July 1 2000 BLAIR IN GERMANY The guru © Times of London Tony Blair and Hans Küng, the theologian, at Tübingen yesterday, when the Prime Minister spoke on values and the power of the Community Photograph: DANIEL MAURER / AP Vatican 'reject' inspires Blair BY ROGER BOYES HANS KÜNG, once described as the Pope's Loyal Opposition, or chief critic, was anointed as Tony Blair's guru on "globalisation" yesterday. True, the territory is already rather crowded: Anthony Giddens and other experts have just cobbled together a book bearing a remarkable resemblance to the briefings that they have been giving the Prime Minister over the past years. But Professor Küng is special. Yesterday the Swiss-born theologian praised Mr Blair for his thoughts on the future of an international community and the Prime Minister returned the compliment, highlighting the professor's lecture in London as being the "best piece of writing on globalisation I have ever seen". The professor who was stripped by the Vatican of the right to lecture on Catholic theology, has visited Downing Street, and the relationship seems to be flourishing. The 72-year-old theologian was once considered a wunderkind by the Vatican and was invited by Pope Paul VI to take up Holy Orders: the idea being that he would have a high-flying church career if he subdued his criticism. "Did I miss a great chance?" he said, adding that he thinks he did not. "I would have had to sell my soul for spiritual power within the church." Professor Küng's talent was to popularise doubt. In bestselling paperbacks that caused great ructions in the German Catholic church, he argued against the infallibility of the Pope, tried to offer more human perspectives on the historical figure of Jesus Christ and criticised the role of the Vatican in the Holocaust. It was Pope John Paul II who finally approved the order to cut the troublesome theologian loose. He was denied the right to teach in the name of the church but was protected nonetheless by the University of Tübingen in Germany, which continued to employ him as a theology professor. It was the first major disciplinary act of the present Pope and was followed by a crackdown on other dissident theologians and central American proponents of the so-called Theology of Liberation. After his retirement in 1996, Professor Küng was invited to continue his work, on finding common issues between the faiths at a new institute. It is this work, crystallised in a book called Yes, to a Global Ethic, that brought Professor Küng into Mr Blair's orbit. A speech by Mr Blair yesterday could have been plagiarised from Professor Küng, stressing as it did, the need for managing - rather than resisting or ignoring - global change, and developing the idea of an international community.
