Expanding Catholicity Through Ecumenicity in The Work of Yves Congar: Ressourcement, Receptive Ecumenism and Catholic Reform

International Journal of Systematic Theology Volume 13 Number 3 July 2011 doi:10.1111/j.1468-2400.2011.00580.
Expanding Catholicity through Ecumenicity in the Work of Yves Congar: Ressourcement, Receptive Ecumenism and Catholic Reform
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PAUL D. MURRAY*
Abstract: With particular reference to Yves Congar (190495), this article rst explores the relationship between ressourcement theology and the emergence of Catholic ecumenism. A critical issue is identied concerning the coherence of Congars ecumenical work. In support of the reading pursued here which nds a developing articulation of what has come to be called Receptive Ecumenism Congars three great works of ecumenical theology are closely engaged: Chrtiens dsunis (1937); Chrtiens en dialogue (1964); Diversits et Communion (1982). The conclusion indicates the abiding signicance of Congars ecumenical work, which articulates a call to the fullness of catholicity into which Catholicism has still to grow.
The ecumenical dialogue has, in the rst place, obliged me and helped me to renew the Christian man within me. It has, as it were, compelled me to become more Christian and more catholic.1 [E]cumenism . . . by its very nature, is a movement towards accomplishment and plenitude. It envisages a unity of integration, not one of impoverishment . . . the purpose being to surmount a complex of conventional ideas which, far from being in the true Catholic tradition, represent its stagnation and attenuation. Yet, painful as such an effort is, it soon reaps
* Department of Theology and Religion, Abbey House, Palace Green, University of Durham, Durham DH1 3RS, UK. 1 Yves Congar, Ecumenical Experience and Conversion: A Personal Testimony, trans. Beatrice Morton, in Robert C. Mackie and Charles C. West, eds., The Sufciency of God: Essays on the Ecumenical Hope in Honour of W.A. Visser t Hooft (London: SCM Press, 1963), p. 71.
2011 Blackwell Publishing Ltd
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its reward in the expansion of our own catholicity and in countless discoveries and enrichments.2
Introduction
With particular reference to the person and work of Yves Congar (190495), lauded as the father of Roman Catholic ecumenism,3 this article assesses the decisive contribution made by the ressourcement movement in the mid-part of the twentieth century to the articulation of a Catholic theology of ecumenism.4 There are ve main sections. First, attention is given to the basic fact of a relationship going beyond mere coincidence between ressourcement and the emergence of a Catholic ecumenism. Second, a key critical issue is identied concerning the inner coherence of Congars ecumenical work and indication given of the reading pursued here, which nds in him a developing articulation of what has come to be referred to as Receptive Ecumenism.5 In turn, the third, fourth and fth sections are given over respectively to close readings of Congars three great works of ecumenical theology: his groundbreaking 1937 study, Chrtiens dsunis; his 1964 collection, Chrtiens en dialogue; and his 1982 exploration, Diversits et Communion.6 Finally, a
Yves Congar, The Call to Ecumenism and the Work of the Holy Spirit (1950), in Dialogue between Christians: Catholic Contributions to Ecumenism, trans. Philip Loretz (London and Dublin: Geoffrey Chapman, 1966 (1964)), pp. 1045, henceforth DBC. W.A. Visser t Hooft, Memoirs (London: SCM Press; Philadelphia, PA: Westminster Press, 1973), p. 319, cited in Gabriel Flynn, Cardinal Congars Ecumenism. An Ecumenical Ethics for Reconciliation?, Louvain Studies 28 (2003), p. 312. As indicated below, whilst not without truth this assessment of Congar from outside Catholicism might be qualied, not least by Congar himself, in light of his own self-acknowledged prior and contemporaneous inuences, see nn. 214 here in particular. A shorter version of this article is to be published in Gabriel Flynn and Paul D. Murray, eds., Ressourcement: A Movement for Renewal in Twentieth Century Catholic Theology (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011). Thanks are due to Gabriel Flynn for warm collegial conversation in the course of preparing this article and to Ben Kautzer and Patricia Kelly for help with sourcing some of the references. Given that the reading advocated here is articulated in contrast to that conducted by Gabriel Flynn, it requires clearly noting from the outset that Gabriel Flynn has been a staunch supporter of Receptive Ecumenism (see nn. 36 and 42 here) from its inception: he attended both the relevant international conferences (January 2006 and January 2009); he contributed to the lead volume (see nn. 28 and 36); and he himself hosted a conference on the theme at Mater Dei, Dublin in the summer of 2007, the papers from which were subsequently published in Louvain Studies 33 (2008). Yves Congar, Chrtiens dsunis: principes dun cumnisme Catholique, Unam Sanctam 1 (Paris: Cerf, 1937), ET Divided Christendom: A Study of the Problem of Reunion, trans. M.A. Bouseld (London: Geoffrey Bles, 1939), henceforth DC; Chrtiens en dialogue: contributions catholiques lcumnisme, Unam Sanctam 50 (Paris: Cerf, 1964), ET here DBC (see n. 2); Diversits et Communion: dossier
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conclusion-cum-programmatic outline indicates what it might mean for Catholicism genuinely to regard the work of Congars eminent maturity as of abiding signicance, as articulating a necessary ecumenical orientation and associated call to the fullness of catholicity into which Catholicism has still to grow.
Ressourcement and Catholic ecumenism

Ressourcement was the preferred generic self-reference for an internally diverse movement for renewal in mid-twentieth-century Catholic life and theology which, despite earlier being held in ofcial suspicion,7 came to exert decisive inuence on the Second Vatican Council (19625) and which continues to enjoy prominence, not least through its association with the work of Joseph Ratzinger/Benedict XVI. As the name suggests, for all their diversity, the various streams of ressourcement were characterized by a common concern to overcome the perceived aridity, constraints and distortions of neoscholastic theology by returning to the sources of Catholic Christian tradition, understood as the Scriptures, the liturgy, the Fathers and the other great witnesses to the tradition.8 Through this integral enrichment of Catholic thought and practice, the exponents of ressourcement sought to give fresh articulation to the tradition in a way that could respond to the challenges of the time, most notably the intensication of secularization. Whilst a number of key inuences on and contributors to the ressourcement were located in Belgium and Germany (e.g. Dom Odo Casel, Romano Guardini, Karl Adam and even, in some respects, Karl Rahner), the dual epicentre of activity was in France, led on the one hand by the Jesuits of the Lyons province in Fourvire and, on the other, by the Dominicans of Le Saulchoir. Where the chief Jesuit protagonists were Henri de Lubac, Jean Danilou, Henri Bouillard and the Swiss Hans Urs von Balthasar, the chief Dominicans were Marie-Dominique Chenu and Yves Congar.9
historique et conclusion thologique (Paris: Cerf, 1982), ET Diversity and Communion, trans. John Bowden (London: SCM Press, 1984), henceforth D&C. Unless otherwise stated, all references in each case are to the ET. 7 See Pope Pius XII, Humani Generis. Encyclical Letter Concerning some False Opinions Threatening to Undermine the Foundations of Catholic Doctrine (12 August 1950), available at http://www.vatican.va/holy_father/pius_xii/encyclicals/documents/ hf_p-xii_enc_12081950_humani-generis_en.html (accessed 2 April 2011). 8 On the neoscholasticism that the ressourcement theologians and others sought to overcome, see Fergus Kerr, Twentieth-Century Catholic Theologians: From Neoscholasticism to Nuptial Mystery (Oxford: Blackwell, 2007), pp. 116. For Congar on ressourcement: to the extent one can speak of my theology, [it] is linked specically to a study of the sources, with a great reliance on those sources: . . . scripture, the fathers, the liturgy, the great councils, and the very life of the church, the Christian community. Letter from Father Yves Congar, O.P., Theology Digest 32 (1985), p. 214. 9 For a comprehensive treatment of the movement, see Flynn and Murray, Ressourcement.
