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The article attempts to identify the key sources of anti-institutional discourse in the theological discourse of the Catholic Church in Germany after the Second Vatican Council and to analyse the use of the concepts of “charisma” and “institution”. The ideas of the Freckenhorst group, the most infl uential group of Catholic priests who advocated church reforms, are considered as an example of this theological argument. This intellectual community played a very special role in the Catholic renewal and impacted signifi cantly the regulation of the church life in Germany. The article analyses the works of three members of the group, i.e. Walter Kasper, Gotthold Hazenhüttl and Norbert Greinacher. At the heart of the church structure itself, they place charisma as an individual ministerial vocation of each member of the Christian community. The institutions of the Church were interpreted almost exclusively in a negative way. The article shows that the “student revolution” of 1968, “the theology of liberation”, but especially the Frankfurt School infl uenced the theology of this group. The criticism of modern society and political systems by the thinkers of Frankfurt School lies in the basis of the critical argumentation of Freckenhorst group. It is used in their criticism of the Catholic Church and its power institutions, considered, however, as an ideal of the New Testament. Therefore, the anti-institutional pathos has no convincing ecclesiastical or theological grounds. The author of the article notes that Christian priest has a particular role within the anti-institutional discourse. On the one hand, he is fully involved in the life of the community, on the other, he is a representative of the hierarchy. Hence, in the theology of Freckenhorster group, he either functions as a representative of the people, or as a representative of the “authoritarian” institution of the Church. This allows us to speak about the exceptional potential of the priest, both within the modern ecclesiology and in the modern social thought in the context of the revision of the traditional power relations.

After the Second Vatican Council, priesthood came to be one of the key themes in Catholic theology of the latter half of the 20th century. This article attempts to scrutinise the specifi c rhetoric that was generated around the topic of priesthood and became wide-spread in various spheres of theological studies. With Hans Kueng’s ideas as an example, the author of this article reconstructs, fi rstly, the main theses of the “new theology of priesthood” and, secondly, the argumentation underlying them. The conclusion is that with the crisis of priesthood in the background, not only there appears the criticism of the “traditional” priest, there develops a positive theological programme which aims, on the one hand, at the return to the tradition and Christian roots and, on the other hand, aims at the compatibility with the facts of life of the present-day world. At the same time, the rhetoric in question contains as its important part trenchant criticism of not solely the traditional theology of ecclesiastical ministry, but also of established practices of pastoral service and of parish life. This criticism is aimed at the accelerated renewal of the Catholic church life and the overcoming of the crisis of the traditional religious institutes. Conservative authors regard these attempts as “theologians’ subversions” and as the work aimed at aggravating the crisis. Following the analysis carried out in the article, this phenomenon in Catholic theology is termed “theological anticlericalism”.