Politics & Power Quote by Hans Kung

Kung’s line lands like a quiet grenade: the Curia, that famously centralizing nerve center of Catholic power, suddenly pleads decentralization. “That’s up to the American bishops, not up to Rome” is bureaucratic phrasing with a strategic edge. It’s not just a procedural note; it’s an institutional dodge dressed as subsidiarity.

Kung, the era’s most relentless internal critic of Vatican governance, knows how these sentences function in the wild. The Curia isn’t merely declining to rule; it’s offloading accountability onto a national episcopate that can be blamed when the outcome is messy, unpopular, or morally compromised. Rome preserves its aura of universal authority while claiming its hands are tied. It’s a neat reversal: the center asserts primacy when it wants control and discovers local autonomy when it wants plausible deniability.

The subtext also gestures to a deeper conflict about Catholic identity in the late 20th century: is the Church a global communion with shared responsibility, or a chain of command that manages scandal and dissent through jurisdictional shell games? “American bishops” isn’t neutral here. It evokes a specific Catholic battlefield of the period: a US Church wrestling with political pressure, media scrutiny, and internal polarization, often with Rome hovering in the background as both referee and distant monarch.

Kung’s intent is to expose how power actually behaves: not as theology, but as risk management. The line’s sting is its ordinariness. In a Church that speaks in absolutes, evasion often arrives in the most mundane sentence.