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For present purposes, it is notable that the period of most intense ressourcement activity, the 1930s1960s, largely coincides with the period during which Catholicism, albeit unofcially, began again, after the shock waves of the Modernist crisis,10 to open to serious ecumenical theological engagement in some ways picking up where the great nineteenth-century forerunner to ressourcement, Johann Adam Mhler (17961838), had left off in his 1832 work Symbolik.11 Whilst not exclusively so, ressourcement energy was central to this endeavour, pre-eminently so that of Yves Congar. In autobiographical reminiscences Congar makes clear that his ecumenical work was rooted in a very denite sense of call immediately prior to ordination in 1929, preceding and shaping all of his constructive theological work, and itself prepared for by the circumstances of his early life and the climate of warm, close, even routine ecumenical relationships in which he grew up.12 He was subsequently allowed to make a pair of study trips to Germany over consecutive summers (1930 and 1931) that enabled him to engage closely with Lutheranism and to make pilgrimage to the chief places associated with Luther.13 Thereafter he continued to extend his circle of ecumenical friends. Following many shorter pieces, his rst monograph, Chrtiens dsunis of 1937 (see n. 6), was devoted to pursuing, as the French subtitle has it, the principles of a Catholic ecumenism not, as the English translation has it, A Study
See Darrell Jodock, ed., Catholicism Contending with Modernity: Roman Catholic Modernism and Anti-Modernism in Historical Context (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000). 11 Johann Adam Mhler, Symbolik oder Darstellung der dogmatischen Gegenstze der Katholiken und Protestanten nach ihren ffentlichen Bekenntnisschriften (Mainz: Kupferberg, 1832), ET Symbolism: Exposition of the Doctrinal Differences between Catholics and Protestants as Evidenced by their Symbolical Writings, trans. James Burton Robertson (New York: Crossroad, 1997 (1843)). On Mhler and ressourcement, see Hans Boersma, Nouvelle Thologie and Sacramental Ontology: A Return to Mystery (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), pp. 4152. For Congars own explicit use of Mhler and this from very early in Congars writing see further below; of particular signicance are his LEsprit des Pres daprs Moehler, Supplment la Vie Spirituelle 55 (1938), pp. 125; and La signication cumnique de loeuvre de Mhler, Irnikon 15 (1938), pp. 11330. 12 Ecumenism has been my concern, I would even say my vocation, for a very long time; it is a vocation that I can date quite precisely from 1929, though it has antecedents, kinds of preparation in my childhood and youth. Yves Congar, Fifty Years of Catholic Theology: Conversations with Yves Congar, ed. Bernard Lauret, trans. John Bowden (London: SCM Press, 1988 (1987)), p. 77; also, p. 79: I have often reected on John 17, since it is to this text that I owe my ecumenical vocation: it was when I was preparing for my ordination as priest in 1929 that while studying the Gospel of John I stopped at chapter 17. Since then God knows how many times I have read it and even prayed it. In this regard, the subtitle he gives to the 1963 Preface to DBC is interesting: The Call and the Quest 19291963, see here particularly pp. 24. He makes similar statements elsewhere, see Letter from Father Yves Congar, O.P., p. 213; also Reections on Being a Theologian, New Blackfriars 62 (1981), p. 405. 13 Preface. The Call and the Quest, DBC, pp. 57.
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of the Problem of Reunion and represents the rst such Catholic work, the rst-fruit of an ecumenical spring as Bernard Lauret puts it.14 He was similarly central to various practical initiatives aimed at preparing the ground for Catholic participation in major ecumenical processes such as the Oxford Life and Work Conference of July 1937 and the Amsterdam Faith and Order Conference of 1948, endeavours frustrated by the refusal of ofcial sanction and effectively remaining frustrated until the establishment in 1965 of the Joint Working Group between the Roman Catholic Church and the World Council of Churches.15 Nor were the frustrations conned to practical matters. In 1947 he was refused permission to publish an article on the position of the Catholic Church with regard to the ecumenical movement, and in 1950 he abandoned plans to publish a revised edition of Chrtiens dsunis on account of the obstacles placed in his way by his superiors.16 Whilst such frustrations led him to a turning-point (DBC, p. 38) that, at one level, was a move away from an explicit ecumenical focus and onto, ostensibly, more internal Catholic ecclesiological matters, such as the theology of the laity and Catholic understanding of the dynamics of Christian tradition, Congar was always clear that it represented not the relinquishing of his fundamental ecumenical concern but its focusing and deepening, not a turn away but its consequent and appropriate means of pursuit, [t]wo things intimately inter-twined.17 As he put it when reecting back in 1963 on what he took to be the continuing signicance of Chrtiens dsunis: It very soon occurred to me that ecumenism is not a speciality and that it presupposes a movement of conversion and reform coextensive with the whole life of all communions.18 Indeed, as early as 19423, in a note written to himself whilst a prisoner of war, reecting on what he had been seeking to do in Chrtiens dsunis and how that required to be taken forwards, he wrote: I believe more than ever that the essential ecumenical activity of the Catholic Church should be to live its own life more fully and genuinely; to purify itself as far as possible . . . this presupposes the work of broadening and purication, of reform.19 Accordingly, he laid down the principles for this in his next great work, Vraie et fausse rforme dans lglise
14 Bernard Lauret, Introduction, in Congar, Fifty Years of Catholic Theology, p. 1. 15 Preface, DBC, pp. 268, 368. 16 Preface, DBC, pp. 356. The 1947 paper for which he was refused permission is also printed here as The Catholic Church and the Ecumenical Movement on the Eve of the Amsterdam Assembly, DBC, pp. 7199. 17 Congar, Reections on Being a Theologian, p. 405. For his seminal study on the laity, see Jalons pour une thologie du lacat, Unam Sanctam 23 (Paris: Cerf, 1953), ET Lay People in the Church, trans. Donald Attwater (London: Bloomsbury, 1957). For his work on tradition, see La Tradition et les traditions: essai historique (Paris: Fayard, 1960), ET Tradition and Traditions: An Historical and Theological Essay (London: Burns & Oates, 1966). 18 Preface, DBC, p. 21. 19 Preface, DBC, p. 31; also The Catholic Church and the Ecumenical Movement, DBC, p. 83.
