The return of Yves Congar:

...From 1931 to 1939 he taught fundamental theology and ecclesiology at the great Dominican seminary at Le Saulchoir...

...He had to submit all his writings, however ephemeral, for censorship by his Dominican superiors...

...Chenu, his great colleague at Le Saulchoir Congar first attracted attention by the publication of Divided Christendom: Principles of a Catholic "Ecumenism" (1937...

...Weber invited him to the Dominican house in Strasbourg, where, although he did not teach, he was able to return to his studies...

...One of his most meditative and least provocative books, The Mystery of the Temple (1958...

...At the age of seventy-nine, he is still working ten hours a day, and there is every reason to expect that this year too the quality and quantity of his publications will shame theologians half his age and unhindered by the crippling disease from which he has suffered for many years...

...Two years later he was informed by his superiors of Rome's difficulties with the book, and it seems that it was only his imprisonment at the time that enabled him to escape the condemnation that befell Le Saulchoir and Father Chenu in 1942...

...In 1945 he returned to Le Saulchoir, where he taught until 1954, when a series of ecclesiastical decisions forced on him a new exile which did not really come to an end until he was invited, at the express wish of Pope John XXIII, to help in the preparations for Vatican II...

...Similarly, much of the third volume is an attempt to mediate the different appreciations and realizations of the Gospel which the Spirit has evoked in the Eastern and Western Churches...

...Their rate of appearance has not even been slowed by a disease of the bone marrow that has crippled his legs and even the hand with which he writes, now that he can no longer type...

...In each of these controversies he has shown himself acutely aware of the values at stake and of the new questions being posed, and he has never practiced a kind of conciliar fundamentalism...

...The great causes which I had tried to serve had come to a head at the Council: the renewal of ecclesiology, ecumenism, the laity, mission, ministries...

...Several essays have illumined questions of infallibility and magisterium, the crisis of authority, and issues in ministry...

...That it is even difficult to find his works for sale in Catholic bookstores suggests that it is appropriate to reintroduce him to American readers...

...At the Council he served on the Theological Commission and made major contributions to the Council's documents on the church, ecumenism, missions, the priesthood, and the church's role in the modern world...

...The Council represented a thorough rehabilitation of his reputation, and since then he has been able to devote himself again to the historical and theological scholarship for which the church has at last shown itself grateful...

...In February 1954, the three provincials of the French Dominicans were all removed by Rome, and several of their theologians, among them Chenu and Congar, were ordered to leave their posts Congar first went to Jerusalem and then, after being recalled for several fruitless months in Rome, was ordered to go to England where he was refused permission to teach or to engage in ecumenical contacts...

...By this time Congar seemed to be irremediably suspect "From the beginning of 1947 to the end of 1956," he wrote of his difficulties with Rome, "I knew nothing from that quarter but an uninterrupted series of denunciations, warnings, restrictive or discriminatory measures and distrustful interventions...

...Ecumenism has been the chief passion of Congar's work...

...One might be tempted to speak of the work as crowning Father Congar's theological achievement, but that would suggest an FATHER JOSEPH A. KOMONCHAK, a priest of the archdiocese of New York, teaches ecclesiol-ogy and ministry at the Catholic University of America in Washington, D.C...

...In 1939 he was drafted into the French army, but a year later he was captured by the Germans and spent the next five years in various prison camps...

...He was born in Sedan, France on April 13, 1904, the year of birth, by the way, also of Bernard Lonergan and Karl Rahner...

...A visitor to the Couvent Saint Jacques last June found him seated at a large and chaotic desk, nearly hidden by the tomes from which he was preparing three major articles to celebrate the 500th anniversary of the birth of Martin Luther...

...Last summer, right after Pope John Paul II's dramatic visit to Canterbury, he illustrated the distance the church has come by recalling that one of his censors once asked him to put "soi-disant" before any reference to Anglican bishops...

...Only last year he published Diversites et communion in which, in an effort to escape the present ecumenical impasse, he explored models for conceiving a future unity of Christians...

...end, which, thank God, is not in sight...

