Red hat did not undo Vatican harm

National Catholic Reporter, Sept 8, 1995 by Richard P. McBrien

Cardinal Yves Congar died in Paris on June 22. It was only last November that he was named to the College of Cardinals at age 90.

His contemporaries in the 1940s and `50s would have been astonished by that appointment. They would have expected this great Dominican theologian more likely to have been defrocked or excommunicated than given the red hat.

In spring 1942, Congar, a medical orderly in the French army, was prisoner of war. A starved messenger brought the news that Fr. M.D. Chenu, the guiding spirit of the Saulchoir, the renowned Dominican house of study near Paris, had been censured by the Vatican for a book he had written on the nature of theology. Other scholars were also "swallowed up in the earthquake."

"Only because of my captivity and removal from the scene was I relatively unscathed," Congar later wrote in 1956. "But the land to which I belonged was shaken. The trembling was to continue for long years, and we were to work in a climate of scorn from which we have not yet entirely emerged."

The war ended in 1945, and Congar returned home. "Anyone who did not live through the years 1946-47 in French Catholicism," he would write, "has missed one of the most beautiful moments in the life of the church."

Among the developments to which Congar referred were the renewal of biblical studies, the liturgical movement, the priest-worker movement, a new sense of Christian community and a more pastorally grounded theology. But "the beautiful moment" would quickly pass.

In 1947 he made a rough draft of a book on church reform that was eventually published in 1950. He noted that it would "cost [him] much in personal anxiety."

There were already rumors from Rome as early as November 1946 that any work that Congar would undertake from that point on "would be menaced."

"From the beginning of 1947 until the end of 1956," Congar said, "I have known only an unbroken series of denunciations, warnings, restrictions, discriminatory measures and scornful delations." ("Delation" is a pre-Vatican II term referring to a secret, accusatory report to Rome regarding the work of a theologian or biblical scholar.)

Congar's first major work, Divided Christendom, a groundbreaking ecumenical volume published in 1937, was still being scrutinized by Vatican authorities. Various chapters of another book, The Mystery of the Church (1941), were disapproved of.

In August 1948 he completed a revised edition of Divided Christendom. The father general of the Dominican order asked him to submit the manuscript to censors so that he could better defend Congar.

But the father general kept the manuscript for nearly two years, despite a number of urgent letters Congar wrote to him. When the manuscript was finally returned, Congar was informed that one of the censors requested changes, but he was never told which changes he was being asked to make.

When he gave up the project in frustration, it was said in Rome that it was Congar who made the decision, not the Vatican.

In 1948 Congar and others were invited to participate as Catholic observers at the World Council of Churches Assembly in Amsterdam. The Vatican refused to grant them permission because they were regarded, Congar said, as "more or less suspect representatives of the Catholic church."

After the publication of his book on church reform in 1950, everything Congar wrote, even the smallest book review, had to be submitted to Rome.

In February 1953, he and other Dominican theologians were expelled by order of Rome from their academic posts. Congar was sent to Jerusalem where he wrote The Mystery of the Temple, a book that took seven censors three years to approve for publication.

In 1954 Congar was called to Rome and given a new assignment to Cambridge, England, where his scholarly and ecumenical activities were to be severely restricted. He was particularly warned about contacts with Anglicans.

With the election of John XXIII in 1958, however, the atmosphere in the Catholic church changed dramatically. Congar would be appointed a peritus, an expert, at the Second Vatican Council, where he exercised a profound influence on the shaping of its documents. Indeed, the council was largely a vindication of Congar's theology.

Unfortunately, this phase of Congar's life is unknown or has been forgotten. Worse, some may even be attempting now to use Congar's name and portions of his theology to legitimize and promote pre-Vatican II ideas on the church and on seminary education.

What was done to Yves Congar, and other theologians, in the 1940s and `50s was, and remains, a grave scandal. His elevation to the cardinalate at age 90 did not undo that scandal, and any misuse of his name today would only deepen it.