“Benedict XVI’s thought and magisterium are and always will remain fruitful because he knew how to focus on the fundamental references of our Christian life: first of all, the person and the word of Jesus Christ, as well as the theological virtues, namely charity, hope and faith,” the Pope wrote in the introduction to a new book.

The Vatican publishing house described the book “Dio è Sempre Nuovo”, (“God is Ever-New”), as a collection of the “spiritual thoughts” of the late pope, “an anthology of the principal themes of the Christian faith in the words of Pope Benedict XVI”.

The book was edited by Luca Caruso, communications officer for the Joseph Ratzinger-Benedict XVI Vatican Foundation, and was scheduled for release on January 14. The Vatican published Pope Francis’ introduction on January 4.

Pope Francis’ highest praise for theologians always has been that they “do theology on their knees” in prayer and with love for the Church.

“Benedict XVI did theology on his knees”, the pope wrote in the book’s introduction. “His explanation of the faith was carried out with the devotion of a man who has surrendered all of himself to God and who, under the guidance of the Holy Spirit, sought an ever-greater participation in the mystery of that Jesus who had fascinated him from his youth.”

The new book’s title, Pope Francis said, “expresses one of the most characteristic aspects of my predecessor’s magisterium and vision of faith: yes, God is always new because he is the source and reason for beauty, grace and truth”.

“God is never repetitive, God surprises us, God brings newness,” the pope wrote, and the “spiritual freshness” of the late pope’s writings confirms those affirmations “with intensity”.

Pope Benedict, he said, offered all Christians a model showing how “heart and reason, thought and affection, rationality and emotion interact” in both living and explaining the power of the Gospel.

The selected quotations, Pope Francis said, offer “a sort of ‘spiritual synthesis’ of Benedict XVI’s writings”, and demonstrate “his ability to show the depth of the Christian faith ever anew”.

Quoting just six words of the late pope – “God is an event of love” – is enough to do “full justice to a theology that always shows the harmony between reason and affection”, the Pope said.

Another book about the late pope also was scheduled for release in January.

The Italian publisher Piemme announced it would publish on January 12 a book, “Nient’altro che la Verità” (“Nothing but the Truth”) by the late pope’s longtime personal secretary, Archbishop Georg Gänswein.

Matteo Bruni, director of the Vatican press office, said on January 4 that he had not spoken to the archbishop about the book so could not say if the publisher’s description was hype or reflected the contents of the book.

Piemme had said that with the death of Pope Benedict, “the time has come” for the archbishop “to tell the truth about the blatant calumnies and dark manoeuvres that tried in vain to cast shadows on the German Pontiff’s magisterium and actions.”

Photo: Retired Pope Benedict XVI and Pope Francis exchange greetings at the conclusion of a consistory at which Pope Francis created 20 new cardinals in St. Peter’s Basilica at the Vatican Feb. 14, 2015. (CNS photo/Paul Haring)

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Father Küng was one of the most outspoken Roman Catholic theologians and one of the sharpest critics of St John Paul II and Pope Benedict XVI. He had worked with and studied with Pope Benedict, then-Father Joseph Ratzinger, in Tübingen in the 1960s.

Along with Father Ratzinger, Father Küng was one of the youngest theological experts advising bishops at the Second Vatican Council in 1962-65, but not long after the council he stirred controversy with his views on papal infallibility.

Because of this he had his “missio canonica”, the license needed to teach Roman Catholic theology, withdrawn in 1979 and was no longer allowed to teach as a Catholic theologian at Catholic universities. Thereafter, he became professor of ecumenical theology in Tübingen, until his retirement in 1996. Father Küng remained a Catholic priest.

In 2019, on the occasion of the 40th anniversary of having his “mission canonica” withdrawn, Father Küng told KNA, the German Catholic news agency, that after an exchange of letters with Pope Francis he saw himself as “quasi-informally” rehabilitated ecclesiastically. He spoke about a “handwritten, fraternal letter” and insisted that a public rehabilitation by the Church was “not so important” to him. What matters, he said, is that things move forward for the people and for the Church.