...Since the Council, he has not stopped either his historical investigations or his participation in and interpretation of the tremendous changes in the church that have ensued...

...He himself is chiefly concerned to illumine contemporary questions by a retrieval of the great and broad Tradition rather than to attempt a new and critical reinterpretation of it...

...He is not in principle critical of this shift, and in fact he has some very interesting analyses of the cultural transformations that make it appropriate and even necessary...

...1966) helped to transpose the issue into a more adequate context Long essays on episcopal collegiality, on authority as service, on poverty in the church, on the local church, and on catholicity as universal enculturation helped to divert the Council's ecclesiology from authoritarian models of Roman uniformity...

...The work throughout is vintage-Congar, displaying the richness of catholicity across generations and cultures, evoking the past in order to understand the present and to anticipate the future...

...He wrote them in part because he believes that Western theology, especially in its ecclesiology and sacramental theology, has not been sufficiently Trinitarian...

...In 1967 his biblography numbered 958 items, and last year he estimated it to be some 1630 or 1640 titles - a "quite ridiculous list," he called it...

...When the Council was at an impasse over the question of Scripture and Tradition, his volumes on Tradition and Traditions (1960 and 1963...

...AFTER THE war, Congar returned to his work "Anyone who did not live through the years 1946 and 1947 in the history of French Catholicism," he wrote some years later, "has missed one of the finest moments in the life of the church...

...He has described it in terms of a religious vocation, experienced quite clearly in prayer as he was preparing for his ordination...

...His great but particular gifts are again visible in the three new volumes on the Holy Spirit...

...One explanation may be that Congar's work is not easily classifiable...

...May I say that it is delightful to read a book by so great a theologian which can quite unaffectedly introduce the text of the Veni Creator Spiritus with the words, "The reader may like to join me in praying it...

...Perhaps only a great scholar would claim that, meaning by it that each of the subjects to which he devotes a chapter deserves a monograph apart Certainly few ordinary readers will fail to be instructed and impressed by the breadth of knowledge and sharpness of insight he brings to the studies here presented...

...Nor is he much like Hans Kung, whose assessment of Vatican II, Congar once told him, is that it is like a half-empty bottle - Congar preferred to see it as half-full Congar is much more the reformer than the revolutionary, not necessarily a popular position in the recent church where both extremes seem to have a certain stake in denying that there is a possible middle-ground...

...but in 1950, this was hardy stuff...

...When Pope John surprised the world by his announcement of the Council and saw to it that Congar participated, this work was to bear further and even richer fruit...

...At the time it was rare to claim such a vocation, so rare that at first it disappointed so open and generous a mind as that of M.D...

...One generation is often most ungrateful towards the generation immediately preceding...

...Not long afterward he was forbidden to allow any re-editions or translations of his new book...

...That same year Humani Generis warned against "false irenicism," and Congar was informed that he was one of those intended by the criticism...

...He was too centrally involved in the Council's work to be able to pretend that its teachings represent the last word on any subject...

...Not able directly to be involved in ecumenical activities, he concentrated on historical scholarship which was to result in many important articles and books...

...He joined the Dominican Order in 1925 and was ordained in 1930...

...It is certainly not because he is not worth reading nor because he has failed to address contemporary issues...

...It is clearly a work of love, love of God and of the church...

...It has been seventeen years since a major work of Congar's has been translated into English, a cause of wonder for those who cut their theological teeth on his earlier work or who are aware that there is no theologian who did more to prepare for Vatican II or who had a larger role in the orientation and even in the composition of its documents...

...1939), a work which historians of the ecumenical movement regard as a watershed in the Catholic church's attitude towards ecumenism...

...And in a church particularly divided by the conciliar reforms, he has tried to address in more popular form the issues represented by Archbishop Lefebvre's movement, by the confrontations of the late 1960s, by the political and liberation theologies, and by the charismatic movement...

...1962), took three years to pass through the hands of seven censors...

...Whether they know it or not, there cannot be a single Catholic (certainly no theologian) who has not benefited from the work Congar has done and is still doing...

