Can We Save the Catholic Church?

February 24, 2014
The Catholic Church is hemorrhaging members and is in dire need of assistance, proclaims Kung, prominent theologian at the University of Tubingen and founder of the Global Ethic Foundation. According to the author, in the decades following the second Vatican Council, the church's hierarchy became more entrenched, ossified, and resistant to change. Droves of faithful are leaving Catholicism for other denominations, and young people do not consider organized religion relevant to their lives. This assessment is highly credible, as it comes from a man with a strong intellectual voice and a wise heart, who was present at Vatican II and who has been fighting for reform for five decades. The author's response to the question posed in the title is, "Yes," but only if the hierarchy, along with the people in the pews, return to the foundational message of Jesus and discard the trappings of power, pomp, and prestige. These were never meant to define the Church, which needs to embrace its initial mission to spread God's word.

Starred review from January 1, 2014
The German Swiss priest and theologianand most famous and prolific contemporary critic of the Roman Catholic Churchportrays it as a gravely ill patient in need of radical therapy to recover and thrive. It is suffering from the Roman system, a centralized, hierarchical structure of authority, monarchical in character and imperial in action. Established in the eleventh century by means of a clutch of forgeries (e.g., the Donation of Constantine), that system is, Kng says, primarily responsible for the Orthodox-Roman schism, the Protestant reformation, and the antiscientific and antidemocratic bias in Christianity. Ever entrenching the power of the pope and the Vatican bureaucracy, especially after the 1870 declaration of papal infallibility and again after the second Vatican Council, the system continues to harm the church, driving out believers, lay and clerical, who question it, discouraging vocations to the priesthood, and thwarting ecumenism. Kng's prescription for restoring the church to health is many-faceted, but its effective ingredients derive from early Christianity; it is deeply reformist and revivalist, not revolutionary. Although the translation is idiomatically shaky here and there (e.g., ethician rather than ethicist), and Kng favors precision to scintillation, this updated revision of a 2011 German original is an invaluable summation of a great religious critic's life work.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2014, American Library Association.)