Hans Küng and Call To Action
Photo: Penguin Random House
On April 6, Fr. Hans Küng passed away at the age of 93. The renowned priest, theologian, and reformer leaves an expansive legacy, which the National Catholic Reporter detailed in his obituary. Küng argued for women’s ordination, challenged mandatory priestly celibacy, and critiqued the hierarchy’s rejection of artificial contraception. Over a long career, he supported interfaith and ecumenical relations, acted as an adviser at the Second Vatican Council, and caused an uproar by challenging papal infallibility. Call To Action is particularly grateful for the role that Hans Küng played in our organization’s history. While his body of work has inspired countless CTA members over the years, his concrete influence and support also helped Call To Action become the national organization that it is today.
In 1990, Küng helped launch CTA onto the national stage by reading the organization’s Call for Reform in the Catholic Church to a national church conference in Washington, DC. CTA members had slipped the document under his door the night before, and his enthusiastic endorsement came as a pleasant surprise. Reading the Call for Reform aloud in its entirety, he declared that he had never seen a better declaration of the motives and goals of the progressive church. That led to such a demand that Dan and Sheila Daley went out and made copies to distribute to conference attendees at their next general session. Inquiries about the Chicago-based group that had written the statement poured in from around the country and within a few months, CTA had become a national entity. The statement was printed as a full page ad in the New York Times on Ash Wednesday 1990, along with the names of 4,500 signers and an invitation for more.
Küng had previously spoken at CTA’s third conference in 1981, at Chicago’s McCormick Place. He addressed a crowd of 1,000, more than double the number of attendees of previous conferences. He later spoke at the Milwaukee conference in 1996, where he addressed 5,000 attendees on the occasion of the 20th anniversary of the US bishops’ Call To Action Conference.
In an address at the 1996 Milwaukee conference, Küng referred to Call To Action as the “loyal left opposition” of the Catholic Church. In 2018, Executive Director Zach Johnson quoted this line in his address to our national conference in San Antonio, calling it “the description [for our movement] I like best, and the one that feels like it frames our history, describes our present, and points to our future with equal strength and accuracy.”
Call To Action strives to cultivate a dynamic, evolving movement. In the best tradition of the Second Vatican Council, we heed the “signs of the times.” CTA has changed since the 1990s, perpetually working to become a better version of itself. Fr. Hans Küng is a critical part of that history — and, recognizing him as one of many voices honors the theology of the people that he articulated in our church. He has joined the “cloud of witnesses,” the countless saints that animate our movement. He is part of who we are — and his prophetic vision is one that points us forward, rooting us while pushing us toward what we are to become.
