The Church Rejoining the World

As an historical event, the four sessions of the Second Vatican Council (1962-1965) are ancient history to today's generation, not unlike Trent and Nicaea. For my generation, however, it is a memory of our youth. Memoirs by participants in that event - serious, gossipy, or (better yet) both - bring me back to a time when all this was news, even at times exciting news - although, being just  a teenager, then my knowledge, let alone comprehension, of it all was limited at best.. 

"The Church Rejoining the World" sums up much of what the famous French Dominican theologian Yves Congar (1904-1995) aspired to achieve and how he ideologically interpreted the Council. He was intimately involved in the event, first as a member of the Council's Preparatory Theological Commission, then as a member of several committees that drafted conciliar texts and a participant in many formal and informal meetings, making him one of the most formative theological influences at Vatican II, the main point of which to him was "not to vote on some texts, but to establish a spirit and a new awareness" (February 1, 1964). 

It is this unique experience that Congar recounted in considerable detail in a journal which he kept from July 1960 to December 1965. In keeping with his own explicit instructions, this journal was not to be published until after 2000. Finally published in two volumes in 2002 as Mon Journal du Concile I-II, présenté et annoté par Éric Mahieu, a one-volume English translation finally appeared in 2012 as My Journal of the Council, tr. Mary John Ronayne, OP, and Mary Cecily Boulding, OP (Collegeville: Liturgical Press). Its 900+ pages are well worth the effort, both as a valuable commentary on the Council itself and as an insight into the vocation of one very influential European theologian at a particularly pivotal point in the ongoing history of the Catholic Church's encounter with modernity.

Congar consciously saw his Journal as focusing on his work, with minimal reference to his personal life. We do, however, read about his mother's death during this period, an event which elicits some poignant personal reflections about "the sweetness of these bonds, which are tied not only at the level of a single generation, but from one generation to the next" (December 1, 1963). Congar worried about "a large general feeling of emptiness in my life ... without close friends, without confidants" (May 7, 1965). We also read constantly about Congar's many ailments. His debilitating aches and pains are an intriguing component of his account, contributing to the reader's amazement and wonder at how Congar could accomplish so much, despite his apparent sense of himself as a borderline invalid. "I have no longer anything to offer to God except the total absence of strength. ... At Rome. St. Dominic received the staff and the book, but it was a pilgrim;'s staff. I carried there only a staff of weakness" (May 2, 1965).

One perhaps less attractive aspect of Congar's personality that permeates the journal is an extreme preoccupation (almost obsession) with his intellectual "work," which so completely dominates his life that it causes him to denigrate and/or skip even some of the Council's liturgical celebrations. (Today, one would wonder about insufficient "work/life balance.") Also, as an intellectual, Congar could be somewhat snarky in his comments about those he disagreed with, occasionally employing really demeaning language to describe even Cardinals. Even the two popes to whom he owed his position at the Council and who admired his work (John XXIII and Paul VI) were subjected to severe criticism at times (although praised at others). Of Paul VI, for example, he wrote "he has neither the theology nor the intellectual backing for his gestures" (November 22 1964). Along the way, we also learn a lot about his dislike for Fiumicino Airport, Italian noise, and, in general, the Roman way of doing things.

On the other hand, Congar's comments often reflect a rootedness and a serious sense of balanced moderation sometimes lacking in others. Thus, for example, this prescient comment about one of his most famous theological colleagues, Hans Küng. "Küng is critical. He loves the truth, but has he any mercy for human beings? Has he the warmth and the measure of love?" (February 22, 1963). Later that same year, Congar worried about Küng "that he has not the support of a community of religious and regular life" (October 12, 1963), supports which Congar himself at least had access to. More broadly, Congar also offered a pointed critique of the "Xavier Rynne" interpretation of the Council, which "while saying a good number of things that are true, it yet distorts the truth.  It politicises everything" (January 15, 1965).

