Louvain Studies 29 (2004) 222-238 Congar, Architect of the Unam Sanctam Alberto Melloni A Dominican and a reformer, a Cardinal and a persecuted man, a theologian and a man of resistance, a strategist and a candid Catholic, master and friar, preacher and diarist – Father Yves Congar, one of the leading figures in twentieth-century Catholic theology, easily lends him- self to these apparently paradoxical semantic binaries. Indeed, they could also be formulated as oxymorons of great interest from the point of view of historiography because Congar has been all these things simultane- ously. I say this forestalling what should be a conclusion – that he derived from this his key of interpretation for the Church. This was a church which, over the course of his long life (he was born in Sedan on 8 April 1904 and died in Paris on 22 June 1995) had absorbed all the contra- dictions of its catholicity and learned to practice a new and different form of ecclesial life. In fact, if there is a single theme running through Congar’s intellectual development, it is indeed the Church. As testimony to this fact, we have a huge body of work available for which would-be definitive bibliographies are often undermined by the discovery of a new conference address or a forgotten article.1 At the centre of his theologi- cal corpus, there is a visible and scientific interest in and a lifetime of experience about the Church. Knowing the Church The Church to which Congar consecrated his intellectual search was a Church which, when he was still only a child, was unleashing all 1. Bibliographical references in Pietro Quattrocchi, “Bibliographie générale du Père Yves Congar,” in Jean-Pierre Jossua, Le Père Congar: la théologie au service du peuple de Dieu, Chrétiens de tous les temps, 20 (Paris: Cerf, 1967) 242-246; see also Aidan Nichols, “An Yves Congar Biography: 1967-1987,” Angelicum 66 (1989) 428- 466; a panorama of recent dissertations in Joseph Famerée, Histoire et Église: L’ecclésiologie du père Congar de “Chrétiens désunis” à l’annonce du Concile (1937-1959) (Louvain-la- Neuve: UCL, 1991) 472-475. CONGAR, ARCHITECT OF THE UNAM SANCTAM 223 its institutional might in the struggle against “modernizing forces,” a struggle that engaged the pontiff himself 2 in a ghost-hunt where the ques- tion of the relationship between Catholicism and modernity remained unanswered. Yet that ghost-hunt ended up frustrating the intellectual vivacity of Catholicism with devastating consequences that spread throughout the rest of the twentieth century – from the passivity shown toward totalitarian systems onward – of which we still have not taken even a provisional inventory. This was the same Church which, when Congar died after receiving his red hat in articulo mortis, was still trying to find a balance between the striking gestures of openness administered by John Paul II and a doctrinal policy that sought to discipline theology, thereby restoring a diffidence toward research which at times seems to have imbued the walls of the former Holy Office to a greater extent than they could be sanitized by the intelligence of its most enlightened dwellers.3 Within this vast and slow Church, Congar moved like an indefati- gable explorer. A number of very important studies undertaken in the last twenty years have already highlighted how his way of historicizing problems represented the cornerstone of his thought,4 which was in fact the plan he intended to pursue, as he explained in the foreword to his work Chrétiens désunis, an historical investigation of ecclesiological development which, thanks to the reemergence of a plurality of contra- dictory ecclesiological forms and conceptions of the Christian past,5 would allow a process of rethinking capable of reintroducing the Roman Catholic Church into the two processes from which it had cut itself off. The first was the process of church unity, which was Congar’s real passion and a branch of theology that owes almost everything to him. The second was the process of secular modernity, the hic sunt leones of a Catholicism which, in Congar’s view, by using condemnation as its weapon, had ended up becoming a mere fortress of self-referential eccle- siastical thinking.6 2. Gianni La Bella (ed.), Pio X e il suo tempo (Bologna: Il Mulino, 2003). 3. See Giuseppe Ruggieri, “La politica dottrinale della curia romana nel postcon- cilio,” Cristianesimo nella storia 21 (2000) 103-131. 4. Famerée, Histoire et Église; Jean-Pierre Jossua, “Signification théologique de quelques retours sur le passé dans l’œuvre d’Yves Congar,” Cardinal Yves Congar (1904- 1995), ed. André Vauchez (Paris: Cerf, 1999) 93-103. 5. Andrea Galeano, “La Ecclesiologia de Yves Congar,” Franciscanum 22 (1980) 139-149. 6. Joseph Famerée, “L’ecclésiologie du Père Yves Congar: Essai de synthèse cri- tique,” Revue des Sciences Philosophiques et Théologique 76 (1992) 377-419. 