Louvain Studies 29 (2004) 258-272
Yves Congar: Mentor for Theologians Richard P. McBrien
It is a special honor for me to have been invited to deliver the Cen- tenary Lecture for this international conference honoring Yves Congar, one of the greatest ecclesiologists in the history of the Church, on the hundredth anniversary of his birth. The purpose of the paper is not to provide an overview of Congar’s ecclesiology, but to reflect, in a largely autobiographical fashion, on the impact Yves Congar has had, and continues to have, on Catholic theolo- gians generally, young and old alike, and on Catholic ecclesiologists in particular – whether they fully realize it or not. It is hardly surprising that among theologians attention has focused on Congar’s ecclesiology, the pre-eminent concern of his academic career. An ever-growing body of literature is clear testimony to an increased awareness of his importance among academics.1 I am reminded of a comment that the eminent Lutheran church his- torian, Martin Marty, emeritus professor at the University of Chicago, made some forty years ago regarding the influence that Dietrich Bonhoef- fer had been exerting on younger European and American Protestant
1. The following is an outline of the major studies on Congar’s thought: Jean-Pierre Jossua, Le Père Congar: la théologie au service du peuple de Dieu, Chrétiens de tous les Temps, 20 (Paris: Cerf, 1967); Joseph Famerée, L’Ecclésiologie d’Yves Congar avant Vatican II: Histoire et Église: Analyse et reprise critique, Bibliotheca Ephemeridum Theologicarum Lovaniensium, 107 (Louvain: Leuven University Press/Peeters, 1992); Cardinal Yves Congar 1904-1995: actes du colloque réuni à Rome les 3-4 juin 1996, ed. André Vauchez (Paris: Cerf, 1999); Aidan Nichols, Yves Congar (London/Wilton, CT: Geoffrey Chapman/Morehouse-Barlow, 1989); Charles MacDonald, Church and World in the Plan of God: Aspects of History and Eschatology in the Thought of Père Yves Congar O.P. (Frankfurt: Lang, 1982); Timothy I. MacDonald, The Ecclesiology of Yves Congar: Foun- dational Themes (Lanham, MD: University Press of America, 1984); William Henn, The Hierarchy of Truths According to Yves Congar, O.P. (Rome: Gregorian University Press, 1987); Cornelis Th. M. van Vliet, Communio sacramentalis: Das Kirchenverständnis von Yves Congar – genetisch und systematisch betrachtet (Mainz: Grünewald, 1995); Ramiro Pellitero, La Teología del Laicado en la obra de Yves Congar (Pamplona: University of Navarra Press, 1996); Elizabeth Teresa Groppe, Yves Congar’s Theology of the Holy Spirit (New York: Oxford University Press, 2004); Gabriel Flynn, Yves Congar’s Vision of the Church in a World of Unbelief (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2004). YVES CONGAR: MENTOR FOR THEOLOGIANS 259 theologians in the late 1950s and early 1960s. This was not many years after Bonhoeffer’s execution by the Nazis toward the end of the Second World War. These younger European and American theologians, Martin Marty observed, “often seem to be divided into two camps: those who acknowledge their debt to Bonhoeffer and those who are indebted but who obscure the traces to their source.”2 I do not suggest that there are younger Catholic theologians, and especially younger Catholic ecclesiologists, who have consciously obscured the traces to the source of their theological reflections on the mystery, mission, ministries, and structures of the Church. However, if my own experience over the past twenty-four years with my doctoral and Masters-level students at the University of Notre Dame is a reliable indication, relatively few Catholic graduate students of theology are aware, when they begin their studies, of the extraordinary and lasting contributions that Yves Congar made to theology, to the Second Vatican Council, and to the life of the Church generally. I am happy to report that, when these young Catholic students are exposed to the writings and also to the personal story of Yves Congar, they are almost immediately drawn to him and to his story, and are eager to read more of his work and to learn more about his life’s story as a theologian and as one of the Church’s most courageous and most effec- tive ecumenists and ecclesiastical reformers. I may be taking something of a risk here in not delivering a tradi- tional, academic paper at an event of such obvious scholarly character and importance. As I suggested only a moment ago, this Centenary Lecture which I have been so honored to give will be more autobiographical than academic. I should like to think, however, that the particular genre of this lecture shall enhance rather than detract from the scholarly tone of this conference. After all, Yves Congar himself was a real person, and the theologians whom he had influenced, and continues to influence, were and are also real persons, with their own stories to tell, with their own distinctive backgrounds and sets of experiences that have shaped and directed their lives as persons, as Christians, and as theologians – just like Yves Congar himself. Indeed, Congar recognized the importance of telling his own story, again and again, in order to help his readers better understand his the- ology and the actual life of the Church in which and for which his and
