A HERO OF VATICAN II In the first stages of the council, Yves Congar, the Dominican theologian, got little respect from the old guard When the council closed, thirty years ago, most of his ideas for church renewal had prevailed
Komonchak, Joseph A
A HERO OF VATICAN II Yves Cougar Joseph A. Komonchak The Second Vatican Council ended thirty years ago, on December 8, 1965. As I am often reminded by my students, sometimes playfully, sometimes...
...As the council began, the texts it was supposed to consider were faithful to the original program, and the fears Congar had expressed in his journal seemed all to have been realized...
...Unless the remote finality of serving Christian unity is merely verbal, the council's work should also be undertaken as if under the eyes of other Christians and without ever losing sight of its duty to serve, from afar, but effectively, the cause of unity...
...As for the questions of individual and social morality addressed in the fourth text, these should not rest solely on the natural law, should be modest and nuanced in details ("Remember Galileo...
...Congar would later accuse himself of not having been aggressive enough within the commission, but there is little indication that his presence was considered by the leaders of the commission as more than an inconvenience that had to be tolerated...
...This text of Congar summarized the concerns that had marked his life-work up to this point...
...There would be no need to collaborate with the Secretariate for Christian Unity...
...There were vast areas of the world to which the gospel had to be preached and in which the church had yet to be incarnated...
...But that effort to recover the broader and richer tradition before polemical constraints had narrowed and hardened much Catholic theology and doctrinal statements, was matched by an evangelical commitment to his own world and particularly to those groups, Christian and non-Christian, who were alienated from the church or found some of its teachings and practices incomprehensible...
...He was later to say that the council's achievement had exceeded his dreams...
...The rest of the story is familiar...
...In December 1994, Pope John Paul II gave official recognition of his own and the church's debts to Congar by naming him a cardinal...
...What follows is a grateful tribute to him and to God for the council...
...the dogmatic texts the commission would prepare would avoid merely "pastoral" concerns such as ecumenism and the laity...
...His remarks began by noting that the pope had assigned the promotion of Christian unity as the remote purpose of the council, something that imposed a heavy responsibility upon churchmen...
...On many of the theological issues he had done major historical work, particularly in the Fathers and medieval theologians...
...A struggle remained, however...
...A few weeks later Congar received outlines of four texts which the Theological Commission intended to prepare...
...Rumors that his appointment, and that of Henri de Lubac, had been ordered by Pope John XXIII were not enough to convince him that their presence would be able to affect the largely conservative orientation of the commission...
...In July 1960, Congar learned that he had been appointed to the Theological Commission established to prepare texts for consideration by the Second Vatican Council...
...and should include the question of war and peace and atomic weapons, religious freedom (including within the church: the Index of Forbidden Books, the disciplining of theologians), and the problem of secularization...
...Asked to comment, he turned his response into a general statement of his own views on the conciliar agenda...
...The text on contemporary errors he found too negative, needing to be prefaced by "a positive profession of Christian faith and hope, entirely composed of statements based on the Word of God...
...He was told that his concerns were not widely shared in Rome...
...Confined by a debilitating bone disease to a hospital for the eight years before his death, his mind remained sharp and his spirit bold...
...the primary need was not for the council to offer a positive and coherent statement of the faith but to issue a renewed warning against contemporary errors...
...When he went to Rome for the first meeting of the Theological Commission, he found he was still under Roman suspicion: a member of the Holy Office was quoted as having said of him, "He's the most scholarly theologian, but there are three heresies on every page...
...Its impact is visible in the class that sits before me in the course I teach on the foundations of theology: most of them are young Catholics, five of them are Protestants, one is an Orthodox layman from Bulgaria, two of them are Muslims, one of whom startled me by writing "In the Name of Allah" at the top of his paper...
...and in fact there is scarcely a single one of the concerns that he outlined in his 1960 paper that was not taken up by the council and pursued in the manner he recommended...
...especially to ecumenism...
...Sincerely and humbly I will try to do so in the path that has been opened to me...
...In late September he sent Cardinal Alfredo Ottaviani, the head of the commission, sixteen pages of comments, written in French...
...Few scholars did more than he to make the council possible, few participants had a greater impact on the documents that express the council's thought, few lives embody more clearly the great turning point in the life of the church that the council represented...
...Unfortunately, Congar went on, the outlines of the four proposed texts addressed questions more appropriate to 1870, when the First Vatican Council was meeting, than to 1960...