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(1950), and proceeded to pursue the agenda articulated there through the aforementioned particular studies, as also myriad others.20 Equally, for all the indisputable importance of Congars ressourcement-shaped energy in promoting fresh ecumenical openings within earlymid twentieth-century Catholicism, it is important to acknowledge that this was neither an exclusive nor an unprecedented inuence. More or less contemporaneous with and complementary to the theological work of ressourcement, Congar acknowledges the decisive spiritually-oriented contribution of the saintly Abb Couturier of Lyons (18811953). From the mid-1930s, Couturier single-handedly transformed the Church Unity Octave from, effectively, a week of prayer of Catholics for the return of the others as it had originated in 1908 with the American Episcopalian convert, Paul Watson into a genuine week of universal prayer for the unity of Christians, focused on the need for divinely-initiated conversion on all sides and imploring God for the unity he wills through the means he ordains .21 With this, in 1937 Courturier founded the inuential Groupe des Dombes, which rooted in his principle of spiritual ecumenism in many respects represents an unofcial precursor to later bilateral dialogues and an exemplar of the ethic of ecumenical dialogue for which Congar also called.22 Prior even to either Courturier or Congar and standing, perhaps, as the rst genuinely signicant Catholic opening to ecumenical engagement since Mhler are
See Yves Congar, True and False Reform in the Church, trans. Paul Philibert (Collegeville, MN: Liturgical Press, 2011). For magisterial analysis, see Gabriel Flynn, Yves Congars Vision of the Church in a World of Unbelief (Aldershot and Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2004), pp. 146211. 21 Preface, DBC, pp. 10, 1921; also The Catholic Church and the Ecumenical Movement, DBC, pp. 823; The Ecumenical Approach (1957), DBC, p. 130; The Encounter Between Christian Confessions Yesterday and Today (1958), DBC, p. 159; Thologie de la prire pour lunit (1967), in Yves Congar, Essais cumniques: Le mouvement, les hommes, les problmes (Paris: Le centurion, 1984), pp. 191205, subsequently Essais cumniques; Spiritualit cumnique (1968), Essais cumniques, pp. 17390; Labb Paul Couturier, ses intuitions, vingt-sept ans aprs (1980), Essais cumniques, pp. 1328. 22 See Catherine E. Clifford, The Groupe des Dombes: A Dialogue of Conversion (New York: Peter Lang, 2005); also Joseph Famere, The Contribution of the Groupe des Dombes to Ecumenism: Past Achievements and Future Challenges, Louvain Studies 33 (2008), pp. 99116; compare Congar, D&C, pp. 1389. For Congar on the character of true ecumenical dialogue and the attentiveness to the reality of the other that must lie at its heart, see First, Understand (1935), DBC, pp. 2968; also DC, p. 262; Les tapes du dialogue cumnique, in Congar, Aspects de Lcumnisme, tudes Religieuses, p. 756 (Brussels: La Pense Catholique; Paris: Ofce Gnral du Livre, 1962), pp. 725; Le Concile et le ncessaire dialogue, Aspects de Lcumnisme, pp. 5775; Introduction. Dialogue, Principle of Ecumenical Work, Disposition of the Human Understanding (1963), DBC, pp. 5368; Preface, DBC, p. 13; Conquering Our Enmities, in John A. OBrien, ed., Steps to Christian Unity (New York: Doubleday, 1964), p. 108.
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the remarkable but ultimately forestalled Malines conversations of 19215. Initiated and led by Cardinal Mercier with, at least initially, tacit Roman approval, these were focused on the possibility of corporate reunion between Rome and the Church of England.23 It was in this context that the leading Catholic contributor, Dom Lambert Beauduin (18731960), founder of the ecumenical monastery of Chevetogne in 1925, articulated the evocative hope for a model of unity that would allow the Church of England to be united [with], not absorbed by Rome; a hope that has resonance with Congars later ecumenical writings.24 Allowing for these historical caveats, it nevertheless remains that the period of subterranean ressourcement activity in the middle part of the twentieth century largely coincides with the initial phase of signicant, if informal, Catholic ecumenical openings. With this, the very point at which ressourcement theology was welcomed in from the cold after-effects of Pope Pius XIIs 1950 encyclical, Humani Generis, and given ofcially sanctioned shaping power at Vatican II coincides exactly with Catholicisms decisive formal entry into the modern ecumenical stream with the Councils groundbreaking Decree on Ecumenism, Unitatis Redintegratio.25 Taken together with the Dogmatic Constitution on the Church,
Cardinal Dsir-Joseph Mercier (18511926) was Archbishop of Malines/Mechelen, Belgium from 1906 until his death. For the denitive account of the Malines conversations, see Bernard Barlow, A Brother Knocking at the Door: The Malines Conversations, 19211925 (Norwich: Canterbury Press, 1996); also Lord Halifax, ed., The Conversations at Malines, 19211925: Original Documents (London: Philip Allan, 1930); Walter Frere, Recollections of Malines (London: Centenary Press, 1935). 24 For the text of Beauduins paper, read by Cardinal Mercier in his own name at the fourth Malines conversation, see Halifax, The Conversations at Malines, pp. 24161. For Congars appreciation, see D&C, p. 92, in particular: There were several doubtful points . . . but the basic idea [of united, not absorbed] is worth keeping. . . . This is the idea on which my own research has all been oriented: given that the axis of Christian faith is assured, one can accept various expressions of it. Compare here the earlier and more cautious DC, pp. 1648 and 28693 where, whilst afrming the values that are at work in the motive for corporate reunion, such as a feeling that the reuniting of dissidents should not involve the negation of what is good in their former beliefs (p. 292), Congar suspects the aspiration for corporate reunion of downplaying the need for doctrinal reconciliation and ecclesial-structural development and conversion (p. 291). To put this concern in more contemporary terms: for the Congar of DC, reconciled diversity cannot legitimately be attained at the cost of doctrinal incoherence or structural incompatibility. But, as we shall see, the mature Congar is equally clear about this. As such, and as will be argued here, his move to a more positive appropriation of united, not absorbed by D&C represents not a fundamental change of position on Congars behalf so much as a more sophisticated understanding of what could be meant by this phrase. 25 I was completely gratied because what I had worked and prepared for reached the highest level of the churchs life indeed the ofcial status that Vatican II, the great Council of our century, gave to all the themes of my work: reform within the church, ecumenism, the laity, the missions . . . If there is a theology of Congar, that is where it is to be found. Congar, Letter from Father Yves Congar, O.P., p. 215; also Reections on Being a Theologian, New Blackfriars 62 (1981), p. 405; Preface, DBC, p. 44. For
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Lumen Gentium,26 Unitatis Redintegratio represents a remarkable transformation in Catholic self-understanding relative to the other Christian traditions. Where ofcial Catholic thinking had erstwhile been shaped as robustly articulated in Pope Pius XIs 1928 encyclical, Mortalium Animos by the assumption of an unqualied identity between the Church of Christ and the Catholic Church and consequent espousal of the need for a one-way return of separated Christians to Rome,27 the Council teaches more subtly that the Church of Christ subsists in the Catholic Church (LG 8). In Vatican II teaching, whilst all the essential elements of the Church of Christ really are present in the Catholic Church as it actually exists and not just in prospect, none of them are regarded as being present there in either perfect or exclusive form with the possible exception, in the latter regard, of unity which is understood as needing to be lived out specically in terms of communion with the See of Rome.28 On the contrary, the Catholic Church, itself always in need of purication, semper puricanda, can properly appreciate and even receive from the aspects of catholicity present in other traditions which may be being lived there more adequately, in part, than within the Catholic Church.29 In place
the text of Vatican II, Unitatis Redintegratio. Decree on Ecumenism (21 November 1964), henceforth UR, see http://www.vatican.va/archive/hist_councils/ii_vatican_ council/documents/vat-ii_decree_19641121_unitatis-redintegratio_en.html (accessed 2 April 2011). 26 Vatican II, Lumen Gentium. Dogmatic Constitution on the Church (21 November 1964), henceforth LG, available at http://www.vatican.va/archive/hist_councils/ii_vatican_ council/documents/vat-ii_const_19641121_lumen-gentium_en.html (accessed 2 April 2011). 27 For example: So, Venerable Brethren, it is clear why this Apostolic See has never allowed its subjects to take part in the assemblies of non-Catholics: for the union of Christians can only be promoted by promoting the return to the one true Church of Christ of those who are separated from it, for in the past they have unhappily left it. To the one true Church of Christ, we say, which is visible to all, and which is to remain, according to the will of its Author, exactly the same as He instituted it. (Pope Pius XI, Mortalium Animos. Encyclical Letter on Religious Unity (6 January 1928), 10, available at http://www.vatican.va/holy_father/pius_xi/encyclicals/documents/ hf_p-xi_enc_19280106_mortalium-animos_en.html (accessed 2 April 2011)) 28 See LG 8, 15, 16; also UR 3, 4. For some of the debate around subsistit, see Paul D. Murray, Receptive Ecumenism and Catholic Learning Establishing the Agenda, in Paul D. Murray, ed., Receptive Ecumenism and the Call to Catholic Learning: Exploring a Way for Contemporary Ecumenism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), pp. 223 n. 34, henceforth RE&CCL; also Walter Kasper, That They May All Be One: The Call to Unity Today (London: Burns & Oates, 2004), pp. 658. 29 See LG 8; UR 67, and UR 4; compare Kasper, That They May All Be One, pp. 17 and 67. On the way in which this conciliar principle was subsequently taken forwards quite remarkably in Pope John Paul IIs 1995 Encyclical on Commitment to Christian Unity, Ut Unum Sint, and, more recently, in the development of the strategy of Receptive Ecumenism, see n. 42 here.