2. “Introduction: Problems and Possibilities in Bonhoeffer’s Thought,” The Place of Bonhoeffer: Problems and Possibilities in His Thought,” ed. Martin E. Marty (New York: Association Press, 1962) 10. 260 RICHARD P. MCBRIEN our theologies are done. So many of Yves Congar’s writings are, in fact, autobiographical in nature: his four daybooks on the four sessions of Vatican II,3 his two-volume diaries of the Council,4 his journal of his experiences as a theologian for the years 1946-1956,5 his diary of the First World War,6 his bluntly honest preface to his Dialogue Between Christians,7 his conversations with Bernard Lauret in which he reflected on fifty years of Catholic theology in a book of that title,8 his article in New Blackfriars on his life and work as a theologian,9 occasional letters to conferences and symposia meeting in his honor, just like this one,10 and, to some extent as well, the book which provides the theme of this Centenary Conference, This Church that I Love.11 I first came in touch with the writings of Yves Congar while a young seminarian back in the 1950s. Once I caught the taste, so to speak, I con- sumed everything written by him that I could lay my hands on at the sem- inary library and bookstore. Among the earliest formative works were Con- gar’s Lay People in the Church,12 his magisterial article on theology in the Dictionnaire de Théologie Catholique,13 better known simply as the DTC, and his subsequently-withdrawn work, Vraie et fausse réforme dans l’Église.14
3. Vatican II: Le Concile au jour le jour (Paris: Cerf, 1963); Le Concile au jour le jour, deuxième session (Paris: Cerf, 1964); ET, Report from Rome on the Second Session of the Vatican Council, trans. L. Sheppard (London: Chapman, 1964); Le Concile au jour le jour, troisième session (Paris: Cerf, 1965); Le Concile au jour le jour, quatrième session (Paris: Cerf, 1966); and Mon journal du Concile, ed. Éric Mahieu (Paris: Cerf, 2002). 4. Mon journal du Concile (Paris: Cerf, 2002), 2 vols. 5. Journal d’un théologien 1946-1956, ed. Étienne Fouilloux (Paris: Cerf, 2001). 6. Journal de la Guerre 1914-1918 (Paris: Cerf, 1997). 7. “Preface,” Dialogue Between Christians: Catholic Contributions to Ecumenism, trans. Philip Loretz (Westminster, MD: Newman Press, 1966) 28-45. Originally published as Chrétiens en dialogue: Contributions catholiques à l’œcuménisme (Paris: Cerf, 1964). 8. Fifty Years of Catholic Theology: Conversations with Yves Congar, ed. Bernard Lauret (Philadelphia, PA: Fortress Press, 1988). Originally published as Entretiens d’automne (Paris: Cerf, 1987). 9. “Reflections on Being a Theologian,” New Blackfriars 62 (1981) 405-409. 10. See, for example, “Letter from Father Yves Congar, O.P.,” Theology Digest 32 (1985) 213-216. 11. Trans. Lucien Delafuente (Denville, NJ: Dimension Books, 1969). Originally published as Cette Église que j’aime (Paris: Cerf, 1968). For an incisive, yet broadly based, comment on this book, see Gabriel Flynn, “The Role of Affectivity in Congar’s Theol- ogy,” Theology Digest 50 (2003) 115-122. Originally published in New Blackfriars 83 (2002) 347-364. 12. Lay People in the Church: A Study for a Theology of the Laity, trans. Donald Attwater (Westminster, MD: Newman, 1957; 21965). Originally published as Jalons pour une théologie du laïcat (Paris: Cerf, 1953). 13. “Théologie,” Dictionnaire de Théologie Catholique, vol. 15 (Paris: Éditions Letouzy & Ané, 1938-39); ET, A History of Theology, trans. Hunter Guthrie (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1968). 14. (Paris: Cerf, 1950; 21968). YVES CONGAR: MENTOR FOR THEOLOGIANS 261
These were years, I must remind or inform you (depending upon your age), when it was considered unusual for seminarians, at least in the United States, to have an actual interest in theology. Our course texts in what we called then Dogmatic Theology were either Latin manuals or mimeographed notes, usually translations of the so-called Spanish Summa,15 a four-volume series produced by the Jesuit faculty of theol- ogy at the University of Salamanca, or translations of the Latin manuals that some of our professors had used in Rome. Our ecclesiology text was J. M. Hervé’s Manuale theologiae dogmaticae.16 These theology textbooks and course notes resembled the dry, if somewhat complex, rules of the road that one must master before gaining a driver’s license. Once one has passed the written and road tests, however, the driver’s manuals