...If, in the end, he could not responsibly turn down the appointment, he did reserve the right to resign if he found himself involved in a work that would do harm to his life-long commitments, The Reverend Joseph A. Komonchak teaches theology in the Department of Religion and Religious Education, The Catholic University of America...
...The text on revelation and faith concentrated on questions of formal authority while ignoring the heart of the saving relationship between God and his people...
...At the first session of the council, the official texts of the Theological Commission were severely criticized and remanded to new working groups on which the Secretariate for Christian Unity would be well represented...
...He also sent copies of the comments to all the other members and consultors of the commission...
...For the next eighteen months of preparation, it was the Holy Office's perspectives that guided the commission's work and determined its texts...
...While not uncritical of many postconciliar developments, he retained a confidence in the continued guidance of the Spirit that many others were unable to muster...
...Congar was grateful for the honor, which he referred less to himself than to the concerns he had addressed, to the work he had contributed, and to the council that had confirmed the first and made use of the second...
...The style used in the Syllabus of Errors was no longer effective...
...I pray every day that I can offer myself in this way, that God not allow deceitful and ambitious men to take it over, that he preserve our Pope John and strengthen him....I want to serve the truth...
...Congar and de Lubac prepared a few study papers and regularly criticized the official drafts, but they had little effect...
...He wrote in his journal: I want to offer loyally what I can do in the framework of the council opened by John XXIII under the Holy Spirit's impulse...
...The Theological Commission should collaborate closely with the newly founded Secretariate for Christian Unity, work to explain Catholic positions, address Orthodox and Protestant difficulties, acknowledge the genuine concerns and values that lie behind them, and reconsider some of the practical points of discipline they find problematic, such as the denial of the chalice to the laity, clerical celibacy, and the prohibition of the vernacular in the liturgy...
...In what world would the council be meeting, he asked...
...No criticism recurs more often in his journal of Vatican II than the dichotomy favored at Rome between doctrine and practice...
...I will not indulge in flattery or compromise, but I do want to participate, loyally and humbly, in this very great work...
...He feared that their presence would be used as a proof that the commission was open and representative of various schools-"The shop-window advertises de Lubac, but inside there is only Gagnebet" [a second-rate Roman theologian...
...The majority of bishops made it clear that their own concerns were far closer to those of Congar than to those of the Holy Office...
...Vatican II took place at the midpoint of Congar's work...
...The draft on the church focused on its societal and hierarchical nature and needed to be supplemented by a biblically guided consideration of the church as the Mystical Body, by greater acknowledgment of its eschatological character and its implications for the relationship between church and world and church and kingdom, by greater attention to the laity and to bishops, by a rethinking of the church-state relationship...
...As I am often reminded by my students, sometimes playfully, sometimes painfully, there is now a whole generation of Catholics who have no personal memory of that event...
...He concluded: To my mind, all the work of the council should be undertaken as if before the eyes of this very world, as if it were watching us, and by considering the realities I have just too briefly evoked...
...As is well known, Congar's interests and writings had also caused him much grief for over twenty years, culminating in six years of exile and discipline which his appointment to the commission was bringing to an apparent end...
...Congar concluded with remarks about the ecumenical finality of the council...
...In the decades that followed, he continued his scholarly endeavors, publishing many important articles and books...
...Its context has to be reconstructed for them, the dynamics of its drama identified and explained, its final acts registered...
...He further feared that the appointment would prevent him from being able to criticize texts on which he was not likely to have much influence...
...Things have changed in the Catholic church, and at The Catholic University of America...
...A world where one person in four is Chinese and one in three lives under Communist domination, where Christians are divided, where colonialism and paternalism are under criticism, where women are advancing...
...issues such as atomic weapons were not of great concern...
...As his text reveals, for Congar ressourcement (the return to the sources) and aggiornamento (Pope John's term for adaptation) were not incompatible or even competing interests...
...the council should instead speak biblically, kerygmatically, and pastorally...
...Yves Congar, O.P., failed by six months to see this latest anniversary of Vatican II...
...I want to serve the truth," he told Rome in 1960, and when he died last June 22, he could do so with the knowledge that Rome, finally, was grateful...
...Over the next three years, Congar exercised major influences on the council's texts on divine revelation, the church, ecumenism, religious freedom, and the church in the modern world...
...He is the editor of the English edition of the History of Vatican II, whose first volume has just been published by Orbis...
Vol. 122 • December 1995 • No. 21
