The Catholic Church: A Short History (by Hans Kung, 2003)
Paperback
Modern Library
$14
Disclosure: My ancestors walked out of the Catholic church at the time of the Reformation, and I walked out of the Lutheran church as an adolescent. Curiously, it was the Catholics who brought me back into the church -- but it was progressive Catholic laity, not the tradition-bound hierarchy: through them I learned about the Catholic Worker movement, the Marxist-Christian synthesis of liberation theology, and various other corners of twentieth century Christian thought. I'm still Lutheran, not Catholic, but I am posting here without any malevolent intent
Hans Kung was ordained as a Catholic priest, celebrated his first mass at St Peter's with a Swiss Guard congregation, and remains a Catholic today. He has had a long career as a Catholic thinker, frequently somewhat at odds with the hierarchy, and his aims in this short book, of about two hundred pages, are substantial: he intends to indicate, as a historical matter, just where he thinks the Roman church has gone wrong. The most natural assumption would be that a competent expert on Eastern Orthodox history could write a similar criticism of the Eastern Orthodox, or that a competent expert on Protestant history could write a similar criticism of the Protestant churches, but Kung presumably writes of the Roman church, because that is the church he knows
There is quite a lot to say, and a certain amount of it will sound familiar, because most of us have heard of (say) the abuses that spawned the Reformation or the Inquisitional horrors of the Counter-Reformation. So it is well to be aware that Kung is not trying simply to catalogue everything anyone has ever done wrong in the name of the Roman church -- a project he likens to walking down a road and deliberately stepping into every puddly pothole merely to complain loudly about what a bad road this is! He does not regard the Gospel as bad road: he simply believes the Roman church is sometimes (badly) mistaken
It will be impossible to give a full feel for his criticism, which is usually conveyed by a relentless emphasis on particularities of history. The original Christianity, of a certain group of Jews from the area near Jerusalem, changes somewhat in its encounter with Greek culture, which emphasized the importance of right-thinking as opposed to concrete practice; it also changed with the Roman destruction of Jerusalem and with the split in Judaism between the Christian Jews and the non-Christian Jews; and it changed decisively yet again when it became the state religion under Constantine. There follows a long period in which Rome seeks to establish its priority over all other churches: by reference to forged documents (say) or by claiming early that the investiture of a woman as bishop in the East meant that no one there had any authority. Struggle occurs repeatedly between popes and councils for primacy. Church and state dispute who shall have the last word. Popes are chosen, imprisoned, deposed, convicted of heresy. The original doctrine of papal infallibility seems to have been declared a heresy many hundreds of years before the Roman church adopted it as dogma in the nineteenth century
Covering on average about a decade per page, the book obviously cannot provide great detail: you will learn a bit about why Henry IV was excommunicated the first time, and how he sought pardon, but why he was excommunicated a first time is not addressed -- perhaps it sheds little further light on the issues that Kung points towards
I have read this once and expect to reread it as a useful introduction to some of the matters that must be addressed by those of us who regard our schisms as a scandal and who hope for ecumenical progress
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