A decade and a half ago, a former colleague of yours among the younger progressive theologians at Vatican II told me of a friendly warning he had given you at the beginning of the Council’s second session. As this distinguished biblical scholar and proponent of Christian-Jewish reconciliation remembered those heady days, you had taken to driving around Rome in a fire-engine red Mercedes convertible, which your friend presumed had been one fruit of the commercial success of your book, The Council: Reform and Reunion.Okay, this is the point from which the real exposé begins. Go to the link and read the rest of this solid piece of analysis. It is really more than anything a defense of the Holy Father against the unfathomably stupid insinuations of Küng.This automotive display struck your colleague as imprudent and unnecessarily self-advertising, given that some of your more adventurous opinions, and your talent for what would later be called the sound-bite, were already raising eyebrows and hackles in the Roman Curia. So, as the story was told me, your friend called you aside one day and said, using a French term you both understood, “Hans, you are becoming too evident.”
As the man who single-handedly invented a new global personality-type—the dissident theologian as international media star—you were not, I take it, overly distressed by your friend’s warning. In 1963, you were already determined to cut a singular path for yourself, and you were media-savvy enough to know that a world press obsessed with the man-bites-dog story of the dissenting priest-theologian would give you a megaphone for your views...
Well, let me add another excerpt so you can catch the spirit of the Küngean disaster (to appreciate the full extent of it, read his own open letter of April 16 linked below). Weigel writes:
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 [Küng's April 16 open letter to the world's bishops!], 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.
... Permit me to suggest that you owe Pope Benedict XVI a public apology, for what, objectively speaking, is a calumny that I pray was informed in part by ignorance (if culpable ignorance).
Thus they have rushed precipitously to the circus, hurling themselves over one another to be the first in line to sell their birthright for a mess of bad pottage. How desparate they have been for kudos from their secularized Protestant peers and mentors! How desparate to please their circus trainers and play to the audience at the notoriously agnostic Jesus Seminar (pictured left in New York). -- All together now: "Let's Demythologize & Deconstruct!" 
The uncritical and cavalier ebullience with which Catholic Bible scholars (like Dominic Crossan, right) have unwittingly hurled themselves headlong into an abyss is breathtaking in its presumption. I have no quarrel with any Catholic Bible scholar wanting to be "well-informed" or make use of the "best available tools of contemporary research." The problem is the degree to which what counts as "well-informed," and what counts as the "best available tools of contemporary research," has been pervasively coopted by the liberal Protestant establishment and contaminated by assumptions imported from secular naturalism -- assumptions stemming from the Enlightenment as well as post-Enlightenment movements whose pre-theoretical commitments are deeply inimical to the Catholic tradition and Christian worldview. What is most ironical about the eagerness of Catholic biblical scholars to jump on this bandwagon is not merely the fact that the bandwagon's music is brazenly anti-Christian, but that it is such bad music -- the biblical theological equivalent of Anton LaVey lyrics in a setting by Marty Haugen. It doesn't take a sophisticated ear for "the ring of truth" to discern what is wrong here. Anyone acquainted with a little history of philosophy should be able to see that the jig is up.
(Oxford U.P., 1996) ... unless such a demolition of your history/faith dualizations would blow your circuits. Then, if you can handle the spadework, dig into Roger A. Johnson's classic, The Origins of Demythologizing (Leiden: Brill, 1974) -- which, unfortunately is currently out-of-print, though surely available through a good library (remember those?).
Karl Keating's e-letter of March 8, 2005, lists the following Vatican discipline cases during the pontificate of Pope John Paul II. The list was reportedly taken from the leftist National Catholic Reporter, which provided it as "evidence" of the "repressiveness" of the current pontificate. Keating's own conclusion is just the opposite, that if there is a scandal here it is that so few have been disciplined as to be almost laughable--only 24 in 26 years! I would add one further observation. All but one of the cases cited (Lefebvre) was left-wing. This should furnish some consolation to Catholic traditionalists who worry that the Vatican has been too hard on faithful, conservative Catholics while being too soft on liberal dissidents. Proportionately this certainly hasn't been the case. Still, when it comes to the big picture, Keating's point is well taken: this pontificate has probably leaned much more toward the laissez-faire side of things than towards discipline. Here's the list:
The problem with Hans Kung is that, like the rest of that part of the post-Christian world that has been reluctant to let go of its sentimental attachment to Christianity, he wants to change the meaning of Christianity to conform to his post-Christian commitments rather than to admit that his beliefs are no longer, in any traditionally recognizable sense of the term, Christian. In short, Kung wants to belong to the historical Christian community without accepting key historical Christian beliefs.