are never to be consulted again. The seminary theology of those years was in the same category. Clergy of that pre-conciliar generation, at least in the United States, did not continue to read theology after ordination. Given that clerical culture and the generally low state of seminary theological education in the 1950s, stu- dents who showed a real interest in theology – not the theology of the manuals, to be sure – were regarded as highly unusual. I was drawn to theology initially through the liturgy and church history, and was blessed with a professor of both subjects in my second year of philosophical studies who brought theology to life through the double lens of liturgy and history. As was typical of seminary faculties in those years, this particular professor, Shawn Sheehan by name, had pub- lished no books and few, if any, articles that I was aware of. He had been president of the North American Liturgical Conference, however. Father Sheehan opened my eyes to the reality of a living Church that was not simply identical with the hierarchy or its institutional structures, and to a liturgy that was the work of the whole community of faith and not only of the clergy. Shawn Sheehan’s courses (less appreciative semi- narians referred them as “yawn with Shawn”) would pave the way to my personal study of Congar – a study done in spite of the ecclesiology to which I would formally be exposed the following year, the first of the required four years of theological course work. Indeed, we had a bright, but odd and personally intimidating, pro- fessor who, upon Pope John XXIII’s announcement of the council in January of 1959, which was the mid-point of our ecclesiology course,
15. Sacrae Theologiae Summa (Madrid: Biblioteca de Autores Cristianos, 1962; 4 vols.). 16. (Paris: Berche et Pagis, 1949; vol. 1; final ed., 1957-59). 262 RICHARD P. MCBRIEN urged us to pray that the council would never be held. Our professor was convinced that the First Vatican Council had made all future councils unnecessary, superfluous, and even dangerously counter-productive. In discovering Yves Congar’s Lay People in the Church, I found a useful corrective to such ideas. In my second year of theology, our professor of Dogmatic Theology simply read his dog-eared notes at us – all of which had been mimeographed and handed down from year to year, from one class to another. There were no questions asked or recognized during the class sessions. The professor also had what was for the great majority of us a convenient habit of looking only at one student, known as the class regulator, while delivering his lectures. By reason of seminary tradition, the regulator had the misfortunate of sitting in the first row to the far right, directly in the professor’s line of sight. The poor student-regulator was unable to do anything in class except pretend to listen intently to the lecture. All other students read novels, wrote letters to family and friends, slept, or simply day-dreamed. Not that I was any more virtuous than others; I simply loved theology and Congar’s version of it in particular. During those long, dull lectures on the Trinity I read, in the original French, Congar’s DTC arti- cle on theology, taking copious and detailed notes in a spiral notebook which I still have in my personal library. How I subsequently obtained and then read a copy of Congar’s Vraie et fausse réforme dans l’Église is a more amusing story. In those days, professors served also as confessors and spiritual directors as well as teach- ers. One of my theology professors, a benignly eccentric man who was the only known friend of my former ecclesiology professor and who had warned me to stand clear of the man, knew that I was eager to get hold of Congar’s book, which had by that time been withdrawn from circu- lation by order of the Vatican’s Holy Office. The professor – the first American, we were told, to have received a doctorate in Patristics from the Oriental Institute in Rome – had a copy of the censured volume. He agreed to loan me the book on condition that I would give him, in return, a typed copy of the detailed notes that he knew that I would produce. I accepted his terms, assuming that he wanted the notes, not to check my understanding of the contents of the book, but to have something for himself to refer to, since he himself had not read the book nor apparently ever intended to read it. At an agreed upon time in the early evening and in spite of the strict rule under which the seminary operated in those years (it had the atmosphere of a minimum security prison), my benefactor drove down the hill from St. William’s Hall, where YVES CONGAR: MENTOR FOR THEOLOGIANS 263 he resided, to Bishop Peterson Hall, where I and many other students and faculty lived and had their classes. When I saw my professor’s large, black Jaguar (it