Küng, who brought Ratzinger to Tübingen, would later be barred from teaching by his former colleague, after he rejected papal infallibility.
And, when 1,360 prominent and radical theologians signed a famous statement in 1968 asserting their freedom to explore the faith, he was among them. The group rejected the Vatican’s dominance arguing that Catholics should have the freedom to question the decisions of the Roman Curia – the Vatican departments that help run the Church.
It was the political upheavals of 1968 that led to a dramatic change in Joseph Ratzinger’s theological outlook. Student protests, mirroring those in the United States and Paris, broke out in Tübingen: literature branding the Cross as “a sadomasochistic artefact” appeared throughout the university and lectures were disrupted by tomato-throwing radicals.
Profoundly shocked by this outbreak of radical theology, which he characterised as “brutal”, Ratzinger left Tübingen for the more conservative University of Regensburg.
As his former assistant, Wolfgang Beinert, puts it: “Ratzinger believed that he was in some way responsible, guilty of the chaos, and that the university and society and church were collapsing.”
From that point on, Joseph Ratzinger no longer entertained any thoughts of reforming the Church, of breaking down its rigid hierarchical structure and of encouraging collegiality between the Vatican and Catholic bishops.
Instead, he became an enthusiastic advocate of orthodoxy and continuity, a firm bulwark against dissent in what he considered to be an increasingly disjointed and permissive world.