Success Quote by Hans Kung

Kung is admiring something the modern Catholic Church almost never gets credit for: speed without schism. The line reads like praise, but it is also a diagnostic. By calling the change "epoch-making" and "absolutely unique", he implicitly admits how abnormal this is for an institution whose default mode is glacial time and internal trench warfare. The marvel isnt that the church changed; its that it didnt tear itself in half while doing it.

The context is hard to miss: Vatican II and its immediate aftermath, when liturgy, ecclesiology, and the churchs posture toward modernity were rapidly recalibrated. Kung, a reform-minded theologian who would later clash with Rome, is pointing to a narrow window when consensus seemed possible. That "in just a few years" does double duty: it celebrates the councils momentum while quietly warning that momentum is fragile and can curdle into backlash.

The subtext is institutional strategy. Kung is less interested in triumphalism than in governance: how do you modernize a global, tradition-heavy body without triggering a Protestant-style rupture? By framing unity as the achievement, he is also laying down a standard against which later decades look like failure. The quote flatters the church community, but it also pressures it: if you once pulled off historic reform without a "serious division", why are you now treating conflict as inevitable? In typical Kung fashion, praise becomes leverage.