Can We Save the Catholic Church?
*Starred Review* The German Swiss priest and theologian—and most famous and prolific contemporary critic of the Roman Catholic Church—portrays it as a gravely ill patient in need of radical therapy to recover and thrive. It is suffering from the Roman system, a centralized, hierarchical structure of authority, monarchical in character and imperial in action. Established in the eleventh century by means of a clutch of forgeries (e.g., the Donation of Constantine), that system is, Küng says, primarily responsible for the Orthodox-Roman schism, the Protestant reformation, and the antiscientific and antidemocratic bias in Christianity. Ever entrenching the power of the pope and the Vatican bureaucracy, especially after the 1870 declaration of papal infallibility and again after the second Vatican Council, the system continues to harm the church, driving out believers, lay and clerical, who question it, discouraging vocations to the priesthood, and thwarting ecumenism. Küng’s prescription for restoring the church to health is many-faceted, but its effective ingredients derive from early Christianity; it is deeply reformist and revivalist, not revolutionary. Although the translation is idiomatically shaky here and there (e.g., ethician rather than ethicist), and Küng favors precision to scintillation, this updated revision of a 2011 German original is an invaluable summation of a great religious critic’s life work. --Ray Olson