Hell’s Apostle Called to Judgment: Über-Modernist Theologian Hans Küng Dead at 93
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April 6, 2021April 6, 2021
“Give an account of thy stewardship…” (Lk 16:2)
Hell’s Apostle Called to Judgment:
(https://novusordowatch.org/wp-content/uploads/hans-kung-2011-grayscale.jpg)
Über-Modernist Theologian Hans Küng Dead at 93
Big news on Easter Tuesday: One of the world’s most dangerous, most notorious, and most prolific apostates has been called to judgment.
We are talking about the Swiss theologian Fr. Hans Küng. According to reports (https://www.die-tagespost.de/gesellschaft/feuilleton/Als-sich-Hans-Kueng-gegen-Rom-gestellt-hat;art310,185357), the famous “church critic” died in his sleep on April 6, 2021, at his home in Tübingen, Germany.
Born on Mar. 19, 1928, Kung was ordained a priest for the diocese of Basel, Switzerland, on Oct. 10, 1954, clearly one of the most fateful mistakes in ecclesiastical history.
The Holy Office under Pope Pius XII took notice of Kung right away. Although his denial of the Faith later became manifest and tenacious, Kung always remained a priest in good standing with his diocese. He taught “theology” at the University of Tübingen since 1960.
Together with Fr. Joseph Ratzinger (“Pope Emeritus” Benedict XVI (https://novusordowatch.org/benedict-xvi/)), Fr. Kung was one of those suit-and-tie-wearing “theological experts” at the Modernist Second Vatican Council (1962-65) (https://novusordowatch.org/2020/03/theological-errors-of-vatican2/), called to his advisory role as a competent “Catholic theologian” by “Pope” John XXIII (https://novusordowatch.org/john-xxiii/). By contrast, the then-orthodox Catholic University of America issued an interdict against Kung in 1963 for his lecture “The Church and Freedom”. Though Ratzinger and Kung went separate theological ways, with Ratzinger preferring a more moderate Modernism (which, being moderate and therefore not as easily identifiable, is actually more dangerous, as Fr. Felix Sarda shows in Liberalism is a Sin (https://web.archive.org/web/20160324203726/http://www.sedevacantist.com/liberalism.htm)), whereas Kung decided to go full-steam ahead and reason Modernist principles to their logical conclusions.
Due to his performance at the council, Mgr. Joseph Fenton called Küng “king of the nuts” in his personal diary (https://novusordowatch.org/2017/07/vatican2-diaries-fenton/). But Fenton also spoke against Kung in public, such as in this article:
- “The Roman Curia and the Ecuмenical Council” (https://www.catholicculture.org/culture/library/view.cfm?recnum=2930) by Mgr. Joseph Clifford Fenton (1963)
By the early 1970s, Kung had become a notorious denier of the dogma of papal infallibility as defined at the First Vatican Council in 1870. His 1971 book Infallible? An Inquiry generated untold controversy. After numerous quarrels with the Novus Ordo Vatican’s Congregation for the Destruction of the Faith, on December 15, 1979, the Congregation’s Prefect, “Cardinal” Francis Seper, declared several of Kung’s books to contain errors incompatible with Catholic — even Novus Ordo! — teaching and announced that Kung was no longer permitted to teach theology under the name of “Catholic” and could not be considered a Catholic theologian (see the Novus Ordo “Acta Apostolicae Sedis” (http://www.vatican.va/archive/aas/index_en.htm) 72 [1980], pp. 90-92).
Despite his clear heresies and the dangerous influence he held as an active university professor, the Vatican never excommunicated Kung, did not suspend him, and did not even remove his priestly faculties. The effect was that Kung continued teaching as before at the same university, though no longer as part of the “Catholic” faculty. He became professor of “ecuмenical” theology instead. The secular world has long hailed him as a courageous “rebel Catholic” and frequently consulted him on “controversial” Catholic questions as a “critical voice of reason” against (what they perceived to be) the militantly-hardline Vatican.