...They were years alive with the promise of the biblical, liturgical, and patristic revivals, of "the new theology," of the worker-priest experiment, of efforts to construct a new pastoral theology and practice Congar himself set to work on a major volume which proposed principles for an authentic reformation and renewal within the church...

...He did not follow his contemporaries such as Danielou, Bouyer, de Lubac and von Balthasar into a generally negative and even bitter evaluation of post-conciliar developments in the Catholic church...

...Unfortunately, the same work which gained him a wide audience, including many non-Catholics, also brought him under almost immediate suspicion in Rome...

...It would be a betrayal of aggiornamento to think it has been fixed once and for all in the texts of Vatican II...

...As in his other works, the historical inquiries are never undertaken for archaeological interest, but are offered as illuminating contemporary discussions, to take one example, of the contemporary spiritual renewal in the church (he does not like to see the adjective "charismatic" monopolized by a particular movement...

...ONE MAY WONDER, then, why Con-gar's work since the Council, except for minor pieces and individual essays, has not been honored by English translation...

...He is one of those responsible for the church we inhabit today and for the freedom of mind and heart with which we can think within it, about it, and for it "A poor disciple of the Fathers," he called himself last year...

...In 1956 Archbishop...

...it was published in 1950 as Vraie et fausse re'forme dans I'Eglise (Many of the ideas in the work would later be popularized in Hans Kung's The Council, Reform and Renewal ). The notion that reform and renewal are a permanent necessity in the church would later be enshrined in Vatican II's texts on the church and on ecumenism...

...This will simply open a post-Vatican era, as once there was a post-Tridentine era...

...and in a day when Rahner and Schillebeeckx are so readily translated, it cannot be because his work is too technical or demanding...

...As much as Congar could rightly exult in the Council's achievement, he has never regarded it as a definitive moment in the development of either the church or theology...

...A month before it ended, he warned: "The danger is that people will not seek any more, but will simply explore the inexhaustible warehouse of Vatican II...

...perhaps he will forgive us for thinking him worthy of their rank nking him worthy of their rank...

...but his own world of thought and language is still founded in the Fathers and in his beloved Aquinas...

...It includes a very helpful interpretation of the filioque controversy and proposals to resolve it...

...1957 and 1965) was available to assist in overcoming the prevailing "hierarchology" (a term Congar had coined...

...He has published two major books on the history of ecclesiology, both, unfortunately, still untranslated...

...The list of his publications began in earnest in 1931, and since then, except for the war years, they have come in an uninterrupted stream...

...A host of explorations in the history of ecclesiology enabled him to show the untraditional and impoverished character of viewing the church as a "perfect society" and to defend the richer notions of the church as "mystery" and "People of God...

...80 YEARS OF INDEFATIGABLE FIDELITY & SCHOLARSHIP The return of Yves Congar JOSEPH A. KOMONCHAK THIS SUMMER Seabury Press will publish an English translation of Yves Congar's three-volume work, I Believe in the Holy Spirit...

...In 1937 the future Pius XII communicated a decision refusing Congar permission to take part in an ecumenical discussion in Oxford which he had helped to prepare...

...His pathbreaking book on Lay People in the Church (1953, revised in 1964...

...Several times in the work he insists that it is not a "scholarly" study...

...In this work, whose limits he now readily acknowledges, Congar offered an historical interpretation of the great schisms which have split the church, a sympathetic presentation of the distinctive characters of Protestantism, Anglicanism, and Orthodoxy, and a statement of principles for Catholic participation in the ecumenical movement...

...And perhaps the issue is also methodological Congar is the first to admit that he had an inadequate philosophical training...

...It is something to be grateful for that by his indefatigable fidelity and generosity of spirit Father Congar has made that unlikely in his own case...

...It is no wonder that he could write: "I was quite gratified...

...He is not representative of the shift to a theology which is critically constructed on the basis of a philosophical anthropology - as in Lonergan and Rahner - or in dialogue with critical social theory - as in Schillebeeckx and Metz...

...There are gifts and there are gifts, and, unfortunately, it may be true that his gift is insufficiently appreciated today when history and tradition do not enjoy a favorable press...