Conflicting diagnoses.

My Struggle for Freedom

A Memoir

Hans Kung

William B. Eerdmans, $32, 478 pp.

The Decline and Fall of the Catholic Church in America

David Carlin 

Sophia Institute Press, $24.95, 405 pp.

An American Conversion

One Man's Discovery of Beauty and Truth in Times of Crisis

Deal W. Hudson

Crossroad, $22.95, 189 pp.

There are three closely interwoven stories in the well-packed pages of My Struggle for Freedom. First, there is the purely personal revelation one expects in a memoir. While Hans Kung does not dwell on his early years, there is enough detail to show us that he was a strong personality, a vigorous, mischievous, and independent youth with a low level of tolerance for authority exercised arbitrarily. Thus the child is revealed to be the father of the man. Second, there is an intellectual memoir, primarily the story of his books Justification, Structures of the Church, The Council, Reform, and Reunion, and The Church. Third is what we have to call the polemical memoir, as his personal life and his intellectual productivity come together to turn him rapidly into the controversial figure that he remains today.

What is striking in all three of these tales is the lack of attention to how he developed emotionally and intellectually. Memoirs generally rely for their interest on some account of how the author came to be the person writing the book. Either this does not interest Kung or, more likely, it isn't how he sees his story. He certainly recognizes some naivete in his early life, particularly in the first year or so in Rome and his initial intoxication with the papacy. Once this dissipates, as it rapidly does, it is as if the egg cracks open and the mature Kung emerges. Thenceforward, he is at once charming and brilliant, unsentimental and forthright, more judgmental and less compassionate toward those with whom he disagrees (except for a brief moment when he confesses to being almost sorry for the nearly blind obstructionist of Vatican II, Cardinal Alfredo Ottaviani), and, above all, correct. Others we encounter in the book, including Yves Congar, Karl Rahner, and John XXIII, have their weaknesses exposed even when they are largely admired. Not so the author himself. As the old joke used to go in Tubingen where he taught for many years, Hans Kung doesn't want to be pope because then he wouldn't be infallible.

If readers can overlook Kung's personal foibles, the memoirs tell an absorbing story, most especially when the author himself is not the focus. When Kung arrives in Rome in the late 1940s to begin his priestly studies, the monarchical papacy of Pius XII is at its height. (When the volume ends, Paul VI's troubled pontificate has thrown the same monarchical papacy into a confusion that John Paul II will try to rescue.) This was also the Rome of Pius's encyclical Humani generis, which attempted to rein in contemporary theologians and scholars, and early on Kung had the opportunity to see the harm this document did to some of the great figures of mid-century theology, above all Congar and Marie-Dominique Chenu. Significantly, when he had had enough of Rome, it was to Paris rather than to a German university that he moved to complete his doctoral studies, working under the direction of the theologian and liturgist Louis Bouyer. At this time, by his own account, Kung was also developing a close relationship with Karl Barth and a more cautious one with Hans Urs von Balthasar, leveraging his charm and intelligence to develop a notable circle of famous acquaintances.

After Paris come Tubingen and, amazingly quickly, both a professorial position there and involvement with plans for the council. It seems likely that the brilliant young theologian was moved along a little too quickly. His is a remarkably sharp mind, but there is a brashness in him at that time that, one surmises, may have been partly responsible for the strong reactions he aroused in more conservative temperaments. This is where Kung's blinkered vision may fail him most. On the one hand, the young Turk was feverishly active, writing his influential little book The Council, Reform, and Reunion, caucusing in Rome with one theologian or progressive cardinal after another, giving lectures in Rome, and, between the first and second council sessions, taking an extensive American tour during which he spoke to huge audiences (extensively illustrated in the photographs included in the book). On the other, he was never officially involved in the council, never having been appointed to any of the commissions that did much of the work of drafting the eventual documents. Kung tells of one occasion when his fellow theologians propose to put his name forward for a commission but he demurs, suggesting that his own contribution may be better made from outside the structures, where he could not be muzzled. Perhaps so, but he does seem to be oversensitive to the importance of his own role, especially when it is overlooked. Nowhere is this more apparent than in Kung's repeated negative remarks about Giuseppe Alberigo, editor of the largely well-received History of Vatican II, which seem to be occasioned by the fact that Alberigo's multivolume history has so very little to say about him.