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of a one-way ecumenism of return to Rome You-come-in-ism here we have indicated the possibility of an ecumenism of mutual growth towards full communion. Further, the correspondence traced here between ressourcement energy and Catholic ecumenical activity and their mutual owering at Vatican II is not a matter of mere coincidence, nor even simply a matter of their respectively nding tireless voice and focus in the person and work of Congar, one of the most indefatigably industrious theologians of the century. Looking aside from the person of Congar for a moment, ressourcement activity and Catholic ecumenical opening appear to be intrinsically intertwined in at least four ways. First, as Congar frequently notes, the return to the biblical, liturgical and patristic sources as means of overcoming the ossied categories of neoscholasticism and counter-Reformation polemic and so opening Catholicism again to richer, more dynamic ways of understanding Catholic life was, in practice, an absolutely necessary prerequisite without which serious Catholic ecumenical activity would have remained impossible.30 Second, there is the fact that the very process of ressourcement, of engaging afresh the biblical, liturgical and patristic sources, was itself in some respects a work of ecumenical collaboration, most obviously with the Russian Orthodox migr community in Paris but also with Protestant theologians.31 Third, the characteristic scholarly ecumenical activity of overcoming prejudicial and distorted understandings of other Christian traditions by seeking both to understand them aright and, in the light of this, to re-examine areas of historic disagreement and polemic is itself, as Congar notes, an act of historical ressourcement. As he put it in his 1957 essay, The Ecumenical Approach: The same sort of re-examination of the sources is going on not only in connection with the most vital and positive content of our faith but also with our relations with the great groups of Christian dissenters which have emerged from the ruptures of the eleventh and sixteenth centuries . . . I would like to dwell a little here on the role of history in the work of ecumenism, for I regard it as absolutely essential . . . History, then . . . has begun to remove from our path
30
For example, in his autobiographical Preface to DBC, he writes of his conviction of the inseparable connection between the massive process of denudation which ecumenism demanded and the ecclesiological, pastoral, biblical and liturgical movements, DBC, p. 21; also The Catholic Church and the Ecumenical Movement, DBC, p. 83; The Ecumenical Approach, DBC, pp. 121 and 126; also DC, p. 272. Perhaps the single most signicant example of this re-sourcing of Catholicism is Henri de Lubacs great work of that title: Catholicism: Christ and the Common Destiny of Man, trans. Lancelot C. Sheppard and Elizabeth Englund, from the rev. fourth edn of 1947 (1938) (San Francisco, CA: Ignatius Press, 1988 (1950)). 31 For ressourcement itself involving and beneting from ecumenical involvement, such as with the circle around Nicolas Berdyaev and the Orthodox theologians of the Institut Saint-Serge, Paris, as also Protestant theologians, see Congar, Preface, DBC, pp. 78 and 17.
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certain ctitious quarrels, certain motives for opposition which, however, once claimed pride of place.32 This basic strategy of seeking to overcome historic misunderstandings and disagreements through scriptural, historical and theological ressourcement and rereading has lain at the heart of the various bilateral processes, perhaps most signicantly of all in that between the Lutheran World Federation and the Catholic Church, culminating in the mutual formal endorsement in 1999 of the Joint Declaration on the Doctrine of Justication.33 In turn complementing and extending this notion of ecumenism as itself an agent and example of ressourcement, the fourth way in which ressourcement and Catholic ecumenism can be seen to be intertwined relates to the way in which ecumenical engagement provides connection with the wider sources of catholicity in other traditions that have been relatively lost from view in ones own, thus affording the possibility of expanding and deepening the catholicity of ones own tradition in light of the particular dimensions of catholicity lived well in the other traditions.34 Congar moved to a clearer articulation of this last point in the course of his work. Nevertheless, it was an aspect of his thinking throughout.
In search of coherence in Congars ecumenical vision

The corpus of Congars writings stretches from within years of Catholicisms earliest openings to the ecumenical movement, to well over twenty years of mature reection on the new possibilities and fresh challenges following Catholicisms formal ecumenical engagement at Vatican II. It is, then, hardly surprising that there are observable differences of tone between, for example, the characteristic Catholic dogmatism of the time in Chrtiens dsunis to the much more open, interrogative character of Diversits et Communion35 as also more conceptual and substantive developments across this period.
32 DBC, pp. 1223; also p. 129; also Preface, DBC, p. 45; The Catholic Church and the Ecumenical Movement, DBC, p. 83; The Encounter Between Christian Confessions, DBC, pp. 1513, 155; Historical Considerations on the Schism of the Sixteenth Century in Relation to the Catholic Realization of Unity (1959), DBC, p. 357; D&C, p. 142. 33 See the Lutheran World Federation and the Roman Catholic Church, Joint Declaration on the Doctrine of Justication (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2000; London: CTS: 2001); also at http://www.vatican.va/roman_curia/pontical_councils/chrstuni/documents/ rc_pc_chrstuni_doc_31101999_cath-luth-joint-declaration_en.html (accessed 2 April 2011). For analysis of some of the methodological and substantive issues involved here, see Paul D. Murray, St Paul and Ecumenism: Justication and All That, New Blackfriars 91 (2010), particularly pp. 1546 and 15969. 34 See Congar, The Call to Ecumenism and the Work of the Holy Spirit, DBC, p. 105. 35 Jean-Pierre Jossua, Luvre cumnique du Pre Congar, tudes 357 (1982), p. 543, my own translation throughout.
