George Weigel takes Hans Kung to the woodshed

Go read the whole thing over at First Things (h/t Father Z).

What can be expected, though, is that you comport yourself with a minimum
of integrity and elementary decency in the controversies in which you engage. I
understand odium theologicum as well as anyone, but I must, in all candor, tell
you that you crossed a line that should not have been crossed in your recent
article, when you wrote the following:

There is no denying the fact that the worldwide system of covering up sexual crimes committed by clerics was engineered by the Roman Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith under Cardinal Ratzinger (1981-2005).

That, sir, is not true. I refuse to believe that you knew this to be false and wrote it anyway, for that would mean you had willfully condemned yourself as a liar. But on the assumption that you did not know this sentence to be a tissue of falsehoods, then you are so manifestly ignorant of how competencies over abuse cases were assigned in the Roman Curia prior to Ratzinger’s seizing control of the process and bringing it under CDF’s competence in 2001, then you have forfeited any claim to be taken seriously on this, or indeed any other matter involving the Roman Curia and the central governance of the Catholic Church.As you perhaps do not know, I have been a vigorous, and I hope responsible, critic of the way abuse cases were
(mis)handled by individual bishops and by the authorities in the Curia prior to
the late 1990s, when then-Cardinal Ratzinger began to fight for a major change
in the handling of these cases. (If you are interested, I refer you to my 2002
book, The Courage To Be Catholic: Crisis, Reform, and the Future of the Church.)
I therefore speak with some assurance of the ground on which I stand when I say
that your description of Ratzinger’s role as quoted above is not only ludicrous
to anyone familiar with the relevant history, but is belied by the experience of
American bishops who consistently found Ratzinger thoughtful, helpful, deeply
concerned about the corruption of the priesthood by a small minority of abusers,
and distressed by the incompetence or malfeasance of bishops who took the
promises of psychotherapy far more seriously than they ought, or lacked the
moral courage to confront what had to be confronted.I recognize that authors do
not write the sometimes awful subheads that are put on op-ed pieces.
Nonetheless, you authored a piece of vitriol—itself utterly unbecoming a priest,
an intellectual, or a gentleman—that permitted the editors of the Irish Times to
slug your article: “Pope Benedict has made worse just about everything that is
wrong with the Catholic Church and is directly responsible for engineering the
global cover-up of child rape perpetrated by priests, according to this open
letter to all Catholic bishops.” That grotesque falsification of the truth
perhaps demonstrates where odium theologicum can lead a man. But it is
nonetheless shameful.