In the aftermath of the second World War in forty years, Christians were immersed in the needs of a broken world for reconciliation, forgiveness, hope and regeneration. During this period took place the foundation of the World Council of Churches in 1948, the worldwide spread of Couturier's Week of Prayer (adopted by the Catholic Church in 1959 under Pope John XXIII), and the immense renewal felt in all churches as a result of the Second Vatican Council, not least at the WCC's fourth general assembly at Uppsala in 1968 which followed it. It has been said that this period seemed to distil the prayers and hopes for unity among Christians by looking beyond its internal concerns to the world beyond and asking, 'What is the church for?' For all churches this led to unparalleled transition. In the early 1960s the Orthodox Churches, which had not previously taken part, joined the WCC. Pope John XXIII convened the Second Vatican Council, emphatically placing the Catholic Church at the heart of the ecumenical movement's progress, and enshrining ecumenism in its very constitution, especially with the resulting Decree on Ecumenism, Unitatis Redintegratio. But first there is need to step back and look at another towering figure in the story of Catholic Ecumenism, who brings together everything that has gone before and shapes everything that will come thereafter.
The following is adapted with thanks from the article 'Yves Congar: Apostle of Patience' by Robert Nugent SDS, which appeared in the Australian E-Journal of Theology, February 2005
Yves Congar was born in 1904 in Sedan and in 1925 entered a novitiate of the French Dominicans at Amiens. He soon discerned his call to work in the cause of ecumenism.
Following ordination in 1930, Congar taught theology at Le Saulchoir, the Dominacan seminary which in the mid 1950s was a centre of theological controversy that resulted in the dismissal of several prominent professors, including one of Congar’s mentors, the Dominican theologian, Marie-Dominique Chenu. It was Chenu who introduced Congar to the work of the Faith and Order Conference at Lausanne in 1927 and the thought of Johann Adam Möhler, whose ground-breaking book, Unity in the Church, Congar translated in 1938.
Early in his career he studied the reformer Luther and the Russian mystic Berdyaev. He also made contact with the leading Protestant theologian, Karl Barth. In spring 1932 he befriended Dom Lambert Beauduin, whose monastery at Amay was founded to be a place of encounter and unity between the Eastern and Western rites of the Church. By the time Congar met him, Beauduin was living in exile because of Rome’s displeasure with his work and thought on Anglicans and the Orthodox. Congar was aware of the Church’s tendency to condemn innovation quickly and with no explanation. He realised that anyone promoting the cause of Christian unity would be more or less disowned by Church authorities.
In 1932 he met Paul Couturier at Amay. Couturier’s first impression was that Congar was not serious about the spiritual dimension of unity; Congar thought Couturier had no great grasp of the theology issues. But they soon decided that they were more of a mind than they had realized; and in 1936 Congar was invited to preach a series of sermons at Sacré Coeur, Montmartre, for the first Week of Prayer to be observed in Paris in the spirit established by Couturier at Lyon three years earlier. These talks later formed the foundation for the book, Chrétiens Désunis, or Divided Christendom: a Catholic Study of the Problem of Reunion, published in 1937. It argued that other Christian denominations had at times preserved elements of Christianity better than the Catholic Church. The work of preaching for Christian unity became a focal point of his life and ministry. Every year thereafter he was asked to preach in some part of the world each January during the annual celebration of the Week of Prayer for Christian Unity.
The book brought him to the attention of the Roman authorities. In 1937 he was forbidden by the then Secretary of State, Cardinal Eugenio Pacelli, the future Pius XII, to be an official observer at an ecumenical conference which Congar himself had helped organize in Oxford, although he was allowed to attend it. In 1939 Chenu and Congar were both called to Paris by the Master General of the Dominican Order and warned that the Holy Office had difficulties with their writings, although it was not made clear to him precisely what the problem was. In that same year Congar was drafted as a military chaplain and spent 1940-1945 as a prisoner of war. In March 1942 during his internment he was publicly criticised by a high-ranking, but unnamed, Vatican official in the pages of L’Osservatore Romano. More bad news arrived in letter from friends in the spring of 1942, when he learned that Chenu had been dismissed as rector of Le Saulchoir and his book on the theological tradition at the seminary had been put on the Church’s Index of Forbidden Books. Congar shared Chenu’s theological vision, especially in the realm of rediscovering the role of the laity and a proper understanding of priesthood and ministry in the Church. So he felt that it was only his being held prisoner outside the country that preserved him from the same fate.