may have been a Rolls-Royce; my memory is a bit foggy on that detail) pull up at the main entrance of the building, I came out of the door to meet him. He handed over Congar’s Vraie et fausse réforme dans l’Église – I do not exaggerate – in a plain, brown, paper bag, as if it contained several kilos of an illegal drug. And then he drove off. I could not have been more excited. I would have Yves Congar’s famous book on church reform as an intellectual feast for the next several weeks. After ordination in February 1962, I served as an assistant in a parish in Connecticut for only a year and a half. When the late Cardi- nal Richard Cushing, archbishop of Boston, announced his plans to build a national seminary for so-called delayed vocations in nearby Weston, Massachusetts, just down the road from where the Jesuit theologate was at the time, the cardinal asked some faculty members at the Boston archdiocesan seminary, my alma mater, to make recommendations for the initial faculty at Pope John XXIII National Seminary. Because of my noticeably strong interest in theology, several of my professors at St. John’s Seminary recommended my name. My archbishop in Hart- ford, Connecticut, agreed to release me and I left for Rome and the Gregorian University in September of 1963, in time for the beginning of the second session of Vatican II. The highlight of my two years in Rome, apart from the experience of the council itself, was a visit I somehow managed to arrange with Yves Congar himself at the Angelicum, the Dominican university in Rome where the great man was staying during the council. I had written to Congar, in English, in early November of that year, 1963, to tell him of my deep interest in his writings and of my desire to meet him, if only to discuss a possible dissertation topic. He wrote back, in Latin, saying that anyone so “addicted” to his writings deserved a hearing, and so it was arranged. We met, alas, the day after President John F. Kennedy had been assassinated in Dallas, Texas. The final paragraph of his diary entry for that very day, Novem- ber 23, 1963, notes the tragic event and pays tribute to the fallen President as a man of peace. However, the first words of the next day’s entry – the day I visited Congar – describe the day as “médiocre.” He mentioned that his work was “interrupted” by a visit from a Polish priest in the morning. Fortunately, my visit was in the afternoon. And I do not have a drop of Polish blood in me. Although Congar does not men- tion my own visit later in the day, at least he did not complain about it! 264 RICHARD P. MCBRIEN
Indeed, I am all the more humbled by the fact that, in spite of his enormous list of responsibilities at the time, he so readily agreed to see me at all. When I arrived at his stark cell, I found Congar seated at a desk, in his flowing Dominican habit, with a small blaze in the fireplace just behind him. Mercifully, he spoke with me in English. My memory of that conversation, which lasted the better part of an hour or more, is fading with the years, but he was exceedingly encouraging and helpful about the dissertation topic. Nevertheless, I later concluded that his suggested topic, “The notion of ministry in St. Augustine,” was too broad and would take too long to finish. Given my distaste for the Roman system of pedagogy, I was eager to get back to the States and resume my theological education on my own, just as I had done for the most part in my seminary years. I do recall vividly two other key aspects of my conversation with Congar on that November afternoon in 1963. The one was more amus- ing than illuminating. I had brought up the name of Bernard Lonergan, as an example of the kind of theology at the Gregorian with which I was not particularly enamored. Congar looked at me as if I had just uttered a string of words in Mandarin or Japanese. “What was the name?” he asked. “Bernard Lonergan,” I replied. It was obvious that it still did not register, and so I repeated Lonergan’s name for him, syllable by syllable. “Lon-er-gan,” Congar repeated slowly. Then he shook his head. “No, I do not know him.” At the time, there was a small Lonergan cult, promoted by a few of his disciples at the residence for American priests who were doing graduate studies in Rome. I was not part of the group, nor were several of my new clerical friends from around the United States. I recall that I could not wait to tell one of them that the great Yves Congar had never even heard of Bernard Lonergan. We both experienced what the old manuals of moral theology used to refer to as “gaudium pravum,” a perverse joy. Congar’s lack of awareness of Bernard Lonergan was, of course, entirely consistent with his open admission, given more than once, that he had no philosophical pretensions. “I am not a philosopher,” he wrote. “I lack philosophical training and a philosophical spirit; so I have not produced a theology like that of Karl Rahner, speculatively elaborated, and I don’t think I would be altogether capable of it.”17