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A certain amount of debate has focused here on the contrast between the central role accorded to catholicity in Chrtiens dsunis compared with the corresponding emphasis placed on diversity and plurality in Diversits et Communion.36 What is at issue here? Are we just dealing with a change in terminology in order to explore the same basic reality in developed terms? Or is there something more signicant going on? Does the change represent the abandoning of catholicity and its distinctively Catholic vision of ecumenism in favour of a quite different perspective? For Jossua it is a matter of both deep continuity and signicant evolution that results in a truly dissimilar (vraiment dissemblable) understanding of the search for unity, of which, it should be noted, Jossua basically approves (p. 553). The continuity lies in the key idea of a fundamental polarity between unity and internal richness (p. 552). The dissimilarity lies in the respective concepts used to articulate this internal richness and the very different understandings of unity they suggest (p. 552). Where catholicity, at least in the formulation given to it in Chrtiens dsunis, is presented as encompassing, even closed, diversity and plurality are presented as open, practically to the point of bursting (p. 552). Intertwined with this change of tone and conceptuality is a fundamental shift in Congars thinking about the aspiration for Christian unity. Where Chrtiens dsunis is characterized by a strongly Christocentric view of the visible Roman Catholic Church as the Church of Christ tout simple and, hence, by what amounts to a gracious articulation of the ecumenism of return (see n. 27), Congars subsequent work was characterized by a more pneumatological understanding of the church and corresponding insistence on the transcendence of the mystery aimed at (p. 553). In 1937, unity appeared as already given in the Roman Catholic Church (p. 553). Consequently, whilst Congar did not view separated Christians as having to renounce anything positive in their traditions, ecumenism was nevertheless understood as a matter of one-way return to the unity that has always existed in the Roman Catholic Church. In contrast, in Diversits et Communion, in strict terms unity is conceived of as future and therefore as being sought together by Christians (p. 553). The pilgrim way to unity is one that all must walk. With this, in Diversits et Communion Congar is quite clear that whatever unity might be, it does not represent the overcoming of all differences. Rather, Differences in large measure remain within a restored unity (p. 552).
36
See Jossua, Luvre cumnique, pp. 5523; further references to this work on this page are given in the main text. Compare Gabriel Flynn, Cardinal Congars Ecumenism: An Ecumenical Ethics for Reconciliation?, Louvain Studies 28 (2003), pp. 313, 3213; Yves Congars Vision of the Church in a World of Unbelief, pp. 13945, 219; Receptive Ecumenism and Catholic Learning Reections in Dialogue with Yves Congar and B.C. Butler, in RE&CCL, pp. 4012, 405; also Joseph Famere, Chrtiens dsunis du P. Congar 50 ans aprs, Nouvelle revue thologique 110 (1988), pp. 66686; see also Joseph Famere and Gilles Routhier, De la catholicit la diversit et de lunit la communion, in Famere and Routhier, Yves Congar (Paris: Cerf, 2008), pp. 5879 and also pp. 23842.
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As noted, Jossua basically shares Congars sense of the need for a qualitative and not just quantitative expansion of the underlying notion and reality of catholicity of the basic issue of unied multiplicity in the direction of a more pneumatological understanding of the church.37 Whilst the later Congar, in Diversits et Communion, no longer draws upon the category of catholicity to explore this, there is basic continuity in his concern to articulate appropriately the unied multiplicity of the church; a continuity of concern, we might say, with the actual reality of catholicity rather than a particular concept of it. In contrast, however, Flynn is considerably less sanguine about the merits of Congars later ecumenical thinking (see n. 36). He nds not evolution sustained by deep continuity but contrast to the point of potential deleterious contradiction and even diminution. His concerns essentially relate to what he nds to be Congars overly loose use of the notion of there appropriately being an abiding and signicant diversity within any desired unity of the traditions, concerns particularly focused on Congars employment of the Lutheran-coined concept of reconciled diversity in which Flynn hears the potential for signicantly unreconciled divergences being prematurely placed alongside each other in an unstable and unreal supposed unity.38 Flynns suspicion is that the shift in his [Congars] ecumenism from catholicity to pluralism/diversities entails the recognition of the division of Christendom as permanent and irreversible.39 Congar has succumbed to the temptation to accept a mere plurality of views and thereby anomalously endorses an ecumenism which [he] warned against in Chrtiens dsunis.40 For Flynn the solution, contrary to Congars incautious irtation with the problematic notion of reconciled diversity, is to formulate an ecumenical concept of catholicity that is capable of sustaining differences while also withstanding the movement towards reductionism.41 For its own part, the reading conducted here concurs with this call of Flynn for, as I would express it, a sufciently rich, robust and dynamic understanding of catholicity as to be able to deal fruitfully both with the challenges posed by the continuing reality of unreconciled diversity and with the abiding importance of the proper aspiration for an intensied, enriched and expanded unied multiplicity. It differs from Flynns analysis, however, both in nding more positive possibilities in the notion of reconciled diversity and in nding in Congars mature work (as do also, to some degree, Famere and Routhier) an appropriate means of seeking perhaps without nal resolution to discern and to live the catholicity of the church
For the distinction between qualitative (the fullness of God in Christ and the Spirit) and quantitative (universal extension in time and space) understandings of catholicity, see Avery Dulles, The Catholicity of the Church (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987), particularly pp. 3047, 68105. 38 On the origins of reconciled diversity, see D&C, p. 149. 39 Flynn, Receptive Ecumenism and Catholic Learning, p. 402. 40 Flynn, Receptive Ecumenism and Catholic Learning, p. 402 and Yves Congars Vision of the Church, p. 219, referencing DC, p. 101; also Cardinal Congars Ecumenism, p. 323. 41 Flynn, Receptive Ecumenism and Catholic Learning, p. 409.
37
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as congured communion. Indeed, rather than viewing Congars later work in terms of a radical departure from Chrtiens dsunis, it is here viewed, for all its exploratory nature, as being of abiding signicance and as representing a decisive forerunner of Receptive Ecumenism, itself, in many respects, a new name for some old ways of thinking.42 Three key reasons prompt this reading. First and most pedestrian is that I believe the relevant texts themselves suggest such a reading: whilst there are unarguable differences in conceptual framework, tone, and even ecclesial and ecumenical vision across the writings, it is also possible to identify early, unformed anticipations of what will develop to become key later principles. As Jossua notes, far from Congars relinquishing of the strongly Christocentric ecclesiology and catholicity of Chrtiens dsunis being a late aberration, it was already clearly indicated in his self-critical reections in Chrtiens en dialogue.43 In turn, I am suggesting we can push further back and nd initial notes albeit as minor themes, contrary motions even within Chrtiens dsunis. The point is that Congars dual process of ressourcement and reform was always a theology on its way. Throughout, his concern was to stretch, deepen, enrich and reform Catholic understanding and practice. Some of the principles that would ultimately help effect this reform can already begin to be discerned in the earlier work, albeit in undeveloped, inchoate form; nevertheless they are there in such a fashion that, when played on again in very different intellectual, ecumenical and ecclesial contexts, they would come to stronger, more developed articulation. The second and most signicant reason is that Congar himself understood his work in terms of deep continuity. For example, in the Preface to Essais cumniques, having endorsed Jossuas identication of the key conceptual change from catholicity to diversity and pluralism, he immediately comments: And yet I
42 Building on the relevant conciliar principles (see n. 29 here) and John Paul IIs remarkable extension of these in his 1995 encyclical, Ut Unum Sint, into an invitation to other Christian traditions to help reimagine Petrine ministry, Receptive Ecumenism represents a fresh strategy, at the heart of which is the conviction that further progress will only be possible if the traditions switch from asking what their respective others need to learn from them to asking instead what they themselves can and must learn. As such, it seeks to embed a process of ecclesial conversion and a principle of dynamic integrity at the heart of Christian ecumenical engagement. See RE&CCL; also Paul D. Murray, Receptive Ecumenism and Ecclesial Learning: Receiving Gifts for Our Needs, Louvain Studies 33 (2008), pp. 3045. For Pope John Paul IIs encyclical, see Ut Unum Sint Encyclical Letter on Commitment to Christian Unity (25 May 2005), particularly 956, available at http://www.vatican.va/holy_father/john_paul_ii/ encyclicals/documents/hf_jp-ii_enc_25051995_ut-unum-sint_en.html (accessed 2 April 2011). For the phrase a new name for some old ways of thinking, see William James, Pragmatism. A New Name for Some Old Ways of Thinking (1907), in The Works of William James, I., ed. Frederick H. Burkhardt (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1975). For the resonance between Congars work and Receptive Ecumenism, see nn. 54, 61, 62, 64, 69, 70, 73, 85 here. 43 See Preface, DBC, p. 24; also The Catholic Church and the Ecumenical Movement, DBC, pp. 89, 96; Note on the Words Confession, Church and Communion (1950), DBC, p. 197.
