No one requires more of a heavy duty helmet than Fr Hans Küng, the Swiss-born theologian. Fr Küng is a priest in good standing with the Church, although he has had a long and frequently controversial history within it and the Vatican has revoked his authority to teach Catholic theology.
It wasn’t always thus: In 1960, Fr Küng was appointed professor of theology at Eberhard Karls University, Tubingen, Germany.
In 1962, Pope John XXIII appointed him, along with his colleague Joseph Ratzinger, as an expert theological advisor to members of the Second Vatican Council until its conclusion in 1965.
At the end of last month, Fr Küng published an open letter to all Catholic Bishops in which he criticised the Pope's handling of a number of issues including the abuse/cover up scandal which has shaken the Church to its fundaments.
In that letter, he called on bishops to consider six proposals, ranging from speaking up and working on regional solutions, to calling for another Vatican council.
Uh, oh, I thought.
Here it comes.
And come it did: ‘Hans Küng is a heretic plain and simple. In addition to having been barred from teaching Catholic theology he should now be publically (sic) excommunicated.’ And that was the most coherent of the condemnatory emailers, some of whom would have been pleased to see the faggots being piled high in St Peter’s Square in preparation for Fr Küng’s despatch to a higher court.
But wait, there was more: ‘Hans is no more in communion with the pope than was Martin Luther!’ Yikes!
Fr Küng was accused of heresy but you did not read those posts, and will not read similar ones accusing a retired Australian bishop of the same crime.
If there is an accusation of heresy to be made I would rather it came from someone with the credentials to make it, not some random, anonymous outraged and outrageous individual hiding behind the anonymity of a nom de plume and seemingly untroubled by any formal theological background or even charity.
It’s a dreadful thing to accuse a fellow Christian of heresy and we have all seen where it can lead – the death of innocents. Consider Joan of Arc – burned at the stake for heresy in 1431, canonised in 1920.
The Dominican friar Savonarola, charged with ‘heresy, uttering prophecies, sedition, and other crimes called religious errors’ by Alexander VI and also burned at the stake in 1498. The half-sister Queens Elizabeth and Mary – both ruled at a time when the wrong faith could earn you a charge of heresy and get you killed.
The Inquisition in Spain? Same outcome for many of the unwary or unwise. Salem witch trials on 1692 – hundreds accused of heresy, 19 men and women hanged.
The last person condemned to death for heresy was Cayetano Ripoll, a poor Spanish school teacher hanged in Valencia in 1826. Accused of teaching deist principles, he was under sentence from a 'Church authority'. His last words reportedly were: ‘I die reconciled to God and to man.’ Cayetano might well have been guilty of speaking freely, something taken for granted in the West now, so the sentence seems not only excessively harsh but resoundingly unchristian.
Given the patchy nature of charges of heresy – which seems more about earthly power than faith – you will understand my refusal to allow the discussion boards of CathNews to be used as a conduit to level them.
However, they have returned me to reading about one of the early heresies in the church, that of the Donatists of Carthage. I became interested in them during the time I was researching a book in North Africa.
In short, the Donatists believed that the moral character of the minister affected the sacraments and refused to allow that the sacrament of penitence had redeemed Christians who had betrayed other Christians to the Romans. It required rebaptism for those who had done so.
That belief, which arose in the early 300s, lasted for more than 100 years and was not finally extinguished until the Arab invasion in the 700s. In the meantime, the Donatists did their best to wipe themselves out. Adopting the battle cry Deo laudes (God be praised) to counter the traditional Deo gratias (Thanks be to God), they actively sought martyrdom.
Like some contemporary jihadi, Donatus believed that death for the cause, even by suicide, was holy and so earned eternal life. When they could not provoke Catholics and pagans to murder and thus martyr them, they sometimes took their own lives by the most easily available method – jumping off cliffs while shouting Deo laudes.
According to Catholic Online, St Augustine recounted an incident of Donatist blood lust: ‘A Catholic man who was accosted by a group of zealous Donatists. They threatened to kill him if he refused to 'martyr' them.
Thinking quickly, he agreed to kill them, but only if they first allowed him to bind them with rope to make his work easier. They consented, and when he had them secured he took a large stick, beat them soundly, and walked away.’
No beating with sticks on CathNews for people who step over the line and accuse others of heresy, apostasy, atheism, even creeping Protestantism.
However, those posts will continue to deleted and I will continue to walk away, happy to leave judgement to the Judge we will all face one day.
SIC: CTHAUS