At the end of the war in 1946 there were rumors of an impending change in the direction of the Church. The new Pope Pius XII insisted that the emphasis of the Week of Prayer was wrong and that the Church Unity Octave, upon which it was and ought to be based, required prayer for the return of all Christians to the Roman Church as the only authentic basis for ecumenical prayer and action. Concern in Rome about Congar’s Divided Christendom still lingered and new objections arose to some of his other publications. In December 1947 he was refused permission to write an article on Catholic ecumenism, requested in preparation for a meeting to establish the World Council of Churches in Amsterdam the following year. Meanwhile his highly popular book Divided Christendom went out of print, but was still very much in demand. His publishers asked him to prepare a new edition. His religious superiors required him to submit any revision for prior censorship to prevent further problems with Rome. This took Congar six months to complete and in October 1948 the manuscript was taken to Rome. Nothing more was heard of it until August 1950 when he was told that in light of the Pope’s forthcoming encyclical (Humani Generis) certain additional changes were demanded, although he was not told precisely what they were. But since so much had changed in the world of ecumenism in the meantime between the work’s first publication and the proposed revision Congar abandoned the project entirely.
In 1947 Congar was asked by the organisers of the forthcoming inaugural Amsterdam assembly of the World Council of Churches to submit a list of ten suitable persons to represent the Catholic Church. Congar approached Cardinal Emanuel Suhard of Paris for advice and was authorized by him to write to the Archbishop of Utrecht, recommending ten or twelve official Catholic observers. Suhard was under the impression that Congar had received permission from Rome to name four observers, which was certainly not the case. The Assistant Secretary General of the World Council of Churches simply wanted to deal directly with Catholics who were well informed and sympathetic to the ecumenical movement, which is why Congar was asked to suggest names.
Rome was eventually informed of these negotiations and on June 6th 1948 issued a monitum (a warning), reserving to itself the right to appoint observers to the Amsterdam meeting. This gave Congar reason to hope that at least there would be some Catholic presence at the ecumenical gathering. His hopes were dashed, however, when on June 28th the Archbishop of Utrecht told Congar that the Holy Office would not grant authorisation for any Catholic participation in the Amsterdam meeting. As it happened, Catholic experts were in the city during the meeting, but not as official observers; nor did they take part in any of the meetings. The whole experience taught Congar a painful lesson. It was also a major turning point in his life. He was, he said, not made for any kind of negotiations that demanded ‘prudence, tact and circumspection … … I may have one of these gifts, but certainly not all of them. In addition, I was irremediably suspect and under surveillance; my actions, real or supposed, were interpreted in advance in a reprehensible sense.’
On December 20, 1949, apparently as a result of this incident, the Holy Office published guidelines for official Catholic participation in the ecumenical movement, which actually legalised, but with careful restrictions, what was already being done in many places. Congar did not chafe at the restrictions and made it clear that he himself had never ‘either before or since, taken part in a meeting without the usual authorization, any more than I have ever published a line in contravention of the rule imposed upon me.’ The rules and restrictions became even more stringent after the 1950 publication of Humani Generis. But Congar still managed to publish his ground-breaking and popular True and False Reform in the Church at the end of the same year.
In February of the following year the Holy Office barred an Italian edition of True and False Reform in the Church, including all translations in any other languages. He was also ordered to submit all future writings, even small reviews, directly to Rome. He readily complied, but commented privately that such actions show the incredible narrowness of censorship.
Meanwhile, on May 13, 1952 Congar joined other Catholic ecumenists to convene the Catholic Conference for Ecumenical Questions, with support from the Jesuit theologian, ecumenist and future Cardinal, Augustine Bea. Bea later became the first President of the Vatican’s Secretariat for Christian Unity, established by Pope John XXIII, and spearheaded the cause of ecumenism during the Second Vatican Council. The gathering took place in August 1952, with Congar providing theological treatises which were read at the meeting. He also drafted reports to be shared with the World Council of Churches; but since no official contact with this organisation was permitted to him his reports were sent unsigned.
But the storm broke on February 6 1954, when the Master General of the Dominican Order in Rome, the Spanish Emanuel Suarez, appeared in Paris at the command of the Holy Office. Three Jesuit Provincials from Paris, Lyon and Toulouse were removed from office and four prominent and influential theologians (Boisselet, Feret, Chenu and Congar) were banished from Paris. Congar was banned from teaching and ordered to obtain prior permission from Rome for any future writings. His response was immediate and blunt, calling the action absurd and simply inconceivable. At his own suggestion Congar was assigned to Jerusalem’s prestigious École Biblique, where he wrote Mystery of the Temple, which had seven censors and took three years to publish. On February 9th he confided to his journal: ‘The bishops have bent over backwards in passiveness and servility: they have an honest and childlike reverence for Rome, even a childish and infantile reverence. …for them this is ‘the Church’… In concrete Rome is the Pope, the whole system of congregations which appear as if they are this church…The 'Holy Office' in practice rules the church and makes everyone bow down to it through fear or through interventions. It is the supreme Gestapo, unyielding, whose decisions cannot be discussed …’ ‘ … I am afraid that the absoluteness and simplicity of obedience is drawing me into a complicity with this abhorrent system of secret denunciations … It is …the lies inherent in it which one must utterly reject.’