17. “Letter from Father Yves Congar, O.P.,” 215-216 (see note 8, above). YVES CONGAR: MENTOR FOR THEOLOGIANS 265
I should say here parenthetically that Lonergan and Rahner were themselves personal competitors, as some of you may know. Lonergan and I were colleagues at Boston College in the late 1970s, not long before his death in 1984. He tended to disparage anyone interested in Rahner, as if writing off such interest as the pursuit of a theological fad. (At the same time, he could tell you exactly how many doctoral dissertations had been written about himself, and was happy to do so.) Rahner, in turn, I was told by some of his former students, had expressed his own exas- peration with Lonergan’s immersion in method. One cannot always be whetting the knife, Rahner supposedly said of Lonergan. “Eventually, you must cut with it.” Yves Congar may not have been philosophically inclined, much less adept, but he surely did not hesitate to cut with his own theological knife. The other element of my conversation with Congar on that gray and chilly November afternoon in 1963 is surely of more enduring signifi- cance for our reflections here on Yves Congar as mentor for theologians. Congar offered me two pieces of advice regarding my future work as a theologian. The first was that every theologian needs a master, or men- tor, someone who helps to shape one’s theological mind, without, how- ever, limiting one’s horizons. He pointed out, not surprisingly, that St. Thomas Aquinas was his own theological master, or mentor. The thought struck me then that perhaps Congar himself would prove to be my mentor, as indeed he became and remains to this very day. The other piece of advice which Conger proposed was that I should stimulate my imagination as much as possible because theology is more than an intellectual enterprise. He recommended specifically that I go to films, and mentioned the then-popular “West Side Story” as an example. I viewed the film a few months later while visiting Munich. The theater was packed. The film, of course, was in English, but with German sub-titles. It was a new experience for me to catch the meaning of all the lines before the rest of the audience did. I had warm thoughts and grateful memories of Yves Congar that day in that theater. When I returned to the United States after completing and defend- ing my dissertation in June of 1965, I began teaching Fundamental Theology and Ecclesiology at the new seminary for so-called delayed vocations, named in honor of Pope John XXIII. Congar’s writings, as well as the newly emerging documents of Vatican II, provided the core and framework of my lectures. That continues to this day. Soon after the publication of my two-volume Catholicism in the spring of 1980 and almost immediately after I left the faculty of Boston 266 RICHARD P. MCBRIEN
College to chair the Department of Theology at Notre Dame, the U.S. Bishops’ Committee on Doctrine, at the request of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, undertook a formal review of the work.18 I did not learn until several years later that Congar had played a role in these investigations. My source of information was Yves Congar’s fellow Dominican theologian, Hervé Legrand, who had discovered a document pertinent to the investigation in Congar’s archives following his death. It seems that Congar had been secretly consulted by the U.S. Catholic Bishops’ Committee on Doctrine regarding my Catholicism book. Legrand felt that I had a right to know this, especially since Congar had been so supportive of me and of my book. Congar insisted in his four-page letter to the executive director of the U.S. Bishops’ Committee on Doctrine that he fully approved of the historical method I had employed in the book, observing that it was the one recommended by the Council itself and the one that characterized his own writings over so many years. Congar noted moreover that the intention of the book was to permit readers to locate themselves in the present situation, which is characterized, he wrote, by both change and continuity. “Father McBrien,” Congar generously observed, “responds to this intention with a magnanimity and a seriousness to which I pay my respect.” As for the book’s doctrinal content, Congar pointed out that it was consistent with the teaching of Vatican II and written with an ecu- menical spirit that stood in sharp contrast with the closed system of Scholasticism and what he called “Roman centralism.” It is a “laudable project,” he concluded. In his previous review of my Catholicism book in Revue des sciences philosophiques et théologiques, he had also praised the method and con- tent of the book, calling it a “magnanimous enterprise,” “richly docu- mented,” and “solidly balanced.”19 Later in the decade, Congar honored me again when, in writing the key article on ecclesiology for the sixteen- volume Encyclopedia of Religion, he used the definition of Church that I had formulated in Catholicism, and referred to it approvingly at three different points in his encyclopedia entry.20
