The Catholic Church

The Catholic Church
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The Catholic Church : A Short History (Modern Library Chronicles)

About The Catholic Church:

In this extraordinary book, the renowned Hans Kung chronicles the Roman Catholic Church’s role as a world power throughout history. He examines great schisms — between East and West, Catholicism and Protestantism — the evolving role of the papacy and the stories of the great reforming popes; and the expansion of a global Church infrastructure. The book concluded with a searching assessment of how the Catholic faith will confront the immense challenges posed in the new millennium by the scientific community, by women questioning their role in the Church, and by those seeking reform of the strictures against abortion and contraception. The Catholic Church is a landmark book by a controversial and profoundly influential thinker.

Description of The Catholic Church:

In this extraordinary book, the renowned Hans Kung chronicles the Roman Catholic Church’s role as a world power throughout history. He examines great schisms — between East and West, Catholicism and Protestantism — the evolving role of the papacy and the stories of the great reforming popes; and the expansion of a global Church infrastructure. The book concluded with a searching assessment of how the Catholic faith will confront the immense challenges posed in the new millennium by the scientific community, by women questioning their role in the Church, and by those seeking reform of the strictures against abortion and contraception. The Catholic Church is a landmark book by a controversial and profoundly influential thinker.

Information on The Catholic Church from the publisher:

In this extraordinary book, the renowned Hans Kung chronicles the Roman Catholic Church’s role as a world power throughout history. He examines great schisms — between East and West, Catholicism and Protestantism — the evolving role of the papacy and the stories of the great reforming popes; and the expansion of a global Church infrastructure. The book concluded with a searching assessment of how the Catholic faith will confront the immense challenges posed in the new millennium by the scientific community, by women questioning their role in the Church, and by those seeking reform of the strictures against abortion and contraception. The Catholic Church is a landmark book by a controversial and profoundly influential thinker.

About Hans Kung:

Hans Kung obtained a doctorate in theology from the Sorbonne in 1957. He was ordained a Roman Catholic priest in 1954. In 1962 he was named by Pope John XXIII a theological consultant for the second Vatican Council, and played the key role in the writing of Vatican II, which radically modernized key areas of Catholic teaching. His questioning of traditional Church doctrines led to a 1979 Vatican censure that banned his teaching as a Catholic theologian, provoking huge international controversy. A settlement was reached a year later. He lives and teaches in Tubingen, Germany. His many books include On Being a Christian and Christianity: Essence, History, and Future.

Description of Hans Kung, author of The Catholic Church:

From the great Hans Kung comes a landmark history of The Catholic Church and its place in the world, from its roots in the teachings of Jesus Christ to the present day. To recount the two-thousand-year story of how the church developed from a small band of persecuted Jews who followed Christ into the most enduringly powerful institution in the history of the world is to face contreversy at every step. Hans Kung flinches at nothing, from the origins and legitimacy of the Vatican's claims to supremacy--and, much later, infallibility--to the matter of the Holocaust and the fierce debates Kung himself has been involved in as the primary author of Vatican II and one of the Christian world's great reforming voices. The great individuals--Paul, Augustine, Francis of Assisi, Thomas Aquinas, the magnificent popes, and the disastrous ones--and the watershed events--the conversion of the Roman emperors, the great schism with the east, the crusades and the challenge of Islam, the great heroes and their suppression, the Inquisition, the Reformation and Counter-Reformation, the change of modernity and the waning of the church's influence as an earthly power, the role of women, the treatment of the Jews--are all treated with magisterial wisdom and erudition. Always, Hans Kung distinguishes between what is timeless and universal in The Catholic Church's values and what is the product of human agency.