Friday, May 11, 2012

Koch accuses Küng of misleading faithful on Vatican II

Cardinal Kurt Koch, president of the Pontifical Council for Promoting Christian Unity, has blamed Professor Hans Küng for creating anti-Roman sentiments among German-speaking Catholics and for a widespread misinterpretation of the Second Vatican Council.

"In the German-speaking world there has been, above all, the diffusion of Küng's idea that the Council constituted a rupture with the tradition of the Church and not an evolution of it," the Swiss cardinal said in an interview in the Italian magazine I Tempi. "In my opinion, this interpretation has caused the current disquiet [in the Church]," he said.

The 84-year-old theologian rejected the hypothesis.

"I have never affirmed that Vatican II was an act of rupture with Tradition," Fr Küng told The Tablet this week. 

"It was an epochal paradigm shift that involved both continuity and discontinuity," he said.