Infallibility issue cries out for Vatican III
HANS KÜNG is professor of ecumenical theology at the University of Tübingen, Germany. The famous former Vatican II peritus incurred Vatican censure after he wrote his 1970 book, Infallible? An Inquiry. We quote from his essay which appeared both in the NCR (12/15) and in The Tablet (12/16).
AFTER THE COUNCIL THE TEACHING authority continued to be exercised in Rome in the old preconciliar style with regard to contraception (against the advice of the Pope's own commission), celibacy, and many other things. In 1970 this was the occasion of the book I have already mentioned, Infallible? An Inquiry. After Catholic theologians kept silent following the withdrawal of my licence to teach on 18 December 1979, for understandable fear of similar disciplinary measures, they now see themselves faced by the latest Roman decree. It presents them with a dilemma that they can only avoid against their better judgement. Either they accept the "infallible" doctrine of the ordinary and universal magisterium, in which case they must advocate the impossibility of the ordination of women and much else with "full, definitive, and thus irrevocable assent", and must join with the Pope in saying that women are excluded from the priesthood now and for ever; or they advocate the possibility of women being ordained, with good theological reasons for doing so -- but in this case they are obliged with all due decorum to call the infallibility of the Church's teaching authority into question.
In doing so, would they find themselves in bad company? Not at all. This recent peculiar Roman doctrine, only taught officially from Vatican I onwards, has never been accepted by the Orthodox Churches of the East nor by the Churches of the Reformation, let alone the majority of Catholics. And I cannot help asking what people may have thought in Geneva or Canterbury (let alone among Old Catholics) when the Pope now infallibly condemns a practice that has long since been tried and tested in the Churches of the Reformation. It is hardly possible to kick our ecumenical brothers and sisters in the teeth more roughly than this Pope has done.
In this one thing needs to be made clear. In the case of the latest Roman doctrinal decisions with regard to the ordination of women, contraception and abortion (oddly enough it is always women who are affected), what is involved is not some more or less arbitrary action on the part of Cardinal Ratzinger. What is involved is the statement that in practice cannot be ignored of a teaching authority which, as in the Galileo case or the condemnation of religious freedom, human rights or modern biblical exegesis, turns its own tradition into an idol and which in its blindness still claims to have God's Holy Spirit and Jesus Christ on its side. In other words Rome is not behaving arbitrarily but in keeping with a pattern. And for reasons of sheer self-respect, Catholic theology can no longer avoid examining this pattern and the problem of the infallibility of the magisterium. It is an either-or choice.
...The medieval, Counter-Reforma- tion, anti-modernist pattern of the Church which even after the Council holds the Roman curia in thrall has had its day. Since Vatican II, which tried belatedly to integrate the Reformation and modern paradigms but in doing so made compromises, as in the question of infallibility, that have serious consequences, the expectation of many Catholics is that the reform of the Church for the third millennium must be carried on at a third Vatican Council.
This would release Catholic theology, now so intimidated, from the dilemma in which it finds itself at present. And after the black week suffered by the present Pope, whose compassionless rigorism has notoriously done more to divide than unite the Church, a week that will be recorded in the history of this pontificate (defeat in the Polish presidential elections, the church referendum in Germany, defeat in the divorce referendum in Ireland), even many people in the Roman Curia will be asking themselves if they should continue with this inflexible policy now that it no longer has the support even of the Poles and the Irish, the Germans and the Austrians. As always, the question is: if the Catholic Church is to have a future in the third millennium after Christ, it must renounce this medieval Roman system in favour of genuine catholicity and this is not just my conviction. The last absolute monarchy of God's grace in Europe, this spiritual dictatorship, must be replaced by a genuine pastoral papal primacy in the spirit of Gregory the Great and John XXIII. What we must be able to hear from Rome once again is the voice of the good shepherd.
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