Catholic Reform Theologian Hans Kung, 85, Considers Assisted Suicide

By Tom Heneghan
Reuters
October 3, 2013

http://blogs.reuters.com/faithworld/2013/10/03/catholic-reform-theologian-hans-kung-85-considers-assisted-suicide/

(Hans Kung in Hechingen, Germany, March 2, 2009/Muesse)

Hans Kung, Roman Catholicism’s best known rebel theologian, is considering capping a life of challenges to the Vatican with a final act of dissent – assisted suicide.

Kung, now 85 and suffering from Parkinson’s disease, writes in the final volume of his memoirs that people have a right to “surrender” their lives to God voluntarily if illness, pain or dementia make further living unbearable.

The Catholic Church rejects assisted suicide, which is allowed in Kung‘s native Switzerland as well as Belgium, the Netherlands, Luxembourg and four states in the United States.

“I do not want to live on as a shadow of myself,” the Swiss-born priest explained in the book published this week. “I also don’t want to be sent off to a nursing home … If I have to decide myself, please abide by my wish.”

Kung has championed reform of the Catholic Church since its 1962-1965 Second Vatican Council, where he was a young adviser arguing for a decentralized church, married priests and artificial birth control. The Council did not adopt these ideas.

A professor at the German university of Tubingen since 1960, Kung was stripped by the Vatican of his license to teach Catholic theology in 1979 after he questioned the doctrine of papal infallibility and ignored Vatican pressure to recant.