On September 26, 2005, a newly-elected “Pope” Benedict XVI (Ratzinger) met with Kung in the Vatican for a chit-chat, and a chit-chat is really all it was. Kung described the meeting as “very joyful” and with “no reproaches, no polemics” from Ratzinger (see John Allen’s coverage of the meeting here (http://nationalcatholicreporter.org/update/bn092605.htm)). This did not come as a surprise to those who knew the real Joseph Ratzinger — as opposed to the pseudo-traditionalist face put on him (https://novusordowatch.org/2019/08/benedict16-mission-fatima-rest-of-story/) by his cheerleaders at The Remnant & Co. — because in his 1996 book Salt of the Earth (https://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0898706408/interregnumnow-20), Ratzinger had already said about Kung: “I respect his path, which he takes in accord with his conscience…” (Ignatius Press, p. 96). By “his path”, Ratzinger was referring precisely to the theological views Kung had developed against Catholic (even Novus Ordo) doctrine (see pp. 95-96).
When Jorge Bergoglio became “Pope Francis” (https://novusordowatch.org/francis/) in 2013, Kung quickly recognized a kindred spirit in the new “Holy Father.” He endorsed Francis’ first exhortation, Evangelii Gaudium, and said there was no longer a reason to be a “Pope critic” now:
- Hans Kung Endorses “Pope Francis” – ‘Nuff Said! (https://novusordowatch.org/2013/03/hans-kung-endorses-francis/) (2013)
- Hans Kung welcomes Francis’ “Evangelii Gaudium” (https://novusordowatch.org/2013/11/hans-kung-praises-evangelii-gaudium/) (2013)
- Hans Kung No Longer “Pope Critic”, finds Francis awesome (https://novusordowatch.org/2014/03/kung-no-more-pope-critic/) (2014)
It is no wonder that Francis, himself an apostate, gave Küng explicit “permission” to dispute freely the Catholic dogma of papal infallibility:
- Hans Küng: Francis Allows Free Discussion on Infallibility Dogma (https://novusordowatch.org/2016/04/kung-francis-infallibility/) (2016)
In December of 2013, the German magazine Der Spiegel had interviewed Kung and asked him if he was going to heaven, considering that he is reputed to be a heretic. Kung’s answer was presumptuous of his eternal salvation, denied the existence of hell, and, of course, rejected the idea that he is a heretic:
SPIEGEL: Professor Küng, will you go to Heaven?
Küng: Well I certainly hope so. [German: “Das hoffe ich doch sehr.” NOW comment: The way the answer is phrased in German suggests not the theological virtue of hope but a presumption that he is deserving of Heaven and it would be an affront to him should he not be admitted.]
SPIEGEL: What would indicate that you will go to hell [instead] is you being a heretic in the eyes of the Church.
Küng: I am not a heretic but a critical reform theologian, who, in contrast to many of his critics, does not use medieval theology, liturgy, and canon law as his standard but the Gospel.
SPIEGEL: Does hell even exist?
Küng: All the talk about hell is a warning that a man can completely miss the meaning of his life. I do not believe in an eternal hell.
SPIEGEL: If hell means losing the meaning of life, then that is a fairly earthly conception.
Küng: Sartre says that hell is other people. Men make their own hell, for example in wars like in Syria or also in an unscrupulous capitalism.
(Hans Kung, “Ich hänge nicht an diesem Leben (https://www.spiegel.de/kultur/ich-haenge-nicht-an-diesem-leben-a-1bf72425-0002-0001-0000-000123679036)” (http://www.spiegel.de/spiegel/print/d-123679036.html), Der Spiegel, Dec. 9, 2013; underlining added; our translation.)
Towards the end of his life, Kung was contemplating ѕυιcιdє, since he was gradually going blind and could no longer read and write properly:
- Apostate Hans Kung going blind, ponders Euthanasia ѕυιcιdє (https://novusordowatch.org/2013/09/hans-kung-euthanasia/)
Küng’s death is an important reminder to all of us that no matter how “endless” and even successful someone’s career of apostasy seems to be, eventually it does end. Everything earthly must end, and just as Kung has now died after 93 years on this earth, so the Novus Ordo Sect will one day collapse and all its heresies and blasphemies will be no more.
So too for each one of us. We will all find ourselves, sooner or later, before the all-just Judge: “Therefore every one of us shall render account to God for himself” (Rom 14:12).
How sobering are the words of the sequence Dies Irae (https://www.newadvent.org/cathen/04787a.htm) which Holy Mother Church recites at Requiem Masses:
What shall I, frail man, be pleading?
Who for me be interceding,
When the just are mercy needing?
Ladies and gentlemen, Our Blessed Lord and Savior Jesus Christ spilled His Most Precious Blood also for Hans Küng. We must not desire anyone’s damnation. However, barring a last-minute miracle of conversion to which we are not privy, Fr. Kung appears to have died impenitent and received the due eternal reward of his apostasy.
