Religion: Greater Voice for the Laity

Among the most impatient and influential advocates of greater freedom in the Catholic Church is Hans Küng, 39, Swiss-born priest and professor of theology at West Germany’s Tubingen University. One of the officially invited theological advisers at Vatican II, Küng has earned both liberal praise and conservative censure for his provocative criticisms of his church. Last week, wearing his usual necktie instead of a Roman collar, Küng arrived in the U.S. for his first extended visit in five years. An enthusiastic ecumenist, he will teach courses in divine justification and the sacraments during the spring semester at Manhattan’s Protestant Union Theo logical Seminary. Characteristically, Küng came armed with a quiver of new questions for Catholicism.

One of his themes is that laymen should have a voice in selecting parish priests—as they already do in Switzerland—and bishops. He is confident that laymen’s councils, which have been formed in many parishes since Vatican II, will become ever more widespread, and independent. More than that, he argues that methods should be set up, perhaps through an elected synod of laymen, for the laity to have some say in picking the Pope. He believes that the church’s structure ought to be revised in order to “transform our system of absolutistic authority into one based on mutual service and partnership.”

Küng raises still another idea in a book, The Church, which came out in Germany last year and will be published in the U.S. next month. In it, he even suggests setting up procedures for recalling ecclesiastics who prove incompetent—including the Pope. Though some Popes have been ousted in the distant past, present canon law contains no provision for deposing a Pope, even if he should become physically or mentally incapacitated. But, writes Kung, “the idea that the Pope is the servant of the church must be extended to include the possibility of the Pope’s having to resign or being deposed.”