After his retirement in 2011, he co-founded the Global Ethic Foundation at the University of Tübingen, “not least because my years are numbered and I would like my life’s work to be continued after my death”, Father Küng told KNA at the time. Behind the project was his conviction that, without peace among religions, there can be no peace among nations.

In the decades after Vatican II, he frequently criticised mandatory priestly celibacy, the loss of the Church’s credibility, the ban on women priests and the “Kremlin”-like Roman Curia. He expressed support for the demands of grassroots organisations calling for more democracy in the Church.

Yet in 2005, just a few months after Cardinal Ratzinger was elected pope, he and Father Küng spent several hours together at the papal summer residence in Castel Gandolfo. The papal spokesman at the time said Pope Benedict and Father Küng “agreed that in the space of this meeting it made no sense to enter into an argument about the doctrinal questions remaining between Hans Küng and the magisterium of the Church”.

Instead, the spokesman continued, they focused on two topics of Father Küng’s recent work: the possibility of developing a “global ethic” drawing from all religious traditions and the dialogue between Christian faith and science.

But on the fifth anniversary of Pope Benedict’s papacy, he published an open letter to bishops in several newspapers around the globe in which he listed the opportunities that the new pope missed, like long-term reconciliation with Jews, dialogue with Muslims and helping the people of Africa fight HIV. He said he was motivated by his “profound concern for our Church, which now finds itself in the worst credibility crisis since the Reformation”.

The criticism of Pope Benedict was nothing new. In 2009, Father Küng criticised the pope as isolated and unable to take creative steps to deal with a series of internal Church questions, including priestly celibacy and birth control.

He published a book in 2011 and spoke of clergy sexual abuse, saying the Catholic Church was seriously, possibly terminally ill, and only an honest diagnosis and radical therapy could cure it.

In “Can the Church Still Be Saved?” he argued that the malady of the Church went beyond sexual abuse scandals and included resistance to reform, its secrecy, lack of transparency and misogyny.

Speaking at a book launch in Munich in 2011, he said that at the time the Catholic Church in the United States had lost one-third of its membership. “The American Catholic church never asked why,” he said. “Any other institution that has lost a third of its members would want to know why.”

He also said that at the time, 80 per cent of German bishops would welcome reforms.

He said it was not possible for Pope Benedict to reform. In an interview with Ecumenical News International, when asked why, Father Küng recalled how, as a young student after World War II, he had travelled through Europe to explore, while the young pope “did not want to travel. He is, in essence, a person for medieval liturgy, theology and a medieval Church constitution”.

Referring to the celibacy debate that arose after the sexual abuse cases, Father Küng said, “The Roman Catholic Church survived for the first thousand years without celibacy.” He remained strongly in favour of allowing priests and bishops to marry.

Father Küng, who was born March 19, 1928, in Sursee, Switzerland, was a prolific writer and wrote several bestsellers that were translated into more than 30 languages.

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NZC: In the seminary, priests study theology for several years, yet by and large, out in the parishes, in homilies, one never hears much of it. One could say that homilies are not the place to be expounding upon theology, but if the people never hear theology from the pulpit, what is the point of the exercise?

Professor Thomas O’Loughlin.

Professor O’Loughlin: Can I tell you a story. Many years ago, over 20 years ago, I was walking in the Dublin mountains and realised that it was the eighth of December. Since I hadn’t to say Mass, I thought I had better go to Mass. So I popped into a church between the mountain and my home. And I saw a young man whose ordination I had attended the previous June. He got up and gave, after less than five months ordained, he gave a homily which he could have given within a week of arriving at the seminary.

And one of the problems there is that you can only appreciate theology when you are actually dealing with the questions that theology is the answer to. And if you think you can just study theology in the same way you study theory that you are going to apply, you study theory of accountancy and then you know how to apply it, then you become an accountant, to become a theologian, you actually have to live with the problems of believing in God, believing in God in Jesus Christ, and then living within a way.

And that creates questions, what does the way mean? What does following Jesus demand today? What do we mean by God? How is God present when we hear of a disaster or we see someone suffering in a hospital? You only discover theology very gradually. And it is then only when you discover the need to question the faith, that you discover you need to reflect on faith and add understanding, reflection and thought to belief.

