The Catholic Church: A Short History was published by Weidenfeld & Nicolson in 2001 (originally published in German as Kleine Geschichte der katholischen Kirche), and it condenses two thousand years of institutional history into a single readable volume. Küng tells the story of the Catholic Church as a historian rather than an apologist — acknowledging both its achievements and its crimes, its moments of genuine spiritual power and its episodes of institutional corruption.
The narrative traces six paradigm shifts in Catholic history: the early Christian community, the Hellenistic-Byzantine church, the medieval papal monarchy, the Reformation and Counter-Reformation, the modern ultramontane church, and the contemporary church after Vatican II. Each paradigm represents a fundamental reorganization of the church’s self-understanding, its relationship to secular power, and its internal structures.
Küng’s historical argument serves a contemporary purpose: by showing that the church has changed radically many times in its history, he undermines the conservative claim that current structures are unchangeable because divinely instituted. If the church invented the papacy, the cardinalate, and the Curia at specific historical moments, it can uninvent them at other moments.
Collecting The Catholic Church: A Short History
First edition (Weidenfeld & Nicolson, London, 2001): Cloth binding, dust jacket.
Market values:
- First edition in dust jacket: $10–$25
- Paperback editions: $5–$10