Yves Congar's Vision of the Church in a World of Unbelief

Gabriel Flynn

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781351870498
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Teologia e religione
• Subtopic: Religione

Yves Congar (1904-1995) was one of the chief architects of a remarkable renewal in Roman Catholic ecclesiology in the twentieth century. His vision for ecclesial renewal led to a profound transformation of the Roman Catholic Church, its relationship with other churches and the world. This book considers the contribution made by Congar to that transformation. Situating Congar's ecclesiology in the context of his whole theology, the book presents for the first time a comprehensive study of two related aspects of Congar's thought - unbelief and the notion of 'total ecclesiology'. Dr Flynn shows how unbelief provides the common inspiration for Congar's thought on the Church and constitutes the raison d'être for his entire programme of ecclesial reform at the Second Vatican Council. This study demonstrates how Congar's 'total ecclesiology' contributes to the restoration of unity and helps to redress unbelief. Congar's vision for the future and his programme for ecclesial renewal, centering on a church committed both to the preservation of its heritage and an openness to true reform, is shown to be still pertinent to the churches in the third millennium, a point accented by Pierre-Marie Gy, OP in his Preface to the work.

CHAPTER 1

The Vision of the Church in Congar’s Theology

Congar’s life’s work concerned the articulation of a complete theology, through the study of the totality of Catholic doctrine, for the benefit of the Church and the advancement of its mission in the world. A clear idea of his rich hopes for the Church may be found in a short essay written in 1937, entitled ‘Pour une théologie de l’Église’:

Everywhere we get a sense that it would be of great profit in our pastoral ministry and would allow Christianity to spread to a far greater extent throughout the world, if the concept of the Church were to recover the broad, rich, vital meaning it once had, a meaning deriving wholly from the Bible and Tradition.¹

The key elements of Congar’s theology include the following: the restoration of the genuine value of ecclesiology; ecumenism; a fresh consideration of the person and mission of the Holy Spirit; reform; the laity; a return to the sources; and the application of the fecund resources of tradition to the current problems of the Church. His prodigious ecclesiological programme was translated directly into the documents of Vatican II. This was a source of gratification for Congar:

I was filled to overflowing. All the things to which I gave quite special attention issued in the Council: ecclesiology, ecumenism, reform of the Church, the lay state, mission, ministries, collegiality, return to sources and Tradition.²

Clearly the development of a comprehensive theology of the Church was one of the most important concerns of Congar’s theological career. Église et papauté: regards historiques³ is a later and valuable collection of Congar’s historical writings which he chose for this volume for their decisive importance in understanding the ecclesiological renewal of the twentieth century. They facilitate a more informed judgement of the properly historical importance of Vatican II as a turning point in the life of the Church. Commenting on this work, which provides an invaluable insight into his theology of the Church, Fouilloux affirms a clear consistency of purpose in Congar’s theology – namely ‘to elucidate the course of the Church across history’.⁴ In view of his consistent concern for the Church, it is not surprising that, in the introduction to Jalons, Congar indicates that a full theology of the Church is essential for an adequate theology of the laity:

The real difficulty is that such a theology [of the laity] supposes the existence of a whole ecclesiological synthesis wherein the mystery of the Church has been given all its dimensions, including fully the ecclesial reality of laity.⁵

Congar points out that it is not his intention to offer a complete treatise on the Church in Jalons, although, for him, this would have been an eminently desirable project. He notes, however, that ecclesiology is a recurrent theme:

Ecclesiology keeps on cropping up, and when the reader meets seemingly rather irrelevant and laboured explanations, he must remember that they are necessary in order to tie up particular applications with general principles. Much repetition would have been avoided had we been able to refer him to a complete treatise on the Church.⁶

Congar is careful to draw attention to certain serious difficulties for the Church that would ensue from a failure to formulate the principles of a full ecclesiology:

Without those principles, we should have, confronting a laicised world, only a clerical Church, which would not be the people of God in the fullness of its truth. At bottom there can be only one sound and sufficient theology of laity, and that is a ‘total ecclesiology’.⁷

It is clear that, for Congar, Church and laity cannot be understood in isolation from each other. A study of the concept of the Church in Congar’s theology is, then, a necessary prerequisite to an analysis of his theology of the laity.

