Old Foes, Pope and Dissident, Meet to Find Shared Ground

Rome, Italy - The two old and eminent theologians - once friends, then not - met again over the weekend. One of them, the Rev. Hans Küng, had been barred from teaching Catholics in 1979 for questioning the pope's infallibility. The other, Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, reportedly played some role in that barring.

But time sometimes does strange and poetic things. On Saturday, with Joseph Ratzinger himself the pope, Benedict XVI, they agreed not to delve too deeply into their shared past, and still found they had much to say to each other after an absence of 22 years. This conservative pope, 78, and the church's most influential liberal dissident, 77, met for four hours at the papal summer retreat, Castel Gandolfo. They even shared dinner.

"It is a sign of hope for many Catholics and for many people in the world that two so different people as we nevertheless agreed on many things with regard to the future of the world," Dr. Küng said Monday in a telephone interview from his office in Germany. Their rapport was, he said, "more than friendly."

It was for Benedict a rare meeting with a prominent liberal Catholic. Dr. Küng, who had long spoken bitterly of Cardinal Ratzinger as a "grand inquisitor," said he did not perceive Benedict to be the reactionary that many liberal Catholics fear he is.

"He is still open for new developments," Dr. Küng said. "I did not get the impression that he is fixed on everything. Of course, he has his own convictions, and he also needs time."

He said it would not be appropriate for him to discuss their meeting in detail. But he did say they had spoken at length, and in accord, about two issues on which Dr. Küng has been working: the idea that science and religion are not incompatible, and the role of the church in a secular and pluralistic world. They spoke about secularism in many nations, especially in the United States.

"We talked a great deal about the United States," he said.

Dr. Ratzinger and Dr. Küng first met in 1962 in Rome - two of the church's brightest young minds, both German speakers (Dr. Küng is Swiss) - in the excitement over modernizing the church in the Second Vatican Council.

Both were liberals, though Dr. Ratzinger turned to the right during the student unrest in Germany later in that decade. By various accounts, Dr. Küng concluded that Dr. Ratzinger had abandoned his idealism in the name of conformity to the church hierarchy, and bitterness grew after Dr. Küng was stripped of the right to teach theology at the University of Tübingen in 1979. Cardinal Ratzinger took the position that Dr. Küng's scholarship was no longer in accord with Roman Catholicism.

On Saturday, they did not discuss the "persistent doctrinal questions" between Dr. Küng and the church, said an official Vatican statement on the meeting released Monday. But the statement itself was evidence of the common ground they found: Dr. Küng said it was written entirely, in German, by Benedict himself. "I approved every word," Dr. Küng said.