanasia, which is against Catholic teaching.

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, Kueng wrote to him to say his collaboration with George W Bush was ‘‘a historical failure of the first order’’.

Kueng 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.

Kueng was a dapper figure who wore tailored suits and ties rather than dog collars. He could be wry about his origins. When 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 they can understand every word when it is reported back to Rome.’’

For those of a liberal disposition, Kueng was a prophet, a world-class theologian who 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, but called for an end to priests’ vow of celibacy 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’’.

Hans Kueng was born in 1928 in Sursee, Switzerland to a shoe salesman and a farmer’s daughter. He decided at the age of 11 to become a priest, training in Rome, then taking 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. The Vatican, unimpressed, opened a file on him.

In 1960, aged 32, he was appointed a professor in the Catholic faculty of theology at the University of Tuebingen 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 Kueng produced The Council and Reunion, a book said to have influenced the council agenda.

Kueng, 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. His lecture tours attracted overflow audiences and he became an international media celebrity. ‘‘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. 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 he 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 Church authorities were coming to a head. The Vatican’s Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith had urged Kueng not to repeat his views on papal infallibility. He ignored Rome, and in October 1979 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.

The university 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 wellregarded 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.’’

In 1995 he set up a Global Ethic Foundation, based in Tuebingen from where he regularly criticised capitalism as value-free, placing profit above people. In 2010 came

What I Believe, which 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.

Deeply affected by the early death of his younger brother from an inoperable brain tumour, he co-authored a study of the case for euthanasia entitled A Dignified Dying.

He believed the crisis which overtook the Church as it faced claims for sexual abuse of minors proved he had been right all along in warning against Roman absolutism and clericalism, and he welcomed the advent and different style of Pope Francis.

Contact us

Do you know someone who deserves a Life Story? Email obituaries@dompost.co.nz