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have the feeling of having changed neither the faith nor the Church. I have tried hard to live my Catholic delity [in relation] to the two planes of the absolute and the historically relative.44 Allied with such a claim would be various passages in Chrtiens en dialogue where, in the course of reecting back on what he considers himself to have been up to writing Chrtiens dsunis, Congar emphasizes the importance of points that might be missed on an initial reading of the work. This is most notably the case in the note Congar wrote himself in late 1942 or early 1943 whilst a prisoner of war: [W]hen I re-read Chrtiens dsunis, recall my actions and re-examine my past views, I see very little to change . . . I believe more than ever that the essential ecumenical activity of the Catholic Church should be to live its own life more fully and genuinely . . . As I stated in Chrtiens dsunis, I believe that this presupposes the work of broadening and purication, of reform . . . I believe that this plenitude on the part of Catholicism requires that our thought should have absorbed Orthodoxy, the Reform and Anglicanism. Our Catholicism must be of a post-Reform nature, that is to say the Reform must really exist for it as a problem which has been faithfully faced in depth and has evoked a living process of assimilation, allowing us to embrace any positive elements the Reform presents and to supply an answer to the questions it really raised.45 The third, most speculative, reason for arguing for an evolving continuity of concern amidst variation of articulation and approach in Congars ecumenical writings relates to the role of Mhlers work in his thought. As noted, from the early period of Congars career onwards, Mhler was a key inuence. From the 1930s alone we have ve essays devoted to his work, some expository, others exploring Mhlers constructive signicance for contemporary concerns.46 In this period also we know that Congar wished to start the Unam Sanctam series with a new translation of Mhlers great ecclesiological work, Die Einheit in der Kirche (1825),47 but was unable to do so due to delays with the translation. Reecting back in 1963 he writes: This masterpiece, imperfect like so many masterpieces,
44 Essais cumniques, p. 6, my own translation. 45 Preface, DBC, p. 31; also p. 21 (cf. n. 18 here); The Catholic Church and the Ecumenical Movement, DBC, p. 83. 46 See Yves Congar, La pense de Mhler et lecclsiologie orthodoxe, Irnikon 12 (1935), pp. 3219; La signication cumnique de luvre de Mhler, Irnikon 15 (1938), pp. 11330; Sur lvolution et linterprtation de la pense de Mhler, Revue des sciences philosophiques et thologiques 27 (1938), pp. 205212; LEsprit des Pres daprs Moehler, Supplment la Vie Spirituelle 55 (1938), pp. 125; Lhrsie, dchirement de lunit, in Pierre Chaillet, ed., Lglise est une: hommage Moehler (Paris: Bloud & Gay, 1939), pp. 25569. I am grateful to Flynn, Yves Congars Vision of the Church, for some of these references. 47 ET Johann Adam Mhler, Unity in the Church or the Principle of Catholicism: Presented in the Spirit of the Church Fathers of the First Three Centuries, ed. and trans. Peter C. Erb (Washington, DC: Catholic University of America Press, 1996), henceforth Einheit.
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nevertheless represented remarkably well the character and the spirit of the sort of material I hoped to supply.48 In turn, there are 13 references in Chrtiens en dialogue, with an entire essay inspired by Mhlers Symbolik of 1832.49 For its own part, Diversits et Communion devotes a chapter to Mhlers thinking in Einheit, together with providing a number of other references.50 Here, then, we have an unquestionable line of continuity of inuence. It is with conviction that he could state in 1975: That which Mhler did in the nineteenth century has become for me an ideal by which I wanted to be inspired to guide my own thinking in the twentieth century.51 Indeed, this can be pressed further, in a fashion more directly relevant to the claim for Diversits et Communion giving more developed articulation, in a changed context and within a different conceptual framework, to principles already present in incipient form in Chrtiens dsunis. Here the point is that the use to which Diversits et Communion puts Mhlers Einheit the very volume by which he had placed such store in the years immediately prior to Chrtiens dsunis but to which, interestingly, he there makes no explicit reference is precisely to interrogate the notion of reconciled diversity that Flynn nds to be so seriously divergent from Chrtiens dsunis and to seek to give it appropriate Catholic articulation as, effectively, the kind of principle of dynamic, ecumenically oriented catholicity for which Flynn himself calls. It is further interesting to speculate on the asymmetry between the greater part of Congars explicit writing on Mhler being located in the earliest period of his work, and his most sustained constructive use in direct relation to ecclesiological, ecumenical matters occuring in his latest writings, with no explicit reference at all in Chrtiens dsunis. This cannot be due to an increasing familiarity with and regard for Mhler. If anything, the explicit level of regard and conscious inuence is higher in the earlier phase of Congars work. I suggest that the explanation lies in it having taken time and appropriate circumstance for Congar, self-confessedly neither a speculative nor a systematic theologian, to grow into realizing the full constructive ecclesiological implications of Mhlers thought, faithfully steeped as Congar was in received Catholic self-understanding and modes of thinking even whilst seeking to engage with the ecumenical challenge. Also signicant is the fact that Congar was, in his own words, an occasionalist writer: he wrote in response to specic requests, needs and circumstances, and the
48 49 Preface, DBC, p. 24. See The Encounter between Christian Confessions, DBC, pp. 13559; Preface, DBC, pp. 3, 24, 28; The Call to Ecumenism and the Work of the Holy Spirit, p. 103; Some Reections on the Schism of Israel, p. 169; Historical Considerations on the Schism of the Sixteenth Century, p. 342; Luther as Seen by Catholics, p. 365. For Mhlers Symbolik, see n. 11 here. 50 See D&C, pp. 14952; also pp. 13, 100, 129. 51 Jean Puyo, ed., Une vie pour la vrit: Jean Puyo interroge le Pre Congar (Paris: Centurion, 1975), p. 48, cited in Boersma, Nouvelle Thologie and Sacramental Ontology, p. 42.