Most interesting of all is Kung's estimation of Vatican II itself. We are all accustomed to the two dominant interpretations. Progressives typically see the council as setting directions for the church that were then frustrated by popes and curia. Conservatives tell a very different story. They see the council as a balanced effort at completing the work of Vatican I which was then hijacked by progressives bent on turning the church into what George Weigel has lately referred to as "Catholic Lite." Kung, in contrast to both, reads the council as something of a failure, as the curia outwitted a weak pope and outmaneuvered the bishops. While not denying that Vatican II changed some things for the better and for good, above all the liturgy, he considers the documents finally disappointing, even Lumen gentium.

There is much to be said for Kung's version of events. His villain is the curia, insufficiently reined in by John XXIII, adroitly manipulating Paul VI, quietly enjoying John Paul II. The victim of his story is the Catholic Church, and the hero is Kung himself, a truly tireless worker for the restoration of the church that looks back to before the Gregorian reform of the eleventh century. In the end, Kung deserves a measure of sympathy. What finally got him into trouble was his honest insistence on the freedom to speak his mind, coupled with a curious inattention to the politics of his own utterances, which may in the end amount to much the same thing. It really is impossible to be a prophet and a diplomat at the same time. There is no better example of his style than the story told here of his private audience with Paul VI in 1965, when he was still a distinctly junior figure. The pope congratulates him on his good work but warns him against being so outspoken. He needs to conform a little, to trust the pope. Kung takes the rebuke, not without a little resistance, but immediately changes the subject--to that of birth control, offering the pope a "little memorandum," and then moving on to the subject of infallibility! Only Kung. The nerve of the man, but a man we nevertheless wouldn't really want to do without.

David Carlin does not discuss Kung in his jeremiad for the Catholic Church, but he presumably would think that we could have done far better without him. Carlin's book is pretty conservative in its conclusions but takes an unusual approach. For Carlin, who was a Commonweal columnist for many years, the mess the church is in is a result of capitulation to modernity. In an interesting twist on the usual story, the council was a battle between the "cautious triumphalists" of the curial party and the majority of the bishops, the "incautious triumphalists." The latter dominated the council but were so sure of the power of the gospel that rather than stand strongly against the tide of modernity they did something so stupid as to call their adversaries "men of good will" and extend to them the olive branch of cooperation. So much for the bishops. The clerical and lay "intellectuals" on the progressive side did the opposite of the well-intentioned bishops, actually believing that Catholicism was in many respects flawed, and working to modernize the church rather than "to Christianize modernity." The American Catholic Church is in decline, thinks Carlin, because of the personal-liberty principle that the Catholic community has absorbed from our pluralistic society. Catholic Lite had better shape up or the church will cease to exist. The problem here is that the critique of modernity is so unnuanced. A dose of philosopher Charles Taylor's convictions that the church is indebted to modernity for much of its social vision would serve Carlin well, and even help him make the case about the harmful effects of individualism on contemporary Christians.

Crisis magazine publisher Deal Hudson's book purports, like Kung's, to be autobiographical, though this is a decidedly intellectual memoir. As brief as Kung's is prolix, Hudson's book has a few autobiographical chapters charting his progress from the Baptists to the Catholics, but in essence it's a surprisingly charming ramble through his encounters with one significant influence after another. He writes about Aquinas, Maritain, William Lynch, Julian Green, Walker Percy, Louis Bouyer, Mortimer Adler, and others, all of whom would, I think, be quite uncomfortable with the tone of Crisis. One wonders if he knows that Bouyer presided over Hans Kung's doctoral dissertation! Hudson also has his chapter on Vatican II but, literary as ever, mostly confines himself to a paean to the orthodoxy of the documents themselves. An American Conversion is a light book, if not a lite book, but aside from the occasional eruption of dyspepsia it is refreshingly free of the sort of ungenerous carping that the EWTN gang seems to specialize in.

Paul Lakeland teaches religious studies at Fairfield University and is the author most recently of The Liberation of the Laity: In Search of an Accountable Church (Crossroad).