224 ALBERTO MELLONI This was the goal to which he dedicated his work. Through the sequence of his major books – Chrétiens désunis (1937), Vraie et fausse réforme dans l’Église (1950), Jalons pour un théologie du laïcat (1953), Vaste Monde, ma paroisse (1959), La Tradition et les traditions (1960- 1963), Esquisses du mystère de l’Église (1953), L’Église de saint Augustin à l’époque moderne (1970), Je crois en l’Esprit saint (1979-1980) – we can identify the landmarks that are well-known to a specialist audience and of which Congar himself, as an autobiographical writer, was well aware. Indeed, when revisiting his theological path,7 when speaking about his education8 and when re-examining his entire life (something he did extensively during an interview with Jean Puyo in the mid-seventies),9 Congar showed that he was conscious of what he had been fighting for and his underlying awareness that he owed his success to two character- istics of his ecclesiology. Knowing History, Knowing through History The first of these characteristics was his ability to imbibe data – records and ideas, references and bibliographies, documents and sources. This was true at the beginning of his experience when reading Le mys- tère de l’Église by Père H. Clérissac and made him appreciate the ‘poetic’ side of Catholicism.10 Congar cultivated this aspect when he started attending the Insti- tut Catholique in 1925 (where Jacques Maritain had given him the first traditio by Thomas Aquinas) and again, in December 1926 at Le Saul- choir in Tournai (where he met Marie-Dominique Chenu). It was this confrère who introduced Congar into one of the two major intellectual 7. See “Appels et cheminements 1929-1963,” Cardinal Yves Congar, O.P.: écrits réformateurs, ed. Jean-Pierre Jossua (Paris: Cerf, 1995) 263-304. 8. On his youth, see “Enfance ardennaise,” La Grive (1965) October-December 14-16. “Enfance sedanaise 1904-1919,” Le Pays sedanais (1978), n. 5, 27-31; also “Trois années à la Faculté de philosophie,” Le livre du centenaire 1875-1975 (Paris: Beauchesne, 1975) 245-258; the relation with the Maritain circle in Meudon, “Souvenirs sur Jacques Maritain,” Notes et documents de l’Institut Jacques Maritain (1962) April-June, 5-7. 9. Yves Congar, Une vie pour la vérité, Jean Puyo interroge le Père Congar (Paris: Centurion, 1975). See also Yves Congar, Une passion: l’unité: Réflexions et souvenirs 1929- 1973, Foi vivante, 156 (Paris: Cerf, 1974); Le concile de Vatican II: son Église peuple de Dieu et corps du Christ, Théologie Historique, 71 (Paris: Beauchesne, 1984); Entretiens d’automne, 2nd ed. (Paris: Cerf, 1987); and “D’une ecclésiologie en gestation à Lumen Gentium chap. I et II,” Freiburger Zeitschrift für Philosophie und Theologie 18 (1971) 366-377. 10. Congar, Une vie pour la vérité, 74. CONGAR, ARCHITECT OF THE UNAM SANCTAM 225 ‘dynasties’ of French theology, described by Émile Poulat as divided and irreconcilable. One started from Blondel and his persistent diffi- dence toward the historical-critical approach and ended up with de Lubac’s lukewarm relationship with the reformism of the Second Vatican Council. The other characteristic originated from the research done by Loisy, went through Chenu (who saw in the early twentieth- century crisis just one of the many final crises of a baroque theologi- cal system) – and culminated precisely in the critical passionalité and loyalty to the conciliar reforms put forward by Congar. Chenu did nothing to stifle Congar’s research abilities; on the contrary, he bol- stered them. Actually, shortly after their meeting, Congar (meditating upon the seventeenth chapter of St. John’s Gospel, on 25 July 1930), is led to enrich with an intimate persuasion (inspired by the spiritual- ity of Le Sacrifice du Chef by E. Masure) the flurry of intellectual activ- ities sparked off by Chenu. In the teaching of the elder brother (Chenu explained to his young students, for one hour a week, the meaning of Faith & Order and of the ecumenical Assembly of Lausanne), he discovered an ecumenical vocation. Congar continued to pursue a diachronic study that knew no boundaries. As he had learned from an old article written by Father M.-B. Schwalm which appeared in the 1908 edition of the Revue des Sciences Philosophiques et Théologiques, entitled “Les deux théologies: la scholastique et la positive,” Congar discovered the power of historical bipartition and diachronic distinction. Listening to the ideas of Gabriel Le Bras, Étienne Gilson, and the Protestant theologian André Junot in Paris in 1931, discussions with his contacts among Russian émigrés, developing his relationship with Abbé Gratieux, who brought the mem- ory of Chomiakov to the West, cultivating his friendship with Father Lambert Beauduin at the time when the project for an ecumenical monastery was taking shape – all these experiences laid the foundations for a theological approach which, once the garnering of ideas had been completed, set forth by marking out the distance between unionism and ecumenism.