In September he was called to Rome by the Holy Office but never actually interviewed. During his stay he was not allowed to preach or lecture, nor even meet with students in his residence. In February 1955 he was assigned to Blackfriars, the Dominican house of studies in Cambridge where he was still forbidden any public talks and all publications. Later he recalled his time in England as a very hard eleven months of language difficulties, odious restrictions on his ministry, his movements and contacts with Anglicans and Protestants.
Finally, in December 1955, Congar was assigned to the Dominican house in Strasbourg where the community, as a way of showing their respect and support in the face of Rome’s disciplinary action, promptly elected him as Prior. At that time the Roman authorities had no direct supervision over the election of religious superiors. In this position he certainly had more personal freedom in preaching, lecturing and communal support; but the cloud of suspicion still hung over him. Eventually, with the help of Archbishop Weber of Strasbourg, he returned to Paris, where he was able to resume his pastoral ministry and theological work.
With the advent of Pope John XXIII in 1959 the climate of the Church changed. As a teacher of church history at the diocesan seminary, Roncalli had himself been denounced anonymously by a priest of the diocese of Bergamo for his sympathy for certain authors.
Congar’s personal influence on the Second Vatican Council (1962-1965) was far-reaching - from lecturing international groups of bishops, to helping draft conciliar documents. In July 1960 he was appointed as a theological consultant to preparatory commissions, national hierarchies and individual bishops, and was later made an official Council peritus (expert). Congar’s hand can be discerned in almost every major document produced by the Council Fathers. Among those that bear his stamp are those on Divine Revelation, the Dogmatic Constitution on the Church Lumen Gentium, the Decree on Ecumenism, the documents on missionary activity, life and ministry, priests and religious freedom. Vatican II vindicated Congar and many other theologians, including his friend Chenu, who had been silenced or disciplined by Rome in former days. The truths to which they witnessed in their theological explorations and reflections gradually became assimilated into mainstream Church teaching. Congar himself was made a Cardinal by Pope John Paul II in 1994 and died the following year.
Congar had a great appreciation for the virtue of patience and the role of the cross in the life of the would-be reformer which rings true even today: The cross is the condition of every holy work. God himself is at work in what to us seems a cross. Only by its means do our lives acquire a certain genuineness and depth. Only when a man has suffered for his conviction does he attain in them a certain force, a certain quality of the undeniable and, at the same time, the right to be heard and respected.
This he shared with Teilhard de Chardin, also inhibited by the Holy Office, Lambert Beauduin and Paul Couturier. Although protected by Cardinal Gerlier, Couturier had also suffered for his ecumenical work – it broke his health after he was held by the Gestapo on account of this overseas contacts. Much of Couturier’s thinking comes down to giving one’s life for unity. Sometimes the ultimate sacrifice is accepted, as in the case of Maria Gabriella; sometimes it is the constant assault of being misunderstood and misrepresented, ignored or rejected, the perennial experience of the ecumenist, that is the demanding sacrifice for now so that fruits may borne for others later, elsewhere and in different ways. Couturier was known as the apostle of unity; the trials and contribution of Congar has earned him the name, apostle of patience.
This page will soon be updated to give a further account of the Catholic ecumenical movement through and beyond the Second Vatican Council.
Although the Roman Catholic Church continues not to belong to the World Council of Churches itself, it is actively engaged in extensive discussion and collaboration with many churches and indeed is a full member of the WCC's Faith and Order Commission. Some find it difficult to understand why the Catholic Church is not a full member of the WCC itself, given its leading role in discovering the path to unity. But, as it has come to discern the radical implications of the already God-given unity of Christians in Baptism, it is concerned not to signal acceptance of 'denominationalism', the idea that Christianity is 'many' churches, in place of single-minded trust that the unity of the One Church will be revealed by Christ at the moment of his choosing, 'according to his will, according to his means.' It feels that membership of the WCC could compound the sin of division and formalise separation, rather than transcend it. But with the active, official involvement of the Orthodox and Roman Catholic ecclesial communions in the ecumenical movement, the unity of faith in terms of communion has become a much stronger focus for all churches, yielding the rise of bilateral conversations and, in a number of cases, firm agreements and even occasions for sharing the Eucharist.
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