Sunday, July 25, 2010

Hans Küng’s Malthusian Moment

by Samuel Gregg D.Phil.

[Acton Institute] In April, the world received yet another global missive from the 82-year-old Swiss theologian, Fr. Hans Küng. Perhaps the world's most famous Catholic dissenter from Catholic teaching, Fr. Küng's "open letter" to the world's Catholic bishops contained his usual critique of the papacy and his now-tediously familiar prescriptions for changing the Catholic Church.

Almost 31 years ago, Rome and Germany's Catholic bishops stripped Küng of his license to teach as a Catholic theologian because, by Küng's own admission, he does not believe in some central tenets of the Catholic faith. Some would say Rome's action was merely an exercise in ensuring truth in advertizing. This has not stopped Küng, however, from continuing to exhort Catholicism to adopt the path followed by many mainline Protestant confessions in the West since the 1960s. As George Weigel has noted, Küng's letter is full of misrepresentations and shoddy logic. Moreover, Küng seems oblivious to the sociological fact that those Christian communities which have embraced paths similar to that which he advocates for Catholicism are in a state of terminal collapse. Devoid of doctrinal coherence, they are often led by clerics for whom God's existence and Christ's Divinity are open questions, whose conception of morality is as relativistic as your average lefty-secularist, but who purport to know with absolute certainty that the world is headed for a climate change-driven apocalypse.

Read further:

http://www.acton.org/commentary/587_hans_kungs_malthusian_moment.php
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