He even showed awareness of the early appearance of some of the Church's post-conciliar problems, among them the decline in vocations (January 17, 1965) and "a system of antiphonal psalms, which is a bit overdone and of which one will soon grow tired" (September 16 1965). He suffered "in sensing, here or there, a sort of virtual schism" (January 24, 1965). Toward the end, he was "very disturbed" by "the seriously worrying situation in Holland," where some "reduced Christianity to a mere humanism" (March 10, 1966). And he recorded Karl Barth's warning "that the Catholic Church should not make the same mistake as Protestantism which, since the end of the seventeenth century, had followed all the fashionable philosophies in turn" (September 24, 1966). Ominously, he also alluded, obviously with personal pain, to bishops "found in brothels" and propositioning papal gendarmes (February 7, 1965).

Apart from his period of military service (for much of which he was a prisoner of war), Congar's career had been completely committed to intellectual work. Ordained in 1930, he had discerned early on what he called an ecumenical and ecclesiological vocation. Much of what Congar said and did during the Council (and wrote in his Journal) reflected this ecumenical sensitivity and the high priority he wished the Church to accord to such concerns. Thus, throughout the Journal, we hear Congar expressing a special sensitivity to the ideas and feelings of Eastern Catholic Patriarchs and Protestant Observers. From the Eastern Bishops especially, Congar seemed to see the prospect of recovering certain ecclesiological elements that had been lost from the Catholic tradition. He especially appreciated how "the East speaks through liturgical action" (October 16, 1964).

Part of the post-war French Catholic intellectual renewal, Congar famously wrote True and False Reform in the Church (1950), which was read by the future Pope John XXIII when Nuncio to France. Caught up in the Roman suspicion of modern theological tendencies, he was sidelined from teaching for some time in the 1950s. This traumatic experience left him an anxious legacy to which Congar constantly referred in his Journal. "Personally, I have never, I have still not,  escaped from the apprehension of one who is still under suspicion, punished, judged discriminated against." Even when widely admired and obviously influential, he still sounded at times like someone with PTSD and could not help recalling "a long period of suspicion and difficulties" (December 7, 1965).

Perhaps that contributed to his frequent pessimism about what the Council could or would accomplish - a pessimism apparently shared by others who thought as he did. Given how dramatic the Council's impact turned out to be, this anxious current of pessimism is one of the more intriguing features of his account, and offers an interesting window into the perfectionistic and sectarian tendencies of so many modern progressive movements. 

One particular issue on which this account sheds considerable light is the complex history of the Council's statement on the Church's relationship with the Jews and how this was constantly threatened by Arab governments and those Christians who lived in fear of them. "Really, it is quite scandalous and unacceptable that the Church in order to please some Arab governments that obey no other reason than just an instinct that is simplistic and all-inclusive, should have to refrain from saying what should be said on a question which comes within its province, and on which it has a duty to speak" (April 25, 1964).

Through it all, however, it was the admirable idea of a Church somehow rejoining the world that summed up and expressed Congar's aspiration for the Council. Early on, he shared the hope for "a new kind of bishop," who "will be characterized by the presence of the Church to the world" (October 29, 1962). But he also eventually came to appreciate "some remarks of extreme gravity" made by Cardinal Wojtyla (the future Pope John Paul II), who pointed out that "the new world situation" not only posed questions for the Council to consider but provided answers of its own, "and we must reply to these answers, for they constitute a putting in question of our own response" (February 2, 1965). I think this observation - and Congar's acknowledgment of it - goes to the heart of much of what has happened since the Council, which did a remarkably good job of responding as Church to some of the new questions posed by modernity, while the Church continues to struggle, maybe much less successfully, with the answers modernity itself offers to its own questions.

Despite his infirmities, Congar continued to work after the Council. He was a member of the International Theological Commission from 1969 to 1985. Increasingly, he focused on the Holy Spirit, publishing a now classic three-volume work on the Holy Spirit in 1979. He was created a Cardinal by Pope Saint John Paul II in 1994 and died the following year.