Either way, the world now has one soul-destroying apostate less, and that is a good thing.
Image source: Wikimedia Commons (UNED Universidad Nacional de Educación a Distancia; cropped; modified)
License: CC BY 2.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0/deed.en)
I know that I should not post anything from Novus Ordo Watch. This is not reported by any other poster.
I'd like to study more WHAT was condemned. If it was condemned to say that the sun is fixed, then science has since proven that the sun moves ... even by their standards. Now, I'm a firm believer in geocentrism ... and even lean toward a flat immovable earth, but I might be interested in studying precisely what was condemned and why.
I shall begin the questions asked on the subject with you Ladislaus.
Here is the 1616 decree, the one that led to the condemnations and then Galileo's trial in 1633. It explains exactly why Galileo's natural and Biblican sun did not orbit the Earth.
(1) “That the sun is in the centre of the world and altogether immovable by local movement,” was unanimously declared to be “foolish, philosophically absurd, and formally heretical [denial of a revelation by God] inasmuch as it expressly contradicts the declarations of Holy Scripture in many passages, according to the proper meaning of the language used, and the sense in which they have been expounded and understood by [all] the Fathers and theologians.”
(2) “That the Earth is not the centre of the world, and moves as a whole, and also with a diurnal movement,” was unanimously declared “to deserve the same censure philosophically, and, theologically considered to be at least erroneous in faith.”
In his letter to Foscarini below, Cardinal Bellarmine explains why the Church condemned the denial of a LOCAL (from one place to another) movement of the sun around the Earth as formal heresy, NOTHING MORE. 'Science' they say, has proven it is the Earth that orbits the sun, not the other way around. Science cannot do that as cosmology for the last hundred years has admitted.
‘Second. I say that, as you know, the Council of Trent prohibits expounding the Scriptures contrary to the common agreement of the holy Fathers. And if Your Reverence would read not only the Fathers but also the commentaries of modern writers on Genesis, Psalms, Ecclesiastes and Josue, you would find that all agree in explaining literally (ad litteram) that the sun is in the heavens and moves swiftly around the Earth, and that the Earth is far from the heavens and stands immobile in the centre of the universe. Now consider whether in all prudence the Church could encourage giving to Scripture a sense contrary to the holy Fathers and all the Latin and Greek commentators. Nor may it be answered that this is not a matter of faith, for if it is not a matter of faith from the point of view of the subject matter (ex parte objecti), it is a matter of faith on the part of the ones who have spoken (ex parte dicentis). It would be just as heretical to deny that Abraham had two sons and Jacob twelve, as it would be to deny the virgin birth of Christ, for both are declared by the Holy Ghost through the prophets and apostles.’
Fr Roberts’s arguments on the authority of the 1616 ruling:
‘It is satisfactory to obtain so frank an acknowledgment from my opponent that the terms of the condemnation meant “heresy,” and nothing short of it; that the Pope and the ecclesiastical authorities considered, and in effect said, that heliocentricism is a heresy. Now, I submit that, no matter who says it, ‘whether a ‘Pope speaking ex cathedrâ, or a mere layman, whoever says categorically that an opinion is “heresy,” ipso facto says that the contradictory of that opinion has been revealed by God with sufficient certainty to oblige a Catholic to accept it by an act of divine faith. To generate an obligation of faith, it is by no means necessary that the witness to the fact of revelation should claim for his testimony infallible certainty, but only such certainty as will exclude all prudent fear, ne non locutus sit Deus…..