18. The original two-volume work was published by Winston Press in Minneapolis, MN, in 1980. The study edition was published the following year. A completely revised and updated edition appeared in 1994, under the new imprint of HarperSanFrancisco in San Francisco, CA, which had bought of Winston Press several years earlier. 19. 66 (1982) 122. 20. “Church: Ecclesiology,” The Encyclopedia of Religion, ed. Mircea Eliade, et al. (New York: Macmillan, 1987, vol. 3) 480-486, at 481, 484, and 485. YVES CONGAR: MENTOR FOR THEOLOGIANS 267
I have made these various references to Congar’s support of my own ecclesiological writings, not as a gesture of self-indulgence nor of boast- ing, but simply to highlight Congar’s own readiness to rise to the defense of others who, like himself (although in a much less severe fashion), had come under the unfriendly scrutiny of official forces in the Vatican and in the local hierarchy. Their mentality and the modus operandi that followed from it, Congar believed, more closely resembled that of the pre-Vatican II era than of Vatican II itself and its distinctive hopes and promises of constructive collaboration between theologians and the hierarchical magisterium. I should like to make one final autobiographical comment and then move on to more general observations about Yves Congar’s role as a mentor for theologians. Since July 1966 I have been publishing a syn- dicated theology column each week in various U.S. and Canadian Catholic newspapers. Thanks to a former staff member in the department of Theology at Notre Dame, all of these columns, from the very begin- ning, are now available on my web site:
“One would have thought,” Congar wrote, “that it was just the reverse, that a man could wait patiently because he had hope in his heart.” But the way St. Paul had put it opened up a more profound truth for him. 268 RICHARD P. MCBRIEN
“Those who do not know how to suffer, do not know how to hope either,” Congar observed. “Only when a man has suffered for his convictions does he attain in them a certain force, a certain quality of the undeniable and, at the same time, the right to be heard and to be respected. O crux benedicta (‘O blessed cross’)” (Dialogue Between Christians, p. 45). So he continued working, in spite of the constant opposition and harassment from church officials. But then came the death of Pope Pius XII in 1958 and the election of John XXIII. There was to be a council. Congar received word that he would be a consultor on its Theological Commission and then a peritus (“expert”) at the council itself. His ecclesiology, for which he had suffered so much in the past, would become the ecclesiology of Vatican II itself. Later, in 1994, he was named a cardinal. Resurrection followed the “blessed cross.” Thus far, I have spoken about Yves Congar’s role as a mentor for theologians in highly personal terms. I should like now to broaden that experiential base and to consider how Congar has functioned, and continues to function, as a mentor for theologians, past and present, whether consciously or not. I should propose five elements – not an exhaustive list by any means – of Congar’s mentoring impact on Catholic theologians generally and on Catholic ecclesiology in particular. First, although a mentor for many theologians, Yves Congar has never functioned as a kind of intellectual straight-jacket. He is always the authentic teacher who provides the tools of inquiry, the personal example of how one uses them, and the inspiration and encouragement not only to do likewise, but to do even better than he did, if at all possible. Indeed, Congar has never set out to establish a school or distinctive style of doing theology, complete with disciples. There are Barthians, Rahnerians, Lonerganians, Bultmannians, Tillichians, and even, in my country, albeit at a much lower level, Hauerwasians. But there are no Congarians. “There is no theology of Congar,” he once wrote. And then, in a burst of excessive humility, “There are only some relatively com- monplace works.”21 Those of us who have looked to Congar for inspiration and guid- ance and who have been otherwise influenced, knowingly or not, by his writings and personal example, have done so not as formal disciples, restricted to his thinking and to his approach to issues, but as scholars who have been encouraged to dig as deeply as he did into the tradition
