On the occasion of the Pope’s visit to Germany, Der Spiegel has conducted an interview with theologian Hans Kung, one-time colleague and longtime interlocutor of Benedict XVI, at the University of Tubingen. Kung, in his characteristic style, does not hold his tongue in his criticism of, what he believes to be, the rightward turn in the Catholic Church since John Paul II:
Küng: If you put it that simply, I’ll give you a simple answer. Ratzinger’s predecessor, John Paul II, launched a program of ecclesiastical and political restoration, which went against the intentions of the Second Vatican Council. He wanted a re-Christianization of Europe. And Ratzinger was his most loyal assistant, even at an early juncture. One could call it a period of restoration of the pre-council Roman regime.
[…]SPIEGEL: You and Benedict are traveling along two different paths. You want to reform the Church to keep it alive. The pope is trying to seal off the Church from the outside world and increasingly restrict it to a conservative core, which may possibly survive.
Küng: Indeed. In the past, the Roman system was compared with the communist system, one in which one person had all the say. Today I wonder if we are not perhaps in a phase of “Putinization” of the Catholic Church. Of course I don’t want to compare the Holy Father, as a person, with the unholy Russian statesman. But there are many structural and political similarities. Putin also inherited a legacy of democratic reforms. But he did everything he could to reverse them. In the Church, we had the Council, which initiated renewal and ecumenical understanding. Even pessimists couldn’t have imagined that such setbacks were possible after that. The Polish pope’s restoration policy, beginning in the 1980s, made it possible for the like-minded head of the highly secretive Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith (CDF), once known as the Congregation of the Roman and Universal Inquisition — and it’s still an inquisition, despite its new name — to be elected pope.
Read the whole interview (in English) here.