” “"A lot still remains to be done"

The great names of France that left their mark on Vatican Council II also include that of Father Yves-Marie Congar (1904-1995). A Dominican publishing house has now published the third and last part of his diaries: “Mon Journal du Concile”. To commemorate the 40th anniversary of the opening of the Council on 11 October 1962, a conference recently held in Paris recalled Father Congar’s essential contribution to defining the three great innovations of the Council: ecumenism, ecclesiology and laity. “All those associated with Father Congar between 1962 and 1965 recall the incredible activity he performed at the service of the Council, in spite of his mysterious and worrying illness”, observed Father Bernard Dupuy, who participated in the Council as an expert. Father Dupuy was speaking during the colloquium held on 27 September, under the auspices of the three presidents of the Council of the Christian Churches of France: Archbishop Jean-Pierre Ricard of Bordeaux and president of the French Episcopal Conference; Pastor Jean-Arnold de Clermont, president of the Protestant Federation of France; and Metropolitan Jérémie Kaligeorgis, president of the Assembly of the Orthodox bishops of France. Pastor Konrad Raiser, general secretary of the World Council of Churches, also participated. According to Father Boris Bobrinskoy, dean of the Orthodox Theological Institute of San Sergio, member of the Catholic-Orthodox commission, and friend of the theologian since the end of World War II, “Father Congar was a man in love with truth. He felt the need to return to the common roots of East and West, and undertake a ‘therapy of the memory’ to rediscover a Pauline view of ecclesiology. Thanks to him, the Council was opened to episcopal collegiality. This first stage was necessary, but we need to go beyond it to find the right balance between supremacy and collegiality”. “He was one of the men who helped to prepare and realize this Council”, said Eric Mahieu, priest of Lille, recalling Congar appointment as consultor to the preparatory theological commission on 20 July 1960. “With his work in ecclesiology – continued Mahieu – Congar had already tackled and renewed the great questions that the Council was called to address: the Church, her nature and her mission, the role of the laity, ecumenism, the living tradition in the Church”. Father Congar regretted the “excessively cartesian, juridical, analytical” aspect, recalled Father Dupuy. “By his contribution to the drafting of chapter VII of the apostolic constitution ‘Lumen gentium’ (eschatological nature of the pilgrim Church and her union with the Heavenly Church), he helped the eschatological vocation of the Church to be extended to the whole of humanity and to the cosmos itself”. This enlarged vision of Congar, added his fellow-Dominican, also comprised “his theology of the laity: the time had come to enhance the role of the laity by placing them in the priestly, kingly and prophetic People of God”, to quote Congar’s own words, transcribed by Father Mahieu in his introduction to ” my diary of the Council”. All the questions that concerned “collegiality, the role of the laity, missions and also ecumenism”, had remained only half-developed, complained Father Congar at the end of the Council. And yet he was confident in the “reciprocity between practice, theological reflection and historical research”, as he wrote in “Unam Sanctam”, a journal he himself had founded. His work was crowned with the recognition of John Paul II, who made him a cardinal in 1994, recalling what the Dominican had supported, like all precursors, before obtaining unanimous recognition by the Church. Father Congar always thought of the future: “the work we have achieved is fantastic. Nonetheless, a lot still remains to be done!”, he said on the end of the Council.