Can We Save the Catholic Church?

• If he continues the present course of retrenchment, the call to rise up and revolt (exemplified in Stéphane Hessel’s Time for Outrage: Indignez-vous!, [2011]) will grow ever louder in the Catholic Church and increasingly incite people to take things into their own hands, initiating reforms from below without hierarchical approval and often in the face of all attempts to thwart them. In the worst case, the Catholic Church will experience a new Ice Age instead of a new spring, and it will run the risk of shrinking down to a mere sect, still counting many members but otherwise socially and religiously irrelevant.

Nevertheless, I have well-founded hopes that the concerns expressed in this book will be taken seriously by the new pope. To use the medical analogy that serves as the leitmotif of this book, the Church’s only alternative to what would amount to assisted suicide is radical cure. That means more than a new style, a new language, a new collegial tone; it means carrying out the long-overdue, radical structural reforms and the urgently needed revision of the obsolete and unfounded theology behind the many problematical dogmatic and ethical positions that his predecessors have attempted to impose upon the Church. If Pope Francis commits himself to such a radical reform, he will not only find broad support within the Church, but he will also win back many of those who, publicly or privately, have long since abandoned the Church. Such a renewed Roman Catholic Church could once again become the witness to the Gospel of Christ that it was meant to be.

Hans Küng

Tübingen, July 2013

Note on the Present English Edition

This book originally appeared in 2011 under the title Ist die Kirche noch zu retten? For this revised version, the first in the English language, material of interest only to the German audience has been omitted and the text has also been updated to reflect events which have occurred since 2011, especially in connection with the resignation of Pope Benedict XVI and appointment of Pope Francis earlier this year.

This English translation was generously supported by a grant from the Herbert Haag Foundation for Freedom in the Church, Lucerne, Switzerland.

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Let me begin by saying that I would have preferred not to have had to write this book. But with the appointment of Pope Francis we have an unprecedented opportunity, not seen since the days of John XXIII, to fulfil the aims and promises of his Second Vatican Council, and truly bring the Church into a meaningful dialogue with the modern world.

I would have preferred not to write this book because, despite this time of great hope and promise, it will not make pleasant or comfortable reading for many Catholics. And it is not at all pleasant for me, either, to address such a critical publication to the people who make up the Church, because, despite my often painful and bitter experiences with the merciless Roman System which up to now has governed the Church, the Catholic community of faith remains my spiritual home. But it is my hope that the recommendations in this book will aid the Church’s recovery from what I see, and what I will go on to describe, as a debilitating and potentially terminal illness from which the Church is presently suffering.

For decades now, with mixed success at best and with virtually no impact at all on the Church’s hierarchy, I have repeatedly called attention to the serious, growing crisis within the Catholic Church, pointing out that it is primarily a crisis of the Church’s leadership and not of the faithful, as many in the hierarchy would have us believe. In recent years, however, the revelations of countless cases of sexual abuse by Catholic clergymen – cases that have been occurring for decades and which have been consistently hushed up both by Rome and by bishops around the world – has made this systemic crisis clearly visible to the world at large, and calls for a well-thought-out theological response. With Pope Francis’s appointment of a panel of cardinals to advise him on a reform of the Roman Curia (the machinery of power surrounding the pope in the Vatican), such a theological response is now more urgent than ever to support the voices of many people within the Church who have long been crying out for change.

A reform of the Curia presents us, at this fiftieth anniversary of the Second Vatican Council, with an opportunity to effect a paradigm shift in the Catholic Church. Under Popes Karol Wojtyla and Joseph Ratzinger, over the last three decades, a course of restoration to pre-Council times, rather than reform, was pursued relentlessly and this continues to exert an increasingly dramatic and deadly influence not just within the Catholic Church but also within the whole Christian ecumenical movement. Benedict XVI’s pontificate was, for me, a pontificate of missed opportunities. None of his triumphal appearances and journeys (whether staged as ‘pilgrimages’ or ‘state visits’), none of his brilliant encyclicals, nor his communication offensives, could hide the existence of the long-standing crisis in which the Church now finds itself. In the Federal Republic of Germany alone, in the last five years, hundreds of thousands of people have left the Church, and the population generally is becoming increasingly estranged from church institutions of any kind.

I repeat: I would have preferred not to write this book. In fact, I would not have written it, if:

• my hope that Pope Benedict would lead our Church forward in the spirit of the Second Vatican Council had not been so thoroughly destroyed. Back in 2005, in our four-hour, private and friendly conversation in Castel Gandolfo, my former Tübingen colleague seemed to hold out such a promise. Instead, however, Benedict obstinately adhered to the path of restoration pursued by his predecessor, distancing himself from the Council’s spirit in important points and from the many faithful Catholics whom the Council inspired. Furthermore, Ratzinger signally failed in his handling of the sexual abuses committed by Catholic clergymen all over the world.

