Time & Perspective Quote by Hans Kung

Kung is staking out a paradoxical kind of openness: “catholicity” not as a brand name but as a temporal posture. The word itself carries double freight. It nods to the Catholic Church, yes, but it also reaches back to the older meaning of “catholic” as universal, capacious, not cramped by sectarian fashion. By adding “in time,” Kung reframes universality as an argument about duration. A tradition that has survived 2,000 years can afford to be less defensive, less twitchy about novelty, precisely because it has already metabolized countless “new” things before.

The subtext is polemical, and it lands in the fault lines of 20th-century Catholicism: Vatican II’s aggiornamento, the backlash that followed, and Kung’s own fraught relationship with Rome after his license to teach as a Catholic theologian was withdrawn in 1979. He’s implicitly criticizing a Church that treats certain questions (authority, doctrine, reform) as if they were first-order emergencies rather than recurring episodes in a long story. “Catholicity in time” becomes a rebuke to presentism: the impulse to freeze the faith at one idealized moment, whether that moment is the Counter-Reformation or last week’s culture-war headline.

It’s also a strategic self-positioning. Kung is claiming legitimacy for reform by rooting it in continuity, not rupture. If the tradition is genuinely 2,000 years deep, then change isn’t betrayal; it’s part of the tradition’s operating system. The line sells humility and confidence at once: small in the face of history, bold enough to insist that history is on the side of breadth.