My Struggle for Freedom: Memoirs (review)

Hans Küng's memoirs cover his first forty years (1928–1968). Roughly a third is devoted to his childhood in Switzerland, his education at the Collegium Germanicum and Gregorian University in Rome, and his first forays into theological scholarship (most portentously his massive commentary on Karl Barth's theology of justification). He then moves to what he identifies as the most important part of the story: his participation in the events leading to Vatican Council II, his role at the Council itself, and his evaluation of the aftermath (pp. 169–463). The story is told, as one would expect, from his distinctive point of view: a personal struggle for freedom in the pursuit of theological truth, and the Christian liberty of the whole church, the royal priesthood, the people of God. Early on he chafes at the petty discipline of the seminary. Later the stakes are much higher.

It is his story, and properly so. A reader predisposed to doubt the accuracy of any memoir will mistrust Küng's portrayal of his own importance in these events. But Küng offers concrete evidence of his popularity with reform-minded laity and clergy—including bishops as dissimilar as Frings of Cologne, Suenens of Brussels, and Cushing of Boston. He documents his high profile in the Vatican II years, recalling, with unconcealed satisfaction, huge audiences and spontaneous applause. Mary McGrory (writing in America in June of 1963) called him the "youngest, most famous and perhaps most controversial 'expert' at the Vatican Council," and described a Catholic University audience of three thousand sitting "in rapt silence" for an hour and forty minutes, ending with "a standing ovation" (p. 314). Küng estimates the average audience on his 1963 tour of America at three thousand—rising on occasion to five, six, or eight thousand. I can believe it, for I have seen him hold the attention of a hall of over a thousand on three different nights in Ann Arbor—in long and unforgivingly academic examinations of the theology of eternal life. His fame—or notoriety—carried him right into Kennedy's Oval Office, citadel to Küng of a different but no less admired new frontier. He understandably has very kind words for his time in the United States.

Küng is an ecumenist, a European, and a cosmopolitan; but he is also Swiss and proud of it. References to mythic dates in the history of Swiss independence (1291, 1315, 1386) supply patriotic motives to the freedom theme. Küng deftly defends Swiss neutrality in World War II, and finds no Nazi sympathizers among his family or his family's circle of friends. Swiss political culture forms his outlook on the world—"an almost instinctive antipathy to all dictatorship in state, church and society, to all state totalitarianism and ecclesiastical integralism"—and makes him "resistant to the worship of church leaders and the idolization of institutions, whether party or church." It nourishes democracy, human dignity, and toleration, but also a sense of responsibility (p. 16). These brief pages are offered as an insight into the values and passions that impel him to his career as a reformer.

In tone and content Küng never falters in his commitment to the principle ecclesia semper reformanda. He does not shrink from recording his impatient, aggressive, censorious, and hostile responses to the forces of repression and retrogression—yet there is a reportorial quality about them that can transcend the personal. He recaptures the intensity of the struggle at Vatican II between freedom and obedience, reform and tradition—and the disputes these tensions produced over collegiality, "curialism," ecumenism, liturgy, sacramental theology and practice, and, above all, the application of historical criticism to scripture, doctrine, and moral theology. Much of the agenda of the reformers recalls the Reformation of the sixteenth century—and Küng makes the most of those links. But he also defends his Catholicity.

Küng effectively conveys the excitement of aggiornamento, but...