Hans Kung, the Council's rebel theologian

Investiture ceremony as Doctor Honoris Causa of the theologian Hans Kung by the Faculty of Philosophy of the UNED in 2011 LUIS SEVILLANO

It is impossible to think of the Second Vatican Council which was the theological revolution of the Catholic Church without remembering the then young Swiss theologian Hans Kung.

And with him the theologian Ratzinger, also one of the most progressive voices at the time.

Both were advisers to the German bishops, who constituted the most open and rebellious nucleus.

I met Hans Kung during that council.

He was very cordial and sympathetic to the journalists who covered the sessions.

Many of the more open texts approved by the council are due to those two theologians who already pre-announced liberation theology.

Both theologians after the Council ended up ideologically separated.

Ratzinger, who as Kung was a professor of theology, ended up straying from the council's more progressive theses and even wrote a book answering many of the progressive theses that he had helped to pass.

He became a cardinal and returned to Rome to lead the Congregation of the Faith, the ancient Inquisition.

It was Ratzinger who ended up condemning his old colleague from the Vatican Council for his open theses, including his rejection of papal infallibility.

Kung was a great lecturer, an open and modern person who never abandoned the idea of ​​conciliating a renewed Church that would open a dialogue with the modern world.

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After the council I found Kung in his modern house in Tübingen, full of books everywhere and already then modernized in the technological means of communication.

I was working with several computers at the same time.

He welcomed me for an interview for EL PAÍS with great sympathy and we remember the times of the council when he was harassed by the foreign press that came from all over the world along with the 3,000 bishops of the Church.

Modern theology owes much to that young Swiss priest who was one of the leading voices in the advice of the most outspoken bishops.

It was due to Kung one of the most revolutionary themes that the Vatican Council has come to approve: that sexuality was not only aimed at procreation, but that it was a “new language” of communicating people.

Kung would have got on with Pope Francis better than with previous popes.

She hoped that he would end the compulsory celibacy of the Church and give way to study so that women could enter the priesthood as they were in the early days of the Church.

For the Swiss theologian, Francis brought a "new spring for the Church and meant a theological break with Benedict XVI."

Kung was the prophet of a Church that needed to revise its dogmas to open itself to a new world and had a great influence on the young clergy who followed him as a new prophet, creator of a Church open to the world after having shed the old garments. theological of a Church that had separated itself from the new needs demanded by the new times.

Kung is also responsible for a theology that opened the doors to the woman whose entry into the hierarchy of the Church he always defended.

Kung had a great influence on the new generations of young priests who were formed with him throughout the world.

Here in Brazil, where I am writing these lines, one of Kung's faithful followers was the Franciscan theologian, Leonardo Boff, another of the mainstays of liberation theology with its modern aspect of Earth Theology.

Boff, like Kung, was also condemned by Cardinal Ratzinger, who forbade him to teach and write.

I remember today the morning when he went through the process with Ratzinger that lasted several hours.

When he left, he told me several anecdotes of that difficult encounter.

When the cardinal was beginning to ask him questions, Boff, who was dressed in his religious habit, told him: “In my church in Brazil we Christians usually make a prayer to God before starting any important task.

The cardinal with a serious face stood up and said to him: "Let us then recite the" Come Holy Spirit. "

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