• the bishops had exercised their collective responsibility for the Church as a whole – a responsibility explicitly acknowledged and encouraged by the Vatican Council – and had themselves vigorously spoken out and taken effective action against the scandals in the Church. Instead, however, under Wojtyla’s and Ratzinger’s rule, most of them became subservient once again to the Vatican, only too eager to toe the line without attempting to voice opinions of their own or to act independently. At best, they gave only hesitant and unconvincing answers to questions raised by the modern challenges facing the Church.

• the theologians had, as in former times, strongly and publicly stood together to oppose Rome’s new repressive measures and its attempts to control the selection of the next generation of teachers in university faculties and seminaries. Instead, however, most Catholic theologians, fearing censure and marginalization, now skirt around taboo topics of dogmatic or moral theology rather than face up to them in an unbiased and critical manner. Only very few, therefore, dare to support the global and grassroots Catholic reform organizations such as We are Church, Call to Action and, in Ireland, the Association of Catholic Priests.

To make matters worse, the advocates of reform in the Roman Catholic Church receive little support from Protestant theologians and church leaders, many of whom consider the reform issues to be a purely internal affair of the Catholic Church. All too often, they are content to cultivate cosy, friendly relations with the Vatican instead of exercising the freedom of a true Christian to speak out when needed. In the latest disputes about the Catholic Church and other churches, just as in other public discussions, lively theological discussion and fruitful controversy play only a minor role; thus the theologians miss their opportunity to issue a vigorous call for much-needed reform.

From many quarters, I have been urged to take a strong and clear stand on the current and future condition of the Catholic Church. And so, rather than writing individual newspaper columns and articles, I have decided to pen this compact summary to set forth and justify my carefully considered view of the crux of this crisis: namely that the Catholic Church – this great community of faith – is seriously ill, suffering under the Roman system of rule, a system which developed during the second millennium and which, despite opposition, remains in place today.

As I will show later, this Roman system of rule is characterized by a monopoly on power and truth, by legalism and clericalism, by hostility to sexuality, by misogyny and by clerical use of pressure on the laity. This system is not exclusively responsible for (though it does bear the main responsibility for) the three great divisions, or schisms, of Christianity: first, the East–West schism in the eleventh century, dividing the Western from the Eastern branches of the Church; then, the Reformation schism in the sixteenth century, dividing the Western (i.e. Roman Catholic) Church from the Protestant churches; and, finally, in the eighteenth and nineteenth century, the separation of Roman Catholicism from the enlightened modern world.

The Cause of the Illness

To begin, let me make one thing clear: I am an ecumenical theologian concerned with the Church in all its manifestations, and I am by no means fixated exclusively on the figure of the pope. In my book Christianity: Its Essence and History (1995), I devoted over 1,000 pages to a description and analysis of the history of Christianity as a whole. But it cannot be denied that the papacy is the central element of the Roman Catholic paradigm, and it is the papacy and its power that is primarily and urgently in need of reform.

The papacy as it took shape in the Christian Church of the first centuries, i.e. as a ministry in succession to St Peter, was and remains to this day a meaningful institution for many Christians, not just Roman Catholics. But, from the eleventh century onwards, this institution gradually morphed into the monarchical–absolutist papacy that has dominated the history of the Roman Catholic Church ever since. It is this monarchical–absolutist papacy that has been responsible for the three great schisms mentioned above. Ever since the Middle Ages, the growing power of the papacy within the Catholic Church, notwithstanding numerous political setbacks and cultural defeats, has become the crux of the Roman Catholic Church’s history. Thus, Catholicism’s contemporary neuralgia is not a problem of liturgy, theology, lay piety, monastic rules or art, but rather a problem linked to the very constitution of the Roman Catholic Church. In traditional histories of the Catholic Church, however, far too little critical attention has been given to the problems generated by how the papacy has developed. For this reason, I will examine these problems with special care in the present book, not least because of their explosive ecumenical significance, for their consequences are not confined to the Roman Catholic Church alone; they also affect the other Christian denominations, the dialogue with other religions and ideologies, and the relationship of the Catholic Church to the modern world as a whole.

Fifty years ago, Joseph Ratzinger and I were the two youngest official advisors to the Second Vatican Council (1962–5). That Council tried to reform important elements of the Roman system, but, unfortunately, the stubborn resistance of the Roman Curia managed by and large to hamper these efforts and to restrict their success. In the decades since the Council, Rome has gradually been turning back the clock on the proposals for reform and renewal, and this has in turn led to a renewed outbreak of an already rampant and alarming disease in the Catholic Church. The sexual abuse scandals caused by Catholic clergymen are only the latest symptom. The objections to these scandals have become so vehement that, in any other large organization, they would have triggered an intensive investigation into the reasons behind such a tragedy. Not so, however, for the Roman Curia or the Catholic episcopate! At first, Rome and the episcopate simply denied any share in the responsibility for the systematic cover-up of these cases. And, when that strategy failed, they have, with very few exceptions, shown little interest in uncovering the deep historical and systemic reasons for such horrific aberrations.

