It’s fascinating how people and events from the past can sometimes reappear in one’s life and thus help bring unity to experience. That’s what happened to me last week as I encountered again a famous theologian who had a significant influence on me thirty-six years ago.

In between times, much has changed; thus my encounters with him serve as a set of emotional bookends helping me make better sense of my life.

The person in question is Hans Küng, probably the best known Catholic theologian in the world today. Whether for good or ill, much of his fame rests, not on his many influential books, but on an encounter that he had with the Vatican in 1979. In that year he was stripped of his right to teach as an official Catholic theologian. His plight drew international attention.

The 70-year-old Father Küng now says “I am a priest in good standing,” although the Vatican’s teaching ban still holds. Anyway his attention nowadays rests not so much on Catholic theology; instead his main focus centers on what he calls a “global ethic,” that is, a standard of conduct for all the world’s people based on universally accepted moral norms.

Shaking his hand at Harvard University last Tuesday, I recalled to him a lecture he gave in 1963. I shared with him my appreciation for what he said then and called it the single most significant lecture I had ever heard.

At that time I was a student of theology at Weston College (now based in Cambridge and called Weston Jesuit School of Theology.) Küng had come to share with us students his expectation of what the Second Vatican Council would do to change the Catholic Church.

He turned out to be a prophet, since the bishops who assembled in Rome from around the world for deliberations which lasted through 1965 did indeed accomplish something of a revolution both in thinking and in structures. Küng laid out before us ideas that seemed shocking because they were so little accepted in the church at large. And he predicted practical changes that I had never expected to see in my lifetime, such as the use of English in our liturgy in place of Latin.

These ideas seemed to catch our own professors flatfooted. Though some of them had reputations as good theologians, they had no inkling of the theological tidal wave ready to sweep over the church. Admittedly, Vatican II was largely an event driven by European thinkers. Still you would have thought that our teachers here would have clued us into what was happening in the European churches.

The events that followed Küng’s talk made for the most stimulating era in my intellectual life. For the next few years the western world paid much attention to the work of the bishops gathered in Rome. I got used to seeing in the New York Times documents coming from the Council, along with accounts of the ideological/political struggles behind the scenes.

Many Catholics and others now express intense disappointment that certain changes have not taken place in the church. However, they may not appreciate the irony of the situation: a chief reason why they feel such dissatisfaction with the extent of change is that Vatican II unleashed high expectations that previously few Catholics had ever felt. Change fed the desire for further change, an appetite that the church has found difficulty satisfying.

For fear that this sound complacent, let me quickly place myself among those who favor further change. Still, those of us who have lived many years can perhaps more easily take the long view as the institution struggles to keep up with modernity while holding to its age-old values.

These reflections were brought into sharp focus by last week’s meeting  with Hans Küng. They provoked in me a strong emotional resonance . Seeing him again brought me back to those heady days when my colleagues and I were swept up in the vortex of change.

Küng himself confessed feeling some of this power when he visited that same day the Kennedy Library and listened to JFK’s inaugural speech. It brought him back to the time when idealism was in vogue, a time when and JFK and Pope John XXIII were bringing us into a new era.

The intervening years, of course, have brought us all many disillusions. But it can give meaning to our lives to trace the paths along which we have come. Seeing again the theologian who helped prepare me for a new era in the church has made me realize how history can surprise us both for good and for ill.

I feel glad to have encountered a figure who, unknowingly, helped me  become better prepared for at least some of the turnings my life has taken.

Richard Griffin