It is important to bear in mind that in the case before us the Index was called into action to give effect to the decision of the Congregation of the Holy Office, a Congregation that is in a very special way under Papal direction. The Pope as pope is its president. He is present at its meetings every Thursday. He has informed the Church that he reserves the presidency of this Congregation to himself, because of the intimate connection of its decisions with the preservation of the faith. But if the Pope when he acts as its president never intends to act in the capacity wherein he is divinely secured from making mistakes, how delusive is this assurance! What good does the Church get from his presidency? The Pope not divinely assisted is likely, nay, in a vast number of cases, far more likely, to decide erroneously than some of his Cardinals. And as to his superior authority, the more authoritative an erroneous decision is, the more harm it is likely to do. Either, then, the judgments in question are ex cathedrâ; or the Pope claims to decide doctrinal questions for all Catholics in a capacity in which he is liable to make mistakes, and so the Holy See may be a source of error to the Church Universal; or the Pope’s prerogative of inerrancy belongs to him even when he is not speaking ex cathedrâ. Of course there was not, and there could not have been, the remotest intention of making geocentricism a matter of faith by the mere force of a definition; but the question the Copernican controversy raised was whether the doctrine of the sun’s diurnal movement was not already of faith in virtue of the plain statements of Holy Scripture [and judgments of previous popes against Pythagoreanism]. The Roman church, as John De Lugo says, propounds the whole of Holy Scripture, and every part of it, to be received as the Word of God, so that to contradict the express assertion of a sacred writer is not less heresy than to contradict the definition of a general council. To say that Abraham had not two sons is not less heresy than to say that our Lord had not two wills. Unquestionably the sacred writers, in terms, ascribe diurnal movement to the sun [daily orbit]; therefore, urged the anti-Copernican theologian, the theory that denies that movement is false and heretical. The conclusion is irresistible, if the language objected is so expressed as to forbid the supposition that not real, but only apparent movement may be meant. And that it is so expressed is what Rome in effect decided, when on the one hand she pronounced the heliocentric theses false, and altogether adverse to the divine Scriptures and on the other condemned as destructive to Catholic truth the advocacy of an opposite opinion [1616]. After this, the thoroughly submissive Catholic had no alternative but to recognise the heretical character of the new system; yet the decision plainly proceeded on the assumption that the matter was not open to legitimate doubt before its issue; and therefore, however clearly ex cathedrâ, it would be a judgment of a very different kind from that by which the doctrine of the Immaculate Conception was defined. On turning to Marie Dominique Bouix’s Tractatus de Curia Romana we learn that there are three kinds of Congregational decrees; (1) Those that the Pope puts forth in his own name after consulting a Congregation; (2) Those that a Congregation puts forth in its own name with the Pope’s confirmation, or express order to publish. (3) Those that a Congregation with the Pope’s sanction puts forth in its own name, but without the Pope’s confirmation or express order to publish. Decrees of the first and second class, we are told, are certainly ex cathedrâ, and to be received with unqualified assent under pain of mortal sin. According to Fr Antonio Zaccaria, a very great authority, even decrees of the last class are not fallible, in the sense that they can ever condemn as erroneous a doctrine which is not so.’
We see Fr Roberts’s contention then was that whereas the 1616 ruling was not an extraordinary definition of a pope defining a new dogma, such as Pope Pius IX’s definition of the Immaculate Conception in 1854, but was an infallible act of the Ordinary magisterium protecting what was always a matter of faith; the unanimous teaching of the Fathers, one of those ‘never intended to be brought to light’ matters of faith as the Council of Trent categorised them. This was the exact position held by the popes and Cardinal Bellarmine when in 1640 the 1616 decree was publicly introduced as condemning ‘the false Pythagorean doctrine’ already condemned by many Fathers and popes in the past centuries.
But Fr Roberts believed that geocentrism was proven wrong. So he, like Hans Kung, had to conclude the dogma of infallibility of Vatican I was a false doctrine.
‘But it is almost as easy to show that the condemnation of Copernicanism was not in this sense a safe judgment, as to show that it was not a true one, to prove that it was a mistake at all. For what was the doctrine of that judgment as it was authoritatively interpreted by Rome? This: that heliocentricism is false and altogether contrary to the divine Scriptures, meaning by the phrase, as the monitum (1620) explained it; “repugnant to the true and Catholic interpretation of Scripture.” In other words, according to the ruling of Pope Urban VIII and the Pontifical Congregation of the Inquisition, the decision taught that heliocentrism is a heresy to be abjured, cursed, and detested with the other heresies opposed to the Holy Catholic and Apostolic Roman Church. Now, it is as clear as daylight that if all Catholics had embraced this doctrine with unreserved assent, “plene, perfecte, et absolute,” all Catholics would have held it to be of faith that heliocentrism is false, and thus the whole Church would so far have been in error in its faith. But for the whole Church to be in error in any point it holds to be of faith is plainly irreconcilable with the passive infallibility claimed for it by theologians, or even with its claims to be infallible in its ordinary magisterium, for what it believes it will surely teach “credidi propter quod locutus sum.” And apart from this consideration, obviously it must be against the cause of the Christian faith for all Christians to be persuaded that its teachings conflict with, and demand the suppression and complete elimination from thought of, opinions that are on their way to be proved true…..’ Fr Roberts: The Pontifical Decrees, pp.13-20. quoted in the book The Earthmovers.