Hans Küng, president of the Foundation Global Ethic in Germany and Switzerland.

Hans Küng, one-time Vatican adviser whose views questioning the teachings of the Catholic Church led to a Vatican censure in 1979, will deliver the Sunday, Feb. 14, sermon in the Memorial Church and the Paul Tillich Lecture on Tuesday, Feb. 16.

Küng, president of the Foundation Global Ethic in Germany and Switzerland, has been an internationally known theologian and philosopher for decades. He is an outspoken leader in the movement for global ethical standards, a movement which encompasses rules of conduct common to the world's great religions.

"I welcome both to Harvard and the Memorial Church Professor Küng," said the Rev. Peter J. Gomes, Plummer Professor of Christian Morals and Pusey Minister in the Memorial Church. "I was pleased to bring him here in 1976 as the Noble Lecturer, when he gave us a most stimulating series of lectures on his then-groundbreaking book On Being a Christian. It is a great treat to have him back here for this sermon and the Tillich Lecture."

William Crout, founder and organizer of the Paul Tillich Lectures, said Küng is an excellent choice to deliver this year's lecture because, like the lecture's namesake, Küng is concerned about the spiritual foundations of human life and sees concord among the religions as an essential element of a peaceful, just, and humane world community.

"Hans Küng, a philosopher-theologian of vast learning like Tillich, is a superb choice to give the Tillich Lecture because he is attempting to do at the end of the century what Tillich did before him -- to interpret and illuminate the great personal, social, and political questions in terms of what Tillich called 'the depth dimension,' the religious dimension, that of the meaning of being and ultimacy," Crout said. "He, like Tillich, is a visionary ecumenist, and bridge-builder, a creative uniter of the separated."

The semi-annual Tillich Lectures, sponsored by University Marshal Richard M. Hunt, commemorates the renowned theologian Paul Tillich, an émigré from Nazi Germany who served as a University Professor at Harvard from 1954 to 1962. The first lecture was held in 1990, on the 25th anniversary of Tillich's death.

Küng's Tillich Lecture will be on "World Politics and Global Ethic." His sermon will be on "Christ and the World Religions." The lecture takes place at the Lowell Lecture Hall at 8 p.m. on Tuesday, Feb. 16, and the sermon is at 11 a.m. on Sunday, Feb. 14, in the Memorial Church.

Küng was ordained a Roman Catholic priest in 1954 and served as a full professor of theology at the University of Tübingen in Germany for more than 30 years. Pope John XXIII appointed him an adviser to the Second Vatican Council in 1962, where he became known as a champion of reform.

In 1979, his reformist views prompted a Vatican censure and his being banned from teaching as a Catholic theologian. An agreement was reached in 1980 with the University of Tübingen that allowed him to continue teaching under the secular direction of the University president and senate.

Since then he has become increasingly known as a "public theologian" and one of the world's foremost proponents of interreligious dialogue and a global ethic.

He has written several books, including the international bestsellers On Being a Christian and Does God Exist?