The regrettable refusal to look at the causes of this sickness compels me to bring out into the open the historical truth about the Christian Church, starting from its origins – in the face of all the current attempts to forget, conceal and cover them up. For people with little detailed historical education, for traditional Catholic readers, and possibly even for some bishops, these facts will undoubtedly prove frightening and disillusioning. Someone who has never been seriously confronted with historical facts of this kind will certainly be dismayed to learn how things have been done over long periods of time and how all too human so many Church institutions and constitutions – particularly the core Roman Catholic institution of the papacy – are.

However, there is also a positive side to these disappointing and disillusioning facts: they show that the Church’s institutions and its character – beginning with the papacy – can in fact be changed, even fundamentally reformed. The papacy need not be abolished, but it should be renewed in such a way that the Petrine ministry once again becomes the office in the succession to St Peter described in the Bible. However, what does need to be abolished is the Medieval Roman system of governance and control. My critical destruction is therefore done in the service of committed construction, of reform and renewal, in the hope that, despite all appearances to the contrary, the Catholic Church will remain viable into the third millennium.

Physician, not Judge

Many readers will be surprised that I use so many medical metaphors in this book. This is because, in terms of health and disease, similarities between the body corporate of the Catholic Church and the human organism immediately spring to mind. Moreover, using medical language in analysing the Church’s condition allows me to formulate certain truths more clearly than if I were to use legal language. I do not see myself as a judge, but rather – in the broadest sense of the term – as a kind of physician.

My fundamental criticism of the Roman System is grave, and I will give my reasons for it, point by point. I will attempt, to the best of my knowledge and in all conscience, to make an honest diagnosis throughout this book and to offer effective suggestions for treatment. Doubtlessly, the medicine will often be bitter, but the Church requires such medicine if it hopes to recover. The story I tell here is a gripping one, and – as is usually the case with descriptions of progressive disease – it is hardly pleasant. But I have not described my diagnosis so explicitly simply because I testily insist on being right or because I enjoy being contentious, but only to fulfil my duty in conscience to offer this service (possibly my last?) to my Church, a Church which I have endeavoured to serve all my life.

Based on my previous experience, I expect that Rome will do everything it can, if not to condemn such an uncomfortable and inconvenient book, then at least to keep it as far as possible under wraps. I hope, however, that this book will receive support from within the church community and from the public at large, in particular from theologians and, if possible, also from those bishops who genuinely wish for change. I also hope that this book will shake up those who are ideologically hidebound, and awaken the legally and financially entrenched Roman hierarchy from its complacent slumber, so that they will at least begin to take note of the pathogenesis presented here and to give thought to my explanation of how the disease from which the Catholic Church is suffering has developed, and of the consequences of this disease, so that they will not obstruct the unpleasant but urgently necessary therapy.

What a wonderful way this would be to mark the fiftieth anniversary of the prophetic Second Vatican Council! While not everything can be healed overnight, the agenda set forth here will, I am convinced, remain on the table as an important order of business for the Catholic Church in the coming years. And if that is the case, all of my effort has been worthwhile.

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The Church Cannot Go On in This Way

‘Things just can’t go on like this in our Church’; ‘The powers that be, those up there in Rome, are doing their best to tear the Church apart!’ Complaints like these, and similarly bitter, outraged or despairing cries have frequently been heard over the past few years, in both Europe and the United States.

As Alois Glück, the clear-sighted and courageous chairman of the Central Committee of German Catholics, put it after the Second Ecumenical Church Congress in Munich back in May 2010:

The alternatives are either resignation, accompanied by a deliberate shrinking of the Church until it consists of only a small community of ‘staunch Christians’ as some have little or no regrets about doing, or getting up the courage and determination to try something new.

His words expressed the concerns and hopes of many Catholics, especially the most dedicated and highly motivated members of the Church. The response of the bishops, however, was slow and reluctant; many clearly wanted to continue as before. And that explains the frustration, the anger and the despair that is particularly strong among the most loyal Catholics, who have not yet forgotten the Second Vatican Council.

