Steven Sim

I saw this book years ago, when I was in University, in SUFES bookstore. But I was too poor to buy it then, I mean, the little money that I had, I saved them for days when I had even lesser. Since then, I never saw the book again. I was captured by the cover of the book, though we were all taught not to judge a book by its cover. But Hans Kung, being himself (I can’t even spell his name properly on my qwerty keyboard), his photo on the book jacket looked the part of a self made man. The rough clear lines on his face marked the life experience of a man who had challenged a great authority for the sake of all man. Yet his face glowed with the warmth of a pastor and the elegance of a learned teacher, not just a mere scholar. This man of history is history living in our times. 

I want to learn from him…

Night is already falling on the city, and the spectacular panorama with all the domes and palaces which is so familiar to me is bathed in the intense Roman twilight. The renovated St. Peter’s stands above it in festal illumination like a jewel. Early in the morning, before the stream of visitors, an old Germanicum alumnus will show us with the expertise of an art historian the Sistine Chapel, which is again gleaming as if brand new. A miracle of colours, forms, shapes, gestures - there is so much that moves me in it.

Here Michelangelo, originally a sculptor, has proved to be not only a brilliant painter but also a Christian who did not want to present primarily popes but the whole of salvation history, from the grandiose beginning of the creation fo the world and human beings to the gracious Last Judgement (hell as threatening possibility which no one enters). This is the universal vision which includes the women seers of the pagans as well as the prophets of Israel.

The friend of the poetess Vittoria Colonna, to whom he dedicated his most important sonnet and with whose Viterbo circle he wanted to remain Catholic when the Reformation then broke out and yet to have an evangelical disposition, thought deeply about its form. My ideal.

Together with numerious humanists, theologians and politicians, here is that ‘third force’ which was lost in the sixteenth century but revived again at Vatican II and proves effective. My direction.

To the present day the dispute of the century over the trueform of the Catholic Church, the ecumenical wolrd, indeed Christianity generally in these rvolutionary times which began at the Council, has not yet been decided. My suffering.

And no one knows whether in a couple of years the church and the world will not perhaps look better. My hope. (My Struggle for Freedom, Hans Kung, p461-462)