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Kung has long declined to go to Rome unless the Vatican guarantees him an open hearing, which it has refused to do. When the decree was issued, he met with Bishop Moser, who agreed to take a letter from Kung to the Pope. After that, John Paul II held a five-hour meeting on the case with three Vatican officials, Moser and four other German bishops. The result: all participants agreed to stand firm, and Moser returned to notify the university and the education ministry of the state of Baden-Württemberg.
As things stood last week, Kung is a supposedly verbotener theologian who remains a member of Tübingen's Catholic faculty and head of its Institute for Ecumenical Research. But in compliance with the concordat, Kung will no longer officially instruct would-be priests or those training to teach Catholic theology, formerly 60% of his students. They may sit in on his lectures, but will not receive academic credit. The minister-president of Baden-Württemberg state, Lothar Spath, plans a "careful legal examination" of the concordat to determine whether Kung can remain on the Catholic faculty at Tübingen. If not, he promised Küng an "adequate alternative" and "full protection as a tenured civil servant." But if the education ministry tries to switch Kung to another department, he is prepared to take his case to court.
Whatever the legal outcome, the hierarchy is adamant. "The true faith is that of St. Peter and the bishops, not that of the professors. Otherwise the word of God would be abandoned in chaos and confusion," declares Cologne's Joseph Cardinal Heffner, head of the West German bishops' conference. Adds Bishop Moser: "The church cannot become a playground for conflicts of theology."