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challenges and possibilities they presented. In this regard it is interesting that his work on plurality and diversity in Diversits et Communion was elicited in response to the changed ecclesial and ecumenical context in which he found himself and, most particularly, by the Lutheran articulation of the suggestive notion of reconciled diversity. The suggestion here is that it is not so much that these circumstances, this conceptual frame, prompted an incoherent fresh departure in Congars thinking as that they provided the impetus and stimulation for him to bring to fuller articulation principles and instincts that had long been part of his overall eld of ecumenical concern. So, development we should certainly look for in Congars ecumenical writings, but a development in service of a consistent concern to articulate and live well the catholicity of the church in the ecumenical context, a development, moreover, of which we should expect to be able to nd the rst incipient shoots and indications in even the most dogmatically Roman Catholic of his early ecumenical writings.
Rearticulating catholicity in light of ecumenicity in Divided Christendom

Although he pulls no punches in their execution, in the Preface to the English edition of Chrtiens dsunis Congar expresses his aims in irenic terms: to help enthusiasts for cumenism to understand the Catholic position and its demands and to encourage the general body of Catholics to make some effort to understand the outlook and the positions of the great non-Catholic Christian bodies.52 The emphasis, notably, is on promoting understanding rather than correction. Also interesting is that the historian in him prompts him to note that the analysis of the Christian traditions that these aims imply cannot be pursued successfully at the level of theological constructs and doctrinal tenets alone a weakness, arguably, in much bilateral ecumenism but must deal with the mystery of the Church not only as a fact shown by revelation but as a concrete reality . . . being worked out in human life (p. xiv). In this Congar shows himself a counter-instance to the inuential claim of Nicholas M. Healy that twentieth-century ecclesiology was dominated by conceptual-theoretical modes of proceeding, insufciently rooted in the concrete realities of church life to realize their transformative intent.53 Similarly, he here gives rst indication subsequently emphasized more clearly in various of the essays in Chrtiens en dialogue (see n. 83 here) that he anticipates, to some degree at least, what becomes developed as a core principle of Receptive Ecumenism: that critical and constructive modes of theological analysis, the traditional preserve of historical and systematic ecclesiologists, need to be held together with
52 DC, pp. xiiixiv; also p. 136. All in-text references until further notice are to DC. 53 See Nicholas M. Healy, Church, World, and the Christian Life: Practical-Prophetic Ecclesiology (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), p. 3.
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pragmatic-organizational and other relevant empirical modes of analysis, the traditional preserve of practical theologians and social scientists.54 As was indicated in discussing Jossuas and Flynns readings, the key organizing concept in Chrtiens dsunis is that of catholicity. Here, for all his concern to take seriously the concrete reality of the church, Congar starts out with an avowedly theological perspective essential, he would maintain, to understanding correctly the full identity of the churchs concrete reality. The point is that the church is not understood aright until understood as living with, from, and towards the life of God: The Church is not merely a Society . . . but the divine Societas itself, the life of the Godhead reaching out to humanity and taking up humanity into itself (pp. 489). In this perspective the marks of the church are not rst and foremost empirical properties brought into being by the church but properties of God shared with the church: The oneness of the Church is a communication and extension of the oneness of God Himself (p. 48). Similarly, for all the right and proper emphasis on the quantitative dimension of the churchs catholicity on geographical and temporal extension (pp. 934) it is the qualitative dimension of catholicity the churchs sharing in the universality, the gathering together in one (unus, vertere), of God in Christ (p. 93) that is the prior, necessary cause of the former.55 The churchs ability and impulse to extend over the whole world . . . is in virtue of the universal assimilative capacity of [these] her constituent principles (p. 94). This God-derived, God-impelled, God-oriented catholicity places an intrinsic dynamism at the very heart of the church in the form of the capacity of her principles of unity to assimilate, full and raise to God in oneness with Him all men and every man and every human value.56 As such, The very idea of Catholicity involves the relation of diversity to unity and of unity to diversity (p. 99; also p. 43). In as much, however, as this already exists in Christ as in its rst Principle, the churchs always consequential role is to make this manifest and explicit in the created, historical order, not to bring it into being de nuovo (pp. 967; also pp. 989). The dominant way in which Congar teases out what this consequential dynamic of the churchs catholicity means in practice is in relation to geographical and cultural diversity. He writes, for example, of the necessity for the Church to conform exteriorly to this differentiation and dispersion of humanity (p. 103; also pp. 10813). Again, Granted that Christ is brought to mankind by men, He cannot be truly made our own unless He is preached to every man in his own tongue and by his own kind . . . Therefore in every country the Church has its own background and customs, its own clergy and institutions (p. 106; also p. 107). This embracing of all
54 RE&CCL, pp. xi, xivxv, and Part IV. The Pragmatics of Receptive Ecumenical Learning, pp. 255356; also Paul D. Murray and M.J. Guest, On Discerning the Living Truth of the Church: Theological and Sociological Reections on Receptive Ecumenism and the Local Church, in Chris Scharen, ed., Ecclesiology and Ethnography (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, forthcoming). 55 DC, p. 94; also p. 95; compare de Lubac, Catholicism, pp. 4951. 56 DC, pp. 945; also pp. 97, 98, 101, 114, 252.