The Catholic Church is in its deepest crisis of confidence since the Reformation, and nobody can overlook it. As Pope Benedict XVI, Joseph Ratzinger missed a great opportunity to make the forward-looking ideas of the Second Vatican Council the lodestone of the Catholic Church worldwide and especially within the Vatican itself. Instead of courageously pushing forward the reforms begun by the Council, he did the opposite: again and again, he qualified and weakened the statements of the Council, interpreting them retrogressively, contrary to the spirit of the Council fathers. He even expressly set his face against Vatican II, which, as an ecumenical council, represents, according to the great Catholic tradition, the highest authority within the Catholic Church. He did this by:

• accepting, without any preconditions, the illegally ordained bishops from the traditionalist Pius X Fraternity, which has separated itself from the Catholic Church and which continues to reject central elements of the Council’s teaching;

• actively promoting the use of the Medieval Tridentine Mass and, on occasion, celebrating the Eucharist himself in Latin with his back to the congregation;

• creating a deep mistrust of the Protestant churches by continuing to insist that they do not constitute ‘Churches’ in the true sense of the word;

• failing to pursue the paths to understanding and communication with the Anglican Church as outlined in official (ARCIC) ecumenical documents, attempting instead to lure conservative married Anglican clergymen into the Roman Catholic Church by waiving their obligation to celibacy; and

• strengthening the forces opposing the Second Vatican Council within the Church by appointing men who are opposed to the Council to important administrative positions (e.g. the Secretariat of State, Congregation for Divine Worship and the Discipline of the Sacraments, and the Congregation of Bishops) and installing reactionary bishops around the world.

Benedict XVI’s now-notorious faux pas made it clear that Pope Ratzinger was becoming increasingly distant from the great majority of churchgoers and believers in our countries, many of whom pay increasingly little attention to pronouncements from Rome. At best, these churchgoers relate to their local parish, their pastor and possibly their local bishop. Benedict’s courageous decision, in February 2013, to resign his office deserves our full respect, but it was motivated explicitly for reasons of health; it is not an acknowledgement of mistakes made in the past or a call to take a different course in the future. Thus, of itself, Benedict’s resignation changed nothing, and everything will depend on the course steered by his successor, Pope Francis.

In implementing his anti-Council policies, Benedict XVI, like his own predecessor, enjoyed the full support of the Roman Curia, a Curia in which those persons who support the Council have long since been isolated or eliminated. In the years that have passed since the Council, a highly efficient propaganda machine has been set up to serve the Roman cult of personality. Modern mass media (television, the internet, YouTube and now Twitter) are being used systematically, professionally and successfully to promote the vested interests of the Curia. When you watch the huge Masses at the Vatican, or the gatherings surrounding papal visits and journeys, you could be excused for believing that all is in order in the Catholic Church. But the question we must ask is: what is the substance behind this glittering façade? On the local level, things look quite different.

Decline of Church Institutions

I do not, of course, underestimate the immense amount of good work done all over the world at the local level, especially in individual parishes and in local institutions, the countless pastoral and social contributions of innumerable priests and lay people, men and, above all, women; time and again I have met these people, whose work is a true testimony to their faith. Where would the Catholic Church be today without the untiring commitment of such people? But who has thanked them? So many of them feel they are hindered rather than helped by ‘those up there’, by policies, theology and discipline formulated in Rome. Complaints are pouring in from all over the world about the decline of traditional church structures built up over years or even centuries.

I, too, have been affected personally. I refer to the drastic reduction in pastoral care not merely in the university city of Tübingen and in the entire diocese of Rottenburg-Stuttgart but also in my native Swiss town of Sursee near Lucerne, where I return every year in the summer and where I continue to celebrate the Eucharist. But the joy I experience in celebrating the liturgy is diminishing year on year. What I learned in August 2010 provides a saddening snapshot of the current state of affairs.

For centuries, the town parish of Sursee always had at least four ordained priests, the so-called ‘Vierherren’. Now, however, it no longer enjoys the services of even a single ordained priest. Instead, it is headed by the lay theologian and deacon Markus Heil, who would make an excellent priest; however, because he is married, he cannot be ordained. And, therefore, although he and his team do an excellent job, in order to be able to celebrate the Eucharist they must fall back on the services offered by retired priests – for as long as such retired priests are still available. In Switzerland, too, celibate clergymen are a vanishing species. Nobody knows how long it will be possible to continue to offer pastoral care or regular Eucharistic services.

The Capuchin friars, important providers of pastoral care since the early seventeenth century, have had to close their monastery in Sursee and sell the site; the same has happened in many other places due to the lack of new blood. New recruits to the diocesan clergy are equally rare.

In nearby Lucerne, the theological faculty (and the kernel out of which the university developed in the last century) now fears for its survival. Because of the declining numbers of students, some politicians have proposed that it be merged with the Catholic Theological Faculty of Fribourg or with the Protestant Theological Faculty in Zurich and that the medical school should be expanded in its place. The fact is that, in Switzerland today, there are simply too few students wanting to study Catholic theology and too many centres offering theological training.