This may be the last of Hans Küng’s many books. He is 85 now, and not in good health. He did not want to write it, he says, but the crisis in the Catholic Church seemed to him so serious that he had no choice. He casts himself as a physician diagnosing a desperately sick patient and prescribing remedies. The book is polemical, poised between despair and hope. Throughout his career this Swiss theologian based in the German town of Tübingen has never swerved from his line. As one of his colleagues at Vatican II, the French Dominican Yves Congar, noted at the time, “Küng charges at things, he goes straight ahead like an arrow.” For Küng the greatest Pope of the twentieth century was John XXIII, who exercised a papacy of service not of jurisdictional powe