Congar’s notion of the Church is that of a multifaceted reality. His ecclesiology is markedly disparate, being made up of many different images or models. However, he did not produce a systematic theology. He reveals something of the nature of his theology when, in a somewhat nuanced, yet modest, manner, he asserts: ‘I am not like K. Rahner.’⁸ Congar’s theology is occasional in the sense that it was written in response to requests, but also charismatic, since these requests emanated from within the heart of the

Church. Thus, it would be erroneous to attempt either to systematize or to hierarchize his thought according to French or German conceptual schemata. Congar provides a clear picture of his major theological endeavours in the post-Second World War period:

After the war I had the idea of considering the twofold question of the laity and reform within the Church. […] At that time I gave many lectures. There were requests for lectures and articles on the laity as well as on the question of change in the Church. This led first to my book Vraie et fausse réforme dans l’Église (1950) – reform not of the church, but in the church, since it remained within the church. That then led to my extensively documented book of 1953, Lay People in the Church.⁹

Congar’s theology is fragmentary in nature.¹⁰ M.-J. Le Guillou points out that Congar’s failure to produce a great treatise on ecclesiology was due to his concrete service of the Church and his brethren.¹¹ Jossua attributes this failure to certain traits in Congar’s intellectual temperament. In Jossua’s opinion, Congar’s rejection of ‘a theological science closed in on itself’¹² is one of the factors that ‘makes of him perhaps a new type of theologian, closer to the Fathers than to the medieval scholastics’.¹³ Although he never produced a complete theology of the Church, the Church is nonetheless the major theme of Congar’s theological corpus:

It was during my days as a student brother in 1928–1929 that I first conceived the ambition of writing a treatise on the Church, but it will probably never be written. While my writings give fragments of the project it remains uncompleted, and yet I do not regret this. I now see many things differently and, I hope, better in comparison with forty years ago.¹⁴

The foregoing survey indicates that, for Congar, an ecclesiological synthesis of all the dimensions of the Church is necessary in order to construct a theology of the laity. The central aim of this chapter is, therefore, to present an analysis of the key elements in Congar’s new vision of the Church – the most enduring element of his theological legacy – in order to reconstruct it. An understanding of his unique contribution to the renewal of ecclesiology, an initial consideration of his role at Vatican II and his ecclesiological methodology constitute some of the principal areas of concern. I will also attempt to trace the origins and development of Congar’s vision of the Church with particular reference to the place of the laity, a full consideration of which will be presented in Chapter 2. Another important element in the examination of the vision concerns Congar’s view that the Church is a cause of unbelief in the world, which calls for careful consideration of his ‘Conclusion théologique’. This controversial essay on the pastoral mission of the Church in society points to a poor presentation of the humanity of Christ and of his grace in the world. This was due to the juridical and defensive nature of the Roman Catholic Church in France, major factors that contributed to modern unbelief. Before proceeding to Congar’s analysis of the question of unbelief, let us look at the influence of affectivity on his theology.¹⁵

‘I Love the Church’: Ecclesiology and Affectivity

Congar loved the Church. As he explained to Jean Puyo in 1975, ‘I am of the Church. I love the Church’.¹⁶ This love is based on a simple yet profound truth that he recognized the Church as the Mother, the hearth and the homeland of his spiritual being.¹⁷ Congar’s love for the Church, motivated by his love for Christ, is situated in the wider setting of his love for humankind.¹⁸ It is difficult to avoid an admiration for his shrewd insistence on the need to locate the maternal and fraternal dimensions of the Church’s nature, seen as perfectly compatible, in a communion ecclesiology. A communitarian, ecclesial milieu is correctly identified as essential for the formation of Christians:

Maternal, the Church is also fraternal. It is a fraternity. The two qualities are perfectly compatible, evangelically speaking, because in the spiritual plan, they are united in communion: as in a text like Matthew 12. 50 (Mark 3. 35; Luke 8. 21). Better: it is the fraternity which exercises here a maternity, as it is said so often by Saint Augustine and many others. This does not take away anything from a particular paternity of priests and pastors who can say with Saint Paul: ‘It is I who, through the Gospel, begot you in Jesus ...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Key to Select Bibliographical Abbreviations
• Preface
• Author’s Preface
• Chapter 1
• Chapter 2
• Chapter 3
• Epilogue
• Afterword: The Question of Unbelief Today
• Appendix: An Yves Congar Bibliography 1987–1995, with Addenda: 1996–20021
• Bibliography
• Index