21. “Letter from Father Yves Congar, O.P.,” 213. YVES CONGAR: MENTOR FOR THEOLOGIANS 269 and then to think and to take initiatives as freely and as courageously as he did in whatever cause that would promote the proclamation of the Gospel, the good of the Church, and the quality of life upon this earth. Second, the hallmark of Congar’s way of doing theology was to bring together what was once called the positive and the speculative sides of theology, the latter pre-supposing and building on the former. Con- gar himself originally distinguished between positive theology as auditus fidei and speculative theology as intellectus fidei. While he continued to retain that distinction late in his theological career, he conceded that he “would now integrate the two more closely, distinguish them much less, and see theological exposition, the intellectus of the faith, derive from the sources themselves, the auditus fidei – attentiveness to testimony in the great witnesses: the bible, the fathers, the liturgy, the life of the church, the magisterium in its place (which is not foremost, but which I have always consulted and respected greatly).”22 Under Congar’s impact, therefore, theologians have paid increasing attention to the sources, to tradition, to history itself, which Pope John XXIII once described in his opening address to the Council as the great teacher of life, as the foundation for critical reflection. As in Paul Tillich’s method of correlation, the message must always be in dialectical tension with the situation in the world as well as in the Church itself, the one illuminating and refining our understanding of the other. “In everything,” Congar wrote, “I have always been concerned to recover the sources, the roots … To the extent there is a ‘Congarian the- ology,’ it would be a theology that would unite exposition to knowledge of the sources.”23 Revelation, after all, “takes place in the framework of history or of an ‘economy’,” he has pointed out.24 Third, Congar was among the first Catholic theologians to recog- nize and then to write openly about the “new awareness” of the public role that theologians are called upon to play in the Church and in the world generally. Theologians, he wrote, have “always worked in the Church and for the Church. For a long time, however, the majority of them produced their theology exactly as though the world had not become foreign to the affirmation of the faith which they distinguished and subdistinguished and over which they poured ratiocination… I can- not exaggerate the importance,” he continued, “of the new consciousness which theologians have acquired of their responsibility to the Church
22. “Letter from Father Yves Congar, O.P.”, 216. 23. Ibid., 215. 24. A History of Theology, 12 (see n. 12, above). 270 RICHARD P. MCBRIEN and to the internal credibility of the faith which the Church must offer mankind.”25 “From the standpoint of topics treated,” Congar insisted, “the Council moved away from introspection on the nature of the Church and examined instead how the Church can truly benefit mankind.”26 His focus was always on service: service rendered to one another within the Church and to the Church as a whole, and the service of the Church to the world at large. “The Church exists in herself, as a sacred thing in the midst of the world,” he wrote in his little, yet exceedingly provocative book, The Wide World My Parish, “but [the Church] does not exist for herself; she has a mission to and a responsibility for the world.”27 Congar’s ecclesiology was never ecclesiocentric. The Church and the world, he insisted, “are not like two crowned sovereigns looking sideways at one another as they sit enthroned on the same dais; they are much more like the Good Samaritan holding in his arms the half-dead man, whom he will not leave because he has been sent to help him…”28 For Congar, the Church is akin to the French under- ground which, during the dark period of Nazi occupation, worked in secret to prepare the way for the final liberation of France. Only a minority of citizens, he pointed out, were active members of the underground. The great majority were aware of its existence and content to allow it to work on their behalf. Some gave active support, like Catholics who appear in Church, Congar said, on Christmas and Easter. Others were openly hostile, and collaborated with the occupying forces against it. But in the end, the French underground was seen as a necessary, preparatory condition for the ultimate liberation of France. So, too, Congar suggested, is the Church’s role in history. When the final liberation of the Reign of God is fully achieved, it will be seen that the Church played an utterly crucial and even essential role in the eventual victory, even though it was always “a small Church in a large world.”29 Fourth, in spite of Congar’s prodigious output of writings, he never compromised scholarship and the need for balance. Some of his writings may be faulted for being too lengthy, even repetitive, but few,
