Hans Küng, critical conscience of Roman Catholicism

Hans Küng, photographed on a street in Bilbao on November 13, 2003. Fernando Domingo-Aldama

With the death of the Swiss theologian Hans Küng on April 6, Christianity loses one of the most lucid and creative minds of the 20th century and two decades of the 21st century and a freethinker - a rare figure - within the Catholic Church .

He was the critical conscience of Roman Catholicism, of Vatican imperialism, of the fundamentalism installed for centuries in the dome of Saint Peter and very especially of the dogma of the infallibility of the pope, declared egotistically by Pius IX in 1970. He was a very severe critic of the course. Involutionist of the pontificates of John Paul II and Benedict XVI, which he himself suffered in his own flesh.

"Hardly," he affirms, "will there be among the great institutions of our democratic countries any other that acts more inhumanely with those who think differently and with the critics in their own ranks, none that discriminate so much against women."

More information

• Hans Küng's articles in EL PAÍS

• Hans Küng, the most 'Catholic' theologian, dies despite his disputes with the Vatican

But he also served as a therapist, as he liked to define himself.

He was a reformer, in continuity with the great reformers of Christianity, who defended a change in the ecclesial paradigm having as a reference not the Councils of Trent of Vatican I, but the Vatican Council II, not the Code of Canon Law nor the current hierarchical Constitution- patriarchal of the Vatican City State, but the Gospel, not obedience and submission to the pope, but the following of Jesus of Nazareth.

He practiced dialogue as a mood, a lifestyle, a method for the search for truth and a way to resolve conflicts.

He was a pioneer in ecumenical dialogue between the different Christian churches.

That turned out to be one of his main contributions to the Second Vatican Council, where he participated as a theological expert invited by John XXIII at just 34 years old and helped to move from the anathema, in which the papacy was installed for centuries, to dialogue.

However, a few years later he experienced in his own person the regressionist change from dialogue to anathema when his recognition as a “Catholic theologian” was withdrawn in 1979 with the complicit silence of his colleague in Tübingen Joseph Ratzinger, then Cardinal and Archbishop of Munich.

Küng was one of the earliest theologians in interreligious dialogue from the conviction that no religion has the complete cartography of truth nor is it the only way of salvation-liberation.

He considers the dialogue of religions as an alternative to the multisecular wars of religions, of which there are still some reminiscences, and the theory of the clash of civilizations defended by Samuel Huntington as a strategy in international relations.

A dialogue not focused on the search for doctrinal agreements, but on the defense of moral values ​​common to religions and civic ethics, such as active non-violence on the path to peace and respect for all life, defense of nature as a common home, the practice of a truthful and authentic life, the culture of solidarity and a just international order;

the recognition of equality between men and women.

The third level of Küng's dialogue was interdisciplinary.

From the beginning of his intellectual itinerary, he maintained a fruitful, mutually enriching and uninterrupted dialogue with the natural sciences and the human sciences, with the social sciences and the life sciences, with the sciences of the mind, philosophy, political science, economics, archeology, aesthetics, music, literature, and so on.

A dialogue in which he recognizes the contributions that some and other disciplines have made to thought and the advances they have made for humanity, but in which he sings, at the same time, the farewell to excessive credulity in reason, science and the technology.

In this dialogue, he did not avoid the thorniest issues from the ethical and religious point of view, such as death with dignity, in the middle of the debate on euthanasia and applying it to his own person.

For him, the

ars moriendi

was part of the

ars vivendi

and both must be governed by the principle-responsibility.

"I would love," he says, "to die consciously and say goodbye with dignity."

Living, thinking, speaking, doing theology and dying with dignity is, without a doubt, the best legacy of the nonagenarian life and the intellectual work of Hans Küng.

Juan José Tamayo

is emeritus professor at the Carlos III University of Madrid and author of

The International of Hate

(Icaria, 2021, 2nd ed.).