Yves Congar leaves rich legacy

National Catholic Reporter, July 14, 1995 by Richard J. Beauchesne

Cardinal Yves Marie-Joseph Congar, one of the greatest Roman Catholic ecclesiologists and ecumenists of this century, died June 22, at the Hospital of the Invalides in Paris, at the age of 91. Known as 'Christianus' (as he signed some of his writings of the 1920s) or most endearingly as Pere Congar, this prolific writer of more than 1,600 books, articles and translations, was a major contributor to the documents of Vatican II.

Sections of the Vatican II documents are completely his own, including the Dogmatic Constitution on the Church (Lumen Gentium, Nos. 9, 13, 16 and 17) as well Chapter 1 of The Church's Missionary Activity (Ad Gentes). Thus, Le Monde, the Parisian daily, on the front page of its June 24 edition, headlined Congar's obituary: "The Death of the 'Father' of Vatican II."

The Vatican II glory was preceded for Congar by somber clouds of Vatican harassment. Not unlike today's Leonardo Boff, Charles Curran and Pedro Casaldaligas, Congar during the 1950s was silenced by the Vatican congregation then called the Holy Office, formerly the Office of the Inquisition. His writings were submitted to numerous Vatican censors. Congar personally told me that his Vraie et fausse reforme dans l'Eglise (True and False Reform in the Church) had been submitted to 16 censors, only to finally be censured after being published. Angelo Roncalli, the future Pope John XXIII, then papal nuncio in France, acquired a copy of Vraie et fausse reforme and, becoming intrigued with it, annotated it. Roncalli apparently thought enough of Congar's work to give the theologian an important position at the Second Vatican Council some years later.

During the late 1940s and the 1950s, Congar's articles languished and were not published; his talks were suppressed; and his ecumenical activities were suspended. In order to remove him from Paris, church authorities ordered him to the Ecole Biblique in Jerusalem, where he was prohibited from accepting the prestigious Chair of the Hautes-Etudes, which was offered to him. Then, for a period of four months, he was sent to Rome and, eventually, hustled to Cambridge, England, where he was assigned no ministerial work.

Dominican Thomas O'Meara, in a February 1994 issue of America magazine, noted that Congar wrote in his journal: "The Holy Office presides over the entire church and curbs everyone with its interventions: this supreme, inflexible Gestapo whose decisions cannot be questioned." He was quoted in a later article in the French press as saying, "I am not a man of the tragic, but it is painful to be the victim of stupidity."

However, Pope John XXIII restored Congar, naming him consultant to the preliminary sessions of Vatican II and expert (peritus) at the council.

Congar was born in Sedan in the Ardennes region of France, April 13, 1904. (In 1970, Congar was the guest in Boston of my doctoral adviser at Boston University, J. Robert Nelson, who related to me the following story. When asked by Nelson what he would like to visit in Boston, Congar answered, "The auto show." So, Nelson took Congar to the auto show. When I interviewed Congar in Paris in 1975 at Couvent Saint-Jacques, I asked him why, during his 1970 Boston visit, he was interested in visiting the auto show. He said he wanted to know whether there was a connection between his birthplace in France, Sedan, and the model of American car known as a sedan. At the show, he learned that there was. The interior fabric in the first American sedan cars was woven in Sedan, France.)

What is Congar's theology about? In part, it is about ecumenism as an authentic mark of the church, along with holiness, unity, catholicity and apostolicity. It is about the primacy of Tradition (the Trinitarian "handing over" of God's life to the church) over traditions (found in the church, but not contained formally in scriptures) such as the Roman primacy. It is about the primacy of worship as life over worship as ritual; the primacy of universal priesthood over the ordained priesthood; the primacy of church as community over church structures.

It is about Congar's most fundamental creed: "I believe the holy church is conditioned by the absolute: I believe in the Holy Spirit."

Congar was ordained a Dominican in 1930 and created cardinal by John Paul II in October 1994, which made him "happy as a child," according to Fr. Pierre Marie Gy of Couvent Saint-Jacques in Paris, where Congar lived before entering Les Invalides. Ironically, Congar had earlier written that the 11th century papal creation of the college of cardinals had all but destroyed episcopal collegiality in the Roman Church.

Congar is likely to be remembered for four legacies: his description of the hierarchy, written in the 1950s; of the structure of the church, 1970s; of the priesthood, also in the 1970s; and of what it means to be Catholic, 1939.

* On the hierarchy: "The bishops are completely boxed in by passivity and servility; if their devotion to Rome is sincere and filial, it is also childish, infantile."