Pope Francis embodies my hopes for the Church

Since Pope Francis took office in March, almost everything he has said and done indicates that he is bent on carrying through a thorough reform of the Roman Catholic Church, beginning with the Vatican itself. Scarcely a month after taking office, he created an international group of eight cardinals to advise him on reform of the Roman Curia. Only one of them was a Vatican official; the others came from Australia, Chile, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Germany, Honduras, India, and the US, and some of them were outspoken critics of Vatican operations. As secretary, he appointed an Italian bishop who had recently gone on record for saying that bishops should be men of service, not men of power.

On 1 October, this commission, now officially constituted as the Pope's permanent advisory body, met for the first time for three days of closed-door discussion, during which the Pope listened more than he spoke. In a long interview given a week earlier to the Italian newspaper La Repubblica to be published on the opening day of the meeting Pope Francis stated that, in creating this body, he wanted 'advisers', not 'courtiers' and that he intended it as a first step in making the Church 'an organisation that is not just top-down but also horizontal'. Candidly, he expressed his criticism of the Curia and outlined his programme of reform. He admitted that in the past, 'heads of the Church have often been narcissists, flattered and thrilled by their courtiers', and he went so far as to say that 'the court is the leprosy of the papacy'. Admitting that not everyone in the Curia is a courtier and comparing its legitimate function to that of a military quartermaster corps, he observed that 'it has one defect: it is Vatican-centric. It sees and looks after the interests of the Vatican, which are still, for the most part, temporal interests. This Vatican-centric view neglects the world around us. I do not share this view and I'll do everything I can to change it. The Church is or should go back to being a community of God's people, and priests, pastors and bishops who have the care of souls, are at the service of the people of God.'

These words effectively summarise my own thoughts and hopes for the future of the Church - a future which is now possible in the new reform-friendly atmosphere under Pope Francis. For centuries, we have suffered from the malignant growth of what I have called the 'Roman system' that until now has vitiated all efforts to reform the Catholic Church. But reform is something that can be done - and must be done, not only by the hierarchy, but also by every Catholic: lay, clergy or Religious, to effect a radical cure of a Church otherwise threatened by terminal morbidity. Pope Francis is leading the way.

Fr Hans Küng is a theologian and author based in Tübingen, Germany

Can We Save the Catholic Church? by Hans Küng is published by William Collins this week, £12.99 and ebook £6.49