My Journal of the Council by Yves Congar, O.P. (review)

During the fiftieth anniversary of the opening of the Second Vatican Council, an excellent way to revisit the Council and grow more appreciative of it would be to study the diary of that event of Yves Congar, O.P. The work records Congar’s myriad activities, impressions, and judgments beginning in mid-1960, when he became a peritus of the Preparatory Theological Commission, and continuing to the September 1966 congress in Rome on the theology of the Council. Two great dramas of the Council unfold before the reader as they involved this committed exponent of ecclesiological ressourcement. First, one learns much about how the Council was prepared and then how major portions of this preparation were criticized, set aside, and began to be replaced during the 1962 and 1963 conciliar working periods. Second, Congar participated in the struggles of 1964 and 1965 to create, after long hours of study and discussion in commissions, revised texts that would realize the aims of the Council in ways satisfactory to most Council Fathers, so that the texts would gain a virtual unanimity of approval in the final votes before their promulgation.

Congar’s French original came out in 2002, from which we have now an easily readable translation. The publication enhances the diary itself by offering five introductory texts—namely, a family note by the theologian’s nephew, Dominique Congar; an informative introduction to the diary’s contents by Éric Mahieu, who edited the French original; a review (not accurate in every respect) by Mary Cecily Boulding, O.P., of the Council documents; an interpretation by Paul Philibert, O.P., of the intégrisme of the Council minority that Congar had described—and sharply criticized—in an appendix of his 1950 work on true and false reform; and Mahieu’s note on Congar’s manuscript and typescript of his diary. The introductions by Boulding and Philibert are new in this translation. At the end, appendices are translated from the French that supply information on the timeline of the Council, a chronology of Congar’s work of assisting Council members and Commissions on nine Council documents, lists of Latin titles used by Congar for preparatory schemas and conciliar texts, the official and unofficial names of the Commissions, a Council glossary, works by Congar mentioned in the diary (but without indication of English translations), a map of Rome showing places to which Congar went for meetings, and indices of the diary’s references to Council Fathers and other persons.

A major and lasting impression from this work is the sense that the Council was in fact an enormous ecclesial undertaking, which no short formula or sound bite can adequately describe. As one reads and reflects, Congar’s advocacy of reform and ecumenism, of respectful encounter with the world, and of drawing on early Christian sources gradually convinces the reader of its coherence with the aims of Popes John XXIII and Paul VI. The challenge then was to rally the bishops, the Council’s voting members, to make their own the needed steps toward realization.

The length allotted to this review excludes an account of Congar’s many taxing labors at the Council, which this reviewer gave on the basis of the French original in Gregorianum, 83 (2003), 499–550. However, the translation leads to some further insights regarding the Council documents. For the Constitution on the Church, Lumen gentium, one must especially credit the sagacity and dedication of the relator or coordinator, Monsignor Gérard Philips, who—with his Belgian collaborators—gave the text both depth and unity of vision, contrasting with the haphazard growth by accumulation of the Pastoral Constitution, Gaudium et spes. Regretfully, Philips’s Lumen gentium commentary is not translated into English. Congar assessed the Constitution on Divine Revelation, Dei...