Cardinal Yves Congar OP is first and foremost associated with Catholic ecumenism. His passionate vision of the Church as the true unifier of humankind triumphed when the Church accepted ecumenism at Vatican II. Apart from his deep faith, love of the Church and ‘active patience’, as he called it (Congar spent much of the 1950s under censure), a major factor in his success was the breadth and solidity of his scholarship. Congar's more ‘suspect’ ideas, particularly his notion that doctrine was not coterminous with any one mode of expression, were shown to be founded solidly on Scripture and Patristics. In other words, what was supposedly new was actually traditional, and much older than the supposedly ‘traditional’ formulae which went back only to the Scholastics or Trent. This method of ressourcement, or going back to the sources, is employed by Gabriel Flynn in studying Congar himself, and results in a surprising discovery: Congar was not driven primarily by a passion for ecumenism, but by the recognition that even in the 1930s Europe was a society of unbelief. Indeed, secularisation, he argued, had begun in the 14th Century, with the rise of lay power, which developed into individualist spiritualities and rationalist humanism. At the same time division between Christians and religious war caused scandal, and the Church's defensive response to criticism and negative attitude to social change contributed to the sundering of religion from the reality of people's lives. Some of these factors are still relevant to our own time, which is the impetus for Flynn's analysis of Congar's theology.
Congar's output was massive (some eighty books and over a hundred articles) and not systematic. This was due not just to his lack of philosophical inclination, but also the nature of his project. Concerned that ‘Baroque theology’ had reduced Catholicism to narrow formulae and rigid systems which were simply alien to many people, he sought to draw out all the riches of Scripture and Tradition to help the Church appeal to the widest audience possible. So Congar uses many models and concepts for the Church: the Body of Christ, People of God, Sacrament of Universal Salvation, ‘the world believing in Christ’, Communion, Koinonia … He shifts continually from one concept to another, and all in an intellectual but passionate style redolent of the Fathers, which makes it difficult to treat his work systematically. This is perhaps why, although the main body of Flynn's work is divided into three chapters (Congar's vision of the Church, the shape of the Church and the reform of the Church), he tends towards repetition.
For all that, Flynn's study is a valuable treatment of some of the implied tensions – between Tradition and traditions, unity and diversity, baptised and ordained priesthood, and so on. Importantly, he reveals Congar as a theologian who cannot be ‘claimed’ by either ‘liberals’ or ‘conservatives’: Congar severely criticised the ‘integralists’ who would fossilize every formula and practice and refuse to recognise the Church's failings; but he had no more time for real Modernists, who he felt were intellectual theologians with no priestly or pastoral sense of the Church. Flynn highlights a few times Congar's seeming replacement of the demand for full visible unity between Christians with (by 1980) an idea of ‘reconciled diversities’. Regrettably he does not discuss this in more detail, nor Congar's apparent rejection of the urgency of evangelisation.
The chapter on reform and tradition is of special value, much of it analysing Congar's untranslated Vraie et Fausse Réforme de l’Église(1950). Flynn gives a fine exposition of Congar's considered response to protestant and liberal criticisms: precisely because the essential structures of the Church (sacraments and ordained ministries) are divinely given, their celebration must reveal rather than deform their reality. The source for reform is Scripture and Tradition, in which liturgy plays a central role as the cosmic sacrifice, the offering of the whole world to God.
But given that Congar's programme for reform was adopted pretty much in its totality at Vatican II, why has the Church not been more successful in the modern world? Flynn returns to his original issue, and attempts to set some parameters for an enquiry into unbelief now. While recognising the effect of the collapse in social structures, he considers that Congar's demand for a reconnection of religion and life needs to be heeded properly. He also implies that Congar's emphasis on the laity has (unintentionally) lessened the status of ordained ministry, and that the impetus for evangelisation has been lost just at a time when a message of hope is most needed. Flynn perceives too a retreat into authoritarian statements and the safety of the presbytery, although he does not expand on this.
It is hard to disagree though that the real causes of unbelief need to be addressed honestly. But this does not require yet another round of breast‐beating which reduces apologetics to saying sorry. Rather, just as Congar looked at the tradition of the Church of his time in its historical context, we need to do the same now. Freed as we now are from the absolutism of any theological system, we can search in the great riches of the Church's tradition for new ways of preaching the Gospel – be that from the Fathers, the Counter‐Reform, Vatican II or the modern Charismatics. Congar offers us sound principles, and Flynn's balanced presentation will get us off to a good start.