25. History of Theology, 14. 26. Ibid., 19. 27. The Wide World My Parish: Salvation and Its Problems, trans. D. Attwater (Baltimore, MD: Helicon Press, 1961) 21. Originally published as Vaste Monde, ma Paroisse (Paris: Témoignage Chrétien, 1959). 28. Ibid., 24. 29. Ibid., chapter 2, “A Small Church in a Large World,” 8-26, especially 25-26. YVES CONGAR: MENTOR FOR THEOLOGIANS 271 if any, could be faulted for lack of scholarly accuracy and substance. And through it all, Congar maintained an extraordinary balance between, for example, the already and the not-yet of the coming Reign of God, the need for ongoing reform and the abiding commitment to the Tradition, the Church as People of God and the institutional Church, the crucial role of the laity in the life, mission, and ministries of the Church and the necessary and pastorally irreplaceable ministries of those in Holy Orders, at whatever level. For Yves Congar, as for those who have been mentored by him, it was, and is, always a matter of both/and rather than either/or. Fifth, and finally, in giving us four conditions, or principles, of church reform, Congar provided invaluable guidance for theologians involved in the renewal and reform of the Church and its theology as he himself was.30 The first condition of reform is the primacy of charity and of pas- toral concern. The reformer must love the Church that is to be reformed; its members, after all, are our sisters and brothers in Christ, and the reform can never be an end in itself. It is for the sake of the renewal and enrichment of the actual life of the Church itself, and then, through a renewed Church, of the human community itself. The second condition for reform is the need to remain always in communion with the whole Church. It is this communion that insures the catholicity of the reform. Reform, again, is not an end in itself. It seeks to strengthen the unity of the Church so that an authentic unity, as opposed to a deadening uniformity, can make it possible for the Church to fulfill its mission of service to the world more effectively. A third condition for reform is patience, about which Congar wrote so eloquently in telling the story of his own long-standing troubles with the Vatican in the years following the Second World War, until the election of John XXIII and the call of the Council. It is a patience, however, that is not to be confused with passivity or with a lack of courage. Suffering is not erased through what Bonhoeffer might have referred to as a “cheap hope.” Congar insisted that it is not hope that makes the enduring of suffering possible, but it is suffering that leads to the knowledge and experience of hope. Johannes Metz put it well when he wrote: “The Christian renunci- ation of the world takes on the servant’s form of a crucified hope for the world. A faith which is guided by such a hope is primarily not a doctrine,
30. Vraie et fausse réforme dans l’Église (21968), 227-317. 272 RICHARD P. MCBRIEN but an initiative for the passionate innovating and changing of the world toward the Kingdom of God.”31 A fourth condition for reform and for a true renewal of the Church, according to Congar, is fidelity to Tradition (upper-case “T”), what the French famously called a “ressourcement.” On the other hand, Congar also warned against an attraction to what he referred to as a “mere nov- elty” involving a kind of “mechanical adaptation” to ecclesiastical and cultural circumstances. In sum: the theologian, therefore, must always put charity and pas- toral concern first, must do everything possible to maintain communion with, and the unity of, the whole Church, must expect and even embrace some measure of suffering in the cause of renewal and reform, and must remain rooted always in the authentic Tradition of the Church. The luminous and enduring model, of course, is Yves Congar himself, mentor to us all and to the Church that he loved.
Dr. Richard McBrien is Crowley-O’Brien Professor of Theology at the Univer- sity of Notre Dame, Notre Dame, Indiana, USA. A priest of the Archdiocese of Hartford, Connecticut, he is an internationally acclaimed author and Catholic commentator. He was president of the Catholic Theological Society of America (1973-74) and winner of its John Courtney Murray Award for “outstanding and distinguished achievement in theology” (1976). Address: Department of Theology, University of Notre Dame, 130 Malloy Hall, Notre Dame, IN 46556, USA.
31. Theology of the World, trans. William Glen-Doepel (New York: Herder and Herder, 1969) 93. Published originally as Zur Theologie der Welt (Mainz: Matthias- Grünewald-Verlag, 1968). An earlier English translation of this particular chapter appeared in The Word in History, ed. T. Patrick Burke (New York: Sheed & Ward, 1966) 81.