The Catholic Church Book

All religions are strange, but Catholicism is the weirdest of them all. I know this because I was brought up in the faith -- stumbling up steps, lighting candles, wobbling as I held a massive decorative Bible aloft just under the Reverend Father's eye during mass. Nothing can delete the religious impulse from a boy's brain more quickly than constant contact with nuns, combined with impressment as an altar boy. Yet Jesus of Nazareth remains an inspiring figure in my mind, and I thoroughly admire the message the Church delivers in liberation theology, and its moral opposition to unfettered capitalism.

Which is all to say that I really dug this heartfelt, often nasty history written by a priest who's currently forbidden from teaching Catholic Theology. Beginning with the tricky question of whether or not Jesus of Nazareth founded a church at all, Küng takes us on a wild cynical ride through darkness and light, stopping to point out forgeries and atrocities, while offering tributes to the geniuses who illuminate Church history (Augustine, Pope Gregory VII, Thomas Aquinas, Pope John XXIII, and Martin Luther -- whom he feels the Church is centuries behind in forgiving and removing from the list of excommunicated souls).

As the history gallops toward us and overlaps with Küng's own life, his anger is kept just under a boil -- not only does he despise the Church's constant rejection and neglect of women's issues (bear in mind that Jesus had nothing to say about contraception or abortion), he sees the grim, slow-moving utterly masculine Church hierarchy itself as an affront to the Gospel values it espouses. In fact his stern conclusions that the Church is in love with the Middle Ages (rather than the more hardscrabble communal world of Jesus), and "fixated on stereotyped images women" seem to me bigger problems than Church could ever handle, unless a real reformer takes the helm (this book was written before Ratzenberg was anointed). So in effect this history is both inspiring (in focusing constantly on the "golden thread" of Jesus's teachings) and cynical. Father Küng will most definitely enter by the narrow gate.