Now the problem with a lot of seminarians is that they go into a seminary and they think they are training in the same way you are training an accountant or a nurse or somebody; that they are being formed to be an end product. And so they learn all this stuff off, and they do it as a marathon, and if they pass all the tests in the marathon, they emerge with ordination. In a sense, they think of it as just a job, it is more or less the same sort of thing you do if you are learning a new computer program.

But you only learn the bits of the computer program you need to. So very little of the theology they think they need. And then once they are out in a parish, rather than say I think now I had better start learning theology, they tend to revert back to simple answers. And we all have simple answers, and simple answers are often not good enough.

Equally, if you are going to preach something . . . let’s take another practical story. Every year, on Easter Sunday morning, between then and the Saturday of Easter week, I am waiting for an email or a phone call from someone — what sort of a God is it that kills all those Egyptian soldiers? We went to the Easter vigil, and suddenly it dawned on us — they had heard the story many times — why did God kill those soldiers? Why didn’t God kill Pharaoh? Why did he kill the innocents? They were just doing their duty. Or a child goes to Easter vigil — why did God kill the horses?

And suddenly there is another purpose of theology. As Christians we create a world, a world that is bigger than the world we see, and this world we create with story. And the story is, the whole content of the story is going way back before time of Jesus, in what people at the time of Jesus called the Scriptures and we tend to refer as the Old or the First Covenant.

Now once we start telling our stories, every new telling of the story is a different telling of the story. And it is told in a different situation to people with different questions and different worries. And so suddenly, we have to relate the way we are telling the story to the situation in which we are telling the story. That is another need for theology.

You can put a little bit of that in during the seminary, but most of it has to come up when you are out there telling the story, preaching the story, listening to people who have just heard the story and to questions. And only then can you start to say, well, what sort of a story is it anyway? Why are we bothering to read the Book of Exodus?

This morning, I went to Mass in Papakura, and we read a story that was originally told to explain why the Dead Sea was such a bizarre environment . . . . Blistering heat, configurations of salt, lumps of bitumen asphalt coming up . . . if you go down to Rotorua, you hear the story that the Maori told to explain the strange things there. But, in the book of Genesis, we hear stories to explain these strange geographical phenomena. But the strange geographical phenomena are then related to “God destroyed the cities of the plain”. He destroyed them so terribly, it was like the smoke coming out of a furnace under pressure.

Now what sort of a God is it that takes out an entire city? Now 150 years ago, people were still quite happy to say, that just shows God is a good policeman. Poor old Lot, he escapes, that’s why there is one strange town down there . . . . But his wife just looks back, she turns into a pillar of salt. What sort of God is it that does this sort of thing?

This morning in Papakura, that was the reading from the lectionary. In the seminary, you learn a vast amount about the history of the origins of the Scriptures, the history of the origins of the book of Genesis. But it is only when you are actually presented with that as a real question, you say what is really going on in that story. So again, there is a problem.

The other thing is, you teach theology in the seminary in a very insulated environment. All the class agree, they are all good young men, good Catholics. They all share a vast amount. So the amount of stuff you actually have to question is actually very limited. Now suddenly you are out in reality and you are in an office building or something. You are getting one story from Christianity, you might be getting three different Christian stories at the same time, not just a single Catholic story, you might be getting two other religion’s stories — a Hindu story and then a Sikh story, and you are getting another story called the secular story, that religion is basically a sad, confusing delusion. Now it is only when you have been in that situation, when you are answering people in that situation, that you discover another aspect of theology.

So here are three of the classic sources of theology. Real questions about God and religion and Jesus. Real questions about the history of our stories. And real questions about our ways versus the other ways. You can only understand them when you encounter them in real life. And our seminarians are taught this before they encounter them and then they are faced with a choice. They can either go down the simple route, or they can say, what I learned at the seminary is just prologue. I now have to really start studying theology. And it is only now I can start.

It is a long answer, but I hope it shows you that is a big, profound problem in thinking you can teach theology to 24-25 year olds, or to people who are not yet dealing with reality.

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Fr Gerald O’Collins, SJ

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