"The coherence of the Catholic would be damaged, even a papal self-dismontration would be equivalent if the Pope would sign the infallibility criticism of Küng without reservations," writes Tück in a contribution of the portal "communio.de".
The starting point was the demand of the theologian Wolfgang Beinert, who suggested in the "Herder Correspondence" a rehabilitation of Küng and paid tribute to him as a "prophet of Catholicity".
Tück now contradicts Beinert.
Although Tück acknowledges that Küng has "had a vigilant sense of time issues" and "disclosed modernity conflicts of the Church," he considers rehabilitation to be theologically unconvincing.
Dispute over Pope
Küng, for example, "put a question mark behind the term 'infallible', relativized the dogmas of the First Vatican through historical contextualization," and thus "called into question the last-in-hand competence of the pope - as if he had, as an academic theologian, the last-instance competence to do so," according to Tück.
In addition, Küng had "demanded a democratization of the Church and wanted to go beyond the Council with the Council." Küng has also held different positions on ethical issues than the Church’s Magisterium. Küng "has not taken back any of his disputed positions," Tück insists.
Rehabilitation would therefore "run out to a dissenting." If Pope Leo XIV were to follow the proposal, it would be "an act of disloyalty to his predecessors."
Hans Küng
Hans Küng died in April 2021. He is considered one of the most important German-speaking theologians. He was born in 1928 in the Swiss canton of Lucerne and in 1954 he was ordained a Catholic priest.
After studying theology in Rome and Paris, Küng had been a professor in Tübingen since 1960 and participated as a theological adviser in the Second Vatican Council (1962–1965).
Even before the Council, a conflict with bishops had developed, which focused on the infallibility of the Pope and fundamental questions of Christology. The dispute escalated in 1979, when the Vatican revoked Küng's church teaching permit.
Since then, he was a faculty-independent full professor in Tübingen until his retirement in 1996.