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peoples cannot be a matter of absorbing the nations and reducing them to a least common denominator but through their inclusion: supranationalisation rather than denationalisation (p. 109). In this regard he anticipates subsequent initiatives to internationalize the Roman curia by suggesting that the cultural diversity intrinsic to catholicity needs also to be reected in the central organs of unity (p. 105). At other times and of more direct relevance to current concerns he reects on catholic diversity in the context of there being different spiritual temperaments and traditions. In terms, for example, that could have been lifted straight from Mhler, he refers to the contrasting Pauline and Johannine traditions and draws from this the notion of there being in the Church different spiritual families, each spirituality showing varying facets of a common life in Christ.57 Like Mhler, however, he insists that each of these traditions needs to be corrected by and held in communion with each of the others (p. 43). For Congar, as for Mhler, heresy represents precisely the erection into a system of undue or partial emphasis on a particular point of view.58 This notion of differing spiritual temperaments and traditions being held in Catholic communion relates closely both to Congars concern here in Chrtiens dsunis with an appropriately Catholic understanding of ecumenism and to his explorations of reconciled diversity in Diversits et Communion. Whereas, however, in Diversits et Communion he will allow for the possibility of differing traditions bringing something of their characteristic organizational differences, appropriately recongured, into a genuinely reconciled and expanded Catholic communion, here Congar rejects outright Berdyaevs call for a unity that can be accommodated to several forms of confessional organization (p. 107). His assumption is that this would necessarily reduce to the long-term continued existence of parallel separated confessional traditions that are merely spoken of as one but not in any real sense united (pp. 28693; also n. 24 here). As, however, the existence of the Eastern Rite Catholic churches and Catholic religious orders already indicate, this is by no means necessarily the case. It is entirely possible, as Congar himself came to recognize by the time of Diversits et Communion, to think of there being diverse jurisdictions and organizational structures operating alongside each other, all in full reconciled communion with the Bishop of Rome as organ and symbol of unity. Indeed, anything less is to conne the quantitative expression of catholicity to the relatively supercial level of diverse linguistic and cultural expressions and differing spiritual temperaments and traditions being sustained by a uniform organizational structure.59 Without question,
57 DC, p. 43; compare Mhler, Einheit, 35 (pp. 1678). 58 DC, p. 29; also p. 44; compare Congar, Lhrsie, dchirement de lunit (1939), pp. 25569. 59 Compare here the current Catholic reception of Anglican Patrimony through the creation of Ordinariates for groups of Anglican clergy and laity collectively, see Pope Benedict XVI, Anglicanorum Coetibus. Apostolic Constitution Providing for Personal Ordinariates for Anglicans Entering into Full Communion with the Catholic Church (4
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this is the limit of the vision at work in Chrtiens dsunis.60 What this fails to do is to attend imaginatively and in a way that touches on directly ecclesiological matters to the various ways in which the very organizational culture and structures of Catholicism may themselves be capable, indeed requiring, and with all integrity intact, of being expanded, recongured and re-performed in the light of the alternative performance of related matters in other Christian traditions and beyond.61 But all of this is, for now, an exercise in anticipation. Of more immediate relevance is the fact that for all his recognition in Chrtiens dsunis of there being an intrinsic, dynamic diversity to catholicity, he has no truck whatsoever and, I would maintain, continued not to have even in Diversits et Communion with any ecumenism that relinquishes the aim for structural unity in favour of loose mutual recognition and the treating of abiding signicant differences as mere non-essentials.62 Catholic unity is fullness the reconciled unity of all things in Christ not the lowest common denominator of what can be agreed upon without controversy (p. 131). If this is what Congar is up to in Diversits et Communion then we would have to concede to Gabriel Flynn that we do indeed have a real contradiction on our hands. Similarly, it is equally questionable, for Congar, to assume that the unity and catholicity of the church are purely ahead of us, awaiting establishment through ecumenical reconciliation. On the contrary, they already genuinely exist in Christs church, which, reecting Catholic teaching of the time, is to be identied, without qualication, with the Catholic Church.63 Whilst, as we shall see, Congar allows that the catholicity of the church can be enriched and made more manifest through ecumenical reception, it most denitely does not depend upon such reception to be brought into being.64
60
61 62 63 64
November 2009), available at http://www.vatican.va/holy_father/benedict_xvi/apost_ constitutions/documents/hf_ben-xvi_apc_20091104_anglicanorum-coetibus_en.html (accessed 2 April 2011); compare Paul D. Murray, Hands Across the Tiber: Ecumenism in the Wake of Anglicanorum Coetibus, The Tablet (1 January 2011), pp. 1415. See it is also of her [the churchs] essence, in the degree to which she is human, to have an unchangeable organ of unity, DC, pp. 99100. Here Congar repeats the traditional claim for the divine institution of the central organs of Catholic unity without asking if and how their performance might be expanded and revised. See Part III. Receptive Ecumenism and Catholic Church Order, RE&CCL, pp. 179252. See DC, pp. 101, 11631 (particularly pp. 11920). Again, the concern to maintain consistent focus on the goal of full structural and sacramental unity and not to reduce this to mere co-existence is also central to Receptive Ecumenism, see RE&CCL, pp. 9, 1112. See As Catholics we believe that our Church is the Church, DC, p. 26; also pp. 1323, 139, 142, 197, 222, 236, 237, 254, 258. Lastly, . . . though we must insist that the one Church of Christ is something already existing, we believe that we may give an exact and legitimate meaning to the assertion that the reunited Church will be something more rich, more complete, than any existing Christian body . . ., DC, p. 258; also pp. 2536; compare Catholic Learning duly discerned . . . is about becoming more not less Catholic: more fully, more richly Catholic and, hence, more fully, more richly the church of Christ , RE&CCL, p. 18.
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As this suggests and, perhaps, unsurprisingly given the combination of historicalecclesial context in which and personal temperament with which he was working, Congar here espouses a version of the ecumenism of return required by Mortalium Animos in 1928 (see n. 27 here). As he writes: For us, indeed, the Catholic Church is the Church simply and without qualication and consequently reunion must be a return to this one existing Church.65 Along with return, the other words Congar always meticulous over use of words uses to speak of the goal of structural unity all suggest similar: reunion (most frequently), reintegration and reincorporation.66 But it is very much a version of the ecumenism of return that Congar is advocating here (p. 238), one signicantly shorn of the particularly insulting assumption of a one-way process affecting and requiring something only of the traditions currently separated from Rome but without any substantive implications for the Catholic Church itself. Congar is quite clear that there are positive things elements of truth and inalienable Christian values in all the denominational traditions.67 Indeed, it may well be that these elements have been lived and developed in the other traditions in a manner that far outstrips what has been achieved, thus far, within Catholicism and from which, therefore, Catholicism needs to learn and receive. In his own words: it may well be that we have much to learn from our separated brethren in their exemplication of Christian ideas and values which we have perhaps neglected (p. 258). The growth to Christian unity, to restored communion, is not a one-way street: Catholicism itself has much to learn.68 Indeed, without such learning, Catholicism is very denitely the poorer: what is true in, for instance, the Lutheran or Wesleyan experience is, in its Lutheran or Wesleyan setting, a loss to the Catholic Church of to-day (p. 256; also p. 254). As such, receptive ecumenical learning on Catholicisms behalf and for Catholicisms own good is not simply a desirable but a fundamental necessity.69 In this Congar can be seen to anticipate by 28 years the related principle, earlier noted, that would come to formal articulation in Lumen Gentium 8 and Unitatis Redintegratio 56 and that likewise lies at the heart of Receptive Ecumenism (see n. 42 here). All of this serves to qualify very signicantly the sense in which Congar intends to advocate an ecumenism of return in as much as the Catholicism with which he envisages the currently separated traditions being brought into full communion is
65 DC, p. 258; also pp. 46, 238, 252. 66 E.g., for reunion, see pp. 135, 221, 238, 247, 249, 250, 252, 253, 254, 257, 258, 259, 262, 266, 268, 271, 272, 273, 274, 275; for reintegration, see pp. xiv, 45, 46, 188, 252, 253, 255, 256, 266, 267, 271; for reincorporation, see pp. 40, 46, 97, 98, 101. 67 DC, pp. 256 and 135; also pp. 40, 41, 242, 2501, 258. 68 DC, p. 46; also pp. 47, 136, 255, 271; compare Fifty Years of Catholic Theology, p. 31. 69 Congar writes here of the necessity of each to the other and to the Catholicity of the whole, DC, p. 260; again compare: This is the kind of real ecumenical learning we now so urgently need and which will move us closer to nding ourselves in the other, the other in ourselves, and each in Christ. RE&CCL, p. 16.
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itself changed in the process.70 All must grow towards restored communion and intensied catholicity. In this sense, the qualied version of return he retains is not that remarkable. All authentically Catholic ecumenical engagement will, by denition, view restored communion with the Bishop of Rome, even if in necessarily revised form, as one of the abiding gifts that Catholicism has to offer. The language of return breaks down not because there is no appropriate movement towards communion with Rome, appropriately reformed, but because it is a shared journey of growth and renewal that is better gured in terms of moving together to a new place than of return, however qualied, to an existing place or earlier state. Thus far we have been exploring Congars thinking about the relevance of receptive ecumenical learning to the intrinsic enrichment of catholicity. Equally important, for Congar, is the signicance it has for any real ecumenical progress. Without it the other traