![\"\"](\"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-content\/uploads\/2021\/04\/Kung3.jpg\")
<\/a>K\u00fcng always hoped that some of the democratic spirit would enter the Roman Catholic Church, and he had high hopes at the time of the Vatican II Conference which brought some reforms to Church administration.\u00a0 K\u00fcng also saw Vatican II as a time when Catholic thinkers such as Pierre Teilhard de Chardin (1881-1955) and Henri de Lubac (1896-1991), who had been marginalized, were again being read.\u00a0 However, the conservative forces within the Church and especially within the Vatican itself regained influence.\u00a0 The more liberal voices were less heard, and in some cases were driven out of the Church itself.<\/p>\nThus from the early 1980s K\u00fcng turned his attention to other religions.\u00a0 He wrote a book on Judaism and another on Islam. Then he turned his attention to the religions of Asia, looking for common themes that could provide a bridge.<\/p>\n
Like Karl Barth, the political tensions in the 1980s between the U.S.A. and the USSR became a preoccupation.\u00a0 In addition, the tensions in the Middle East were growing. K\u00fcng wanted to find a moral code that would provide a global way of life conducive to peace.\u00a0 He became active in the Parliament of the World’s Religions which had been an effort in the 1880s to develop dialogue among representatives of religions.\u00a0 A century later the Parliament was revived and has held a session every five years or so meeting in different parts of the world.<\/p>\n
For the Parliament, Hans K\u00fcng wrote a text Toward a Global Ethic <\/em>around which the Parliament could discuss.\u00a0 The Text began,<\/p>\n \u00a0\u201cPeace eludes us, the planet is being destroyed, neighbors live in fear, women and men are estranged from each other, children die. This is abhorrent.”\u00a0 <\/em><\/p><\/blockquote>\n The text goes on,<\/p>\n “We affirm that a common set of core values is found in the teachings of religions and that these form a basis of a global ethic.\u201d<\/em><\/p><\/blockquote>\n He then calls for a radical change in consciousness.<\/p>\n \u201cWe are interdependent. Each of us depends on the well-being of the whole, and so we have respect for the community of living beings, for people, animals, and plants, and for the preservation of Earth, the air, water and soil.”<\/em><\/p><\/blockquote>\n \u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 <\/em>I had participated in an inter-religious discussion in Geneva in which Hans K\u00fcng was active.\u00a0 True to his democratic spirit, he listened respectfully to what each was saying, although he was the best-known participant in the meeting.\u00a0 The concept of a global ethic as a base for peace has not yet taken hold, although the Universal Declaration of Human Rights is an important step in that direction.<\/p>\n Hans K\u00fcng’s intellectual effort set a direction in which citizens of the world will continue to walk. There is still a good distance to go until the ideology becomes a practice, but the need remains and new voices will come to the fore.<\/p>\n ______________________________________<\/em><\/p>\n Hans K\u00fcng was a Swiss Roman Catholic theologian who died on 6 Apr 2021 at the age of 93. From the early 1980s he turned his attention to other religions. He wrote a book on Judaism and another on Islam. Then he turned his attention to the religions of Asia, looking for common themes that could provide a bridge.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":182658,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[40],"tags":[900,97,303,2463,1142,89,107,805,695,1390],"class_list":["post-182657","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-transcend-members","tag-biography","tag-catholic-church","tag-christianity","tag-hans-kung","tag-obituary","tag-pope","tag-religion","tag-spirituality","tag-theology","tag-vatican"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/182657","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=182657"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/182657\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/182658"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=182657"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=182657"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=182657"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}<\/a><\/em>Ren\u00e9 Wadlow is a member of the <\/em>TRANSCEND Network for Peace Development Environment<\/a><\/em>. He <\/em>is President of the Association of World Citizens, an international peace organization with consultative status with ECOSOC, the United Nations organ facilitating international cooperation and problem-solving in economic and social issues, and editor of <\/em>Transnational Perspectives.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"