Marie-Dominique Chenu

...his view that the one faith could be articulated in various theological systems, as relativism...

...In 1942, in the midst of World War II, he would hear over the radio that his work had been put on the Index...

...These posthumous gestures are, unforgivably, the only tokens of ecclesiastical rehabilitation that he ever received...

...Even before it opened, Congar and he distributed a draft of an evangelically inspired "Message to the World...

...Even after the inevitable revisions-"They soaked my brat in holy water," was his comment-he was content that the council opened with an appeal to the world instead of with the defensively antimod-ernist doctrinal texts prepared for the council to rubberstamp...

...And then there is the other Chenu, this one young, frisky, romping like a kid in the trenches of Holy Church, living in the full hurly-burly of the contemporary world, sensitive to its calls, ready to engage the most ticklish problems of the world and of the faith, talked about, suspect to some...

...Serene study and apostolic impatience: I don't know that there are better words to sum up the man's two great passions...

...When some of his fellow Dominicans objected to the presence of L'Humanite, the Communist journal, in their reading room, he reminded them that Thomas, when writing on Aristotle's Metaphysics, kept a copy of Averroes's commentary on his desk: "Now Averroes today," he said, "is Marx...

...Chenu was centrally involved in the effort: the foundation of the Institute for Medieval Studies and its later counterpart in Canada, scholarly journals, and a series of scholarly articles that quickly made his name known in medieval studies...

...The newly-founded Young Christian Workers (YCW) settled upon Le Saulchoir as one of its spiritual centers, and Chenu delighted in his encounters with these apostolic groups engaged in the church's encounter with the modern world...

...At the same time, he was beginning the apostolic commitments of the "other Chenu...

...One result was that Chenu never served in any official capacity at Vatican II, but a former student of his, a bishop in Madagascar, invited him to come to Rome as his personal expert...

...He was ninety-five when he died, surrounded by his beloved brethren at the Couvent Saint Jacques...

...Cardinal Lustiger presided over his funeral at Notre Dame, assisted by six bishops, two hundred and fifty priests, and a full cathedral...

...His great insistence, unforgettably articulated in his Introduction to the Study of St...

...but he was still the heart and delight of the group of his fellows who gathered in his room for conversation between the community liturgy and dinner...

...But, he insisted, there is really only one Chenu, interested in both "the most serene theological study and the most apostolic impatience for the Gospel...

...He also took personal pride in the council's statements on the unity of creation and redemption in its Decree on the Laity and delighted to see the council reaffirm the validity of the worker-priest experiment...

...The immediate excuse was the defense that Congar and Chenu had made of the worker-priest experiment, with Chenu justifying their priesthood by distinguishing the tasks of the priest in a regime of Christendom and those in a "church in a state of mission," a phrase he coined...

...Father Chenu once described two Chenus: "One is the old medievalist, of some reputation, busy reading old texts, erudite, acquainted with the ancient ages of Christianity, mediating a tradition to a new age...

...But while Chenu was willing to acknowledge the contribution his mentor had made to the recovery of spiritual theology, he was not comfortable with Garrigou's utter lack of a sense of history...

...In 1937, long before Karl Rahner's famous article on the global church, he published an article on "New Dimensions of Christendom," whose argument for a variety of "Christendoms," temporal realizations of Christianity, Canon Joseph Cardijn adopted as a program for YCW...

...new endeavors for a new world that had rendered traditional forms of the apostolate ineffective...

...He was later to regard this forced move as providential, for Paris gave him even greater opportunities for the apostolic engagements by which he enriched his theology...

...The French sociologist Emile Poulat has often remarked on the remarkable ability of one generation of Catholics to forget the generation immediately prior to them...

...The details of this sad story have been set out in exhaustive detail in Francois Leprieur's recent book, Quand Rome condamne: Dominicains et pretres-ouvriers...

...The work was delated to Rome where he was called to explain himself and pressured to sign a list of ten propositions to give proof of his orthodoxy...

...He tried to.do for the study of Thomas what the French Annales school was attempting for history in general-providing a social and intellectual context for the historical facts and texts...

...252: Commonweal REV...

...he was deprived of his title as Master of Theology, removed from his post at Le Saulchoir, and ordered to go live in Paris...

...Basically a description and theological explanation of the program of studies in his Dominican house, it was accompanied by typically sardonic comments about the reduction of Thomas's thought to a system of principles, syllogisms, and conclusions, a "sacred metaphysics...

...A letter from John Paul II was read...

