[A number of years ago, I wrote an article in which I tried to briefly state the essence of what I learned concerning authority in the Church from the writings of the French Dominican, Fr. Yves Congar, while doing my doctoral dissertation on that topic.I never did much with it.What follows, in parts, is that article.]
There is a rather striking, and pointed, observation recorded by Père Yves Congar in his recently published Mon journal du Concile.The observation was occasioned when someone approached him with the possibility that Pope John XXIII would beatify Pope Pius IX, intending to show in this way the integral connection between the two Vatican Councils.Congar used the occasion to comment in his journal on Pius IX’s response to the fall of the Papal States to Italian unification in 1870 in which, according to Congar, he “was invited by the events to leave the awful lie of the ‘Donation of Constantine’ and to come finally to adopt an evangelical attitude, [but] he perceived nothing of this call and, rather, drove the Church in its claim to temporal power” (Congar, Mon journal du Concile, vol. 1 (Paris: Cerf, 2002) 115).
This characteristically forth right comment, recorded in the early stages of the Second Vatican Council, is significant not so much in what it says of Pope Pius IX as what it reveals of the mind of the French Dominican.Indeed, the whole trajectory of Congar’s work as a theologian might be viewed through his desire to move the Church’s self-understanding and self-presentation—including how it conceives its authority—from what had often been reduced to a purely secular and juridical conception to one that is transparently evangelical.This is powerfully testified to early in his life as a priest in the striking prayer he wrote on a visit he made shortly after ordination in 1930 to the chief places connected to Martin Luther and the Protestant reformation.
My God, why does your Church always condemn?True, she must above all guard the “deposit of faith”; but is there no other means than condemnation, especially condemning so quickly? ...My God, you know how I love your Church; but I see clearly that only concerted action has force:I know that your admirable Church once played an immense and splendid part in civil affairs and in the whole of human life and that now she plays hardly any part at all.My God, if only your Church were more encouraging, more comprehensive; all the same! …My God, there is so much work; give us leaders, give me the soul of a leader.The union of Churches!My God why has your Church, which is holy and is one, unique, holy and true, why has she so often such an austere and forbidding face when in reality she is full of youth and life? (Congar, Dialogue Between Christians, trans. Philip Loretz (Westminster, Maryland: The Newman Press, 1966) 5-7, footnote 5).
That this orientation runs through the theological career of Congar, maintaining itself as a motivating force in his thought through the decades, is testified to by a journal entry he made on November 24, 1962.“My God, who made me understand since 1929-30 that if the church would change her face, if she would simply take on her true face, if she would simply be the church, all would become possible on the path to unity” (Congar, Mon journal du Council, vol. 1, 257).