My Struggle for Freedom: Memoirs (review)

Abstract

My Struggle for Freedom: Memoirs. By Hans Kung. Translated by John Bowden. (Grand Rapids, Michigan: William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company. 2003. Pp. xvii, 478. $38.00.) Hans Kung's memoirs cover his first forty years (1928-1968). Roughly third is devoted to his childhood Switzerland, his education at the Collegium Germanicum and Gregorian University Rome, and his first forays into theological scholarship (most portentously his massive commentary on Karl Earth's theology of justification). He then moves to what he identifies as the most important part of the story: his participation 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: personal struggle for freedom 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 Kung's portrayal of his own importance these events. But Kung offers concrete evidence of his popularity with reformminded laity and clergy-including bishops as dissimilar as Frings of Cologne, Suenens of Brussels, and Gushing of Boston. He documents his high profile the Vatican II years, recalling, with unconcealed satisfaction, huge audiences and spontaneous applause. Mary McGrory (writing America June of 1963) called him the youngest, most famous and perhaps most controversial 'expert' at the Vatican Council, and described Catholic University audience of three thousand sitting in rapt silence for an hour and forty minutes, ending with a standing ovation (p. 314). Kung 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 hall of over thousand on three different nights 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 Kung of different but no less admired new frontier. He understandably has very kind words for his time the United States. Kung is an ecumenist, European, and cosmopolitan; but he is also Swiss and proud of it. References to mythic dates the history of Swiss independence (1291,1315,1386) supply patriotic motives to the freedom theme. Kung deftly defends Swiss neutrality 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 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 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 reformer. In tone and content Kung never falters 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 repertoriai 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 Kung makes the most of those links. …