...Perhaps he was not as well known to the American Catholic public as some of the other theological giants of this century, but there were few men who participated more fully and typified more clearly most of the great movements which led up to Vatican II, were at the heart of its achievement, and still determine in many ways the great tasks and opportunities of theology...

...Both passions are visible in the work that first brought him under Roman censure, a little book, intended for internal use of his community, Une ecole de theologie: Le Saulchoir (1937...

...The faculty of Le Saulchoir determined to apply to the study of Thomas Aquinas the same principles of historical criticism that Lagrange had already defended in the study of Scripture...

...Chenu's influence at the council was everted from the first day to the last...

...His statement that "a theology worthy of the name is a spirituality which has found rational instruments adequate to its religious experience" was interpreted as subjectivism...

...Instead of remaining in Rome, Chenu chose Le Saulchoir where an effort was being made to construct a program of studies that would reflect two great principles: the primacy of the revealed Gospel, both as content and as inner light, and the disciplines of each of the steps involved in theological reflection on revelation, mediated through and available only in history...

...Chenu escaped censure in Pius XII's encyclical, Humani generis, but four years later the axe that had fallen on the Jesuits at Fourviere-Lyons in 1950 would fall on the intellectual leaders of the French Dominicans...

...Father Chenu had already felt the stifling effect of the antimodernist "white terror" that prevailed in Rome, summed up by one of his friends in the comment: "There are four tran-scendentals here: the One, the True, the Good, and the Opportune, and the last one governs the other three...

...This would be particularly tragic in the case of Marie-Dominique Chenu, for there are few authentic features of the church as we know it and of theology as we practice it that he did not have a share in shaping: the struggle to find new forms of evangelical and apostolic commitment, the reading of the "signs of the times," the vitality of small, committed groups as a theological source, the overcoming of a sclerotic scholasticism, the insistence on the primacy of the Gospel both as message and as inspiring light, the inseparability of the retrieval of the tradition and the confrontation of the world's problems.world's problems...

...In the years after the council, Chenu's openness and enthusiasm never wavered...

...Congar, eighty-six years old himself and under special care at Les Invalides, preferred not to attend the funeral...

...To watch a master-theologian emerge and go to work, in a century when theologians and theology were not separated from the world, from its conditions, from its perspectives, from its techniques, from its culture, is a great spectacle, and a lesson for anyone who now sees theology exiled and vainly jealous of its rights...

...Thomas Aquinas, was to insert the man in his context, literary and philosophical, of course, but also historical, sociological, and economic...

...In a room that was all bookshelves, crammed tight with volumes and all sorts of papers, he eagerly asked what had happened, beamed with delight at some news, threw his arms up in disbelief at others...

...They had always been so close to one another spiritually, he said, that he thought nothing had really changed with Chenu's death...

...Chenu saw the many movements emergent in the 1930s as attempts similar to the great apostolic movements of Francis of Assisi and Dominic...

...He became a counselor to many of the new apostolic endeavors that were the glory of French Catholicism in the late 1940s, particularly the Mission de France and the worker-priest experiment...

...JOSEPH A. KOMONCHAK is professor of theology at The Catholic University of America in Washington and research fellow at the Jesuit Institute at Boston College...

...Much of the basic anthropology and soteriology of Gaudium et spes, reflects Chenu's influence, including an optimism, much-maligned today, that in him was never simply a personal trait, but confidence in the light and power of the Gospel...

...Francois Mauriac described the effect of the Roman move as "like dynamiting one of our cathedrals...

...Last November when I saw him, he was frailer, with sight and hearing impaired...

...Chenu first made a name for himself as a medieval scholar at Le Saulchoir, the Dominican house of studies to which twentieth-century theology owes a debt it is difficult to overestimate...

...The two-Chenus-in-one were apparent right from the beginning: current challenges provoking inquiry into the tradition at one of its most creative moments, the historical study suggesting and illumining new and bold initiatives...

...This work did not pass without criticism, even in his own house...

...His superiors named him as a theological advisor to several publications sponsored by the Dominicans to give Christian interpretations of contemporary events and movements: La vie intel-lectuelle, Sept, Masses ouvrieres, La vie catholique...

...Under Roman threat radically to alter the age-old constitutions of the Dominicans, the father general requested and obtained the resignations of the three provincials of France and the removal and banishment from their posts of Congar, Chenu, Feret, and Boisselot (the head of their publishing house, Editions du Cerf...

...I remember him in Paris in 1985 after the extraordinary synod of bishops...

...He returned there in 1920 after having finished a thesis in Rome that so impressed his director, the formidable Reginald Garrigou-Lagrange, that he had asked Chenu to stay on as his assistant...