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The Vatican's Double
Standard
by Christopher A. Ferrara
 As the Vatican
hounds and harasses Father Nicholas Gruner and his Fatima apostolate with
threats of ruin and disgrace, Father Hans Küng, the most notorious heretic
of the post-conciliar era, goes his merry way as a priest in good standing of
the Diocese of Basel. Undeterred by his rather mild censure in 1980 (the
Vatican said he could no longer function as a Catholic theologian, although he
continues as such de facto), Küng continues to promote his
heretical views in books and lectures.
A book review in
the LA Times alerted me to Küng’s latest serving of
heterodoxy. As the reviewer notes, in his just-published book The Catholic
Church: A Short History, Küng continues to insist that Our Lord never
intended to found an institutional Church, but only “a group of believers
who saw themselves as distinct from Judaism.” The reviewer discusses
Küng’s claim that “Jesus radiated a democratic
spirit”—which is news to Catholics, who recall that Christ identified
Himself as a King during the inquisition by Pilate, and that the Church
celebrates the Feast of Christ the King each year.
According to
Küng’s book “when His [Christ’s] followers referred to
their ‘ecclesia’ (church), they didn’t mean an institution, only
‘a community gathering at a particular place.’” This would mean,
of course, that the Pope is not really the Vicar of Christ who has juridical
authority over the whole Church. No, Küng has long denied that papal
authority has a Scriptural basis. As the reviewer observes: “He [Kung]
ruffled quite a few ecclesiastical robes when he argued that papal authority
was unsupported by Scripture.”
In his book
Küng informs us how he (like any good modernist) remains unbowed by the
Vatican’s censure: “Despite all my experiences of how merciless the
Roman system can be, the Catholic Church, this fellowship of believers, has
remained my spiritual home to the present day.” How big of him.
Even the secular
book reviewer was struck by Küng’s lack of academic objectivity and
his penchant for name-calling: “In depicting the [alleged] distortions of
papal power, however, Kung teeters early, and often, into name-calling. For
him, Augustine was a propagandist for Rome; Thomas Aquinas was a papal lackey
and a weak theologian (‘He was no Luther,’ he says); Pius IX showed
‘the symptoms of a psychopath.’ In so short a book, attacks like
these pile up, ruining a chance to let instances of abuse speak for
themselves.”
So, to sum up:
According to Küng, Christ founded no Church, Saint Augustine was a Roman
propagandist, Saint Thomas Aquinas was a papal lackey and Blessed Pius IX was a
psychopath. This is the man whose writings the Vatican Secretary of State,
Cardinal Angelo Sodano, publicly praised in his 1998 speech at the Lateran. Yet
Sodano is, at this very moment, overseeing the campaign to silence Father
Gruner with a preposterous sentence of excommunication.
The double
standard exhibited by Sodano—benign neglect and even praise for heretics
but harsh persecution for orthodox priests considered “pre-conciliar”
in their orientation—is a disgrace of historical proportions. When the
history of this time is written, the account of this shameful duplicity will no
doubt figure prominently, just as it did in the time of Saint Basil the Great:
“Only one offense is now vigorously punished—an accurate observance
of our fathers' traditions.”
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