Church teaching
Throughout a distinguished career, Hans Küng has been preoccupied with the question of infallibility (“Controversial Swiss theologian pleads with Pope Francis to solve problem of infallibility”, www.thetablet.
co.uk/news). But two other questions also require urgent attention.

The first, as I have long maintained, is the ambivalence of the notion of “instruction”. At the heart of the crisis of contemporary Catholicism is the subordination of education to governance. If we are told that, through consecration, bread and wine become the body and blood of Christ, we are being educated, instructed, told what is the case. But if someone says to us: “Shut that door”, we are not being educated; the instruction takes the form of a command.

Too often the issuing of commands has been substituted for teaching. When Pope John Paul II said that the Church has no authority to ordain women, and that this pronouncement was held to be definitive, I rather suspect that he simply believed it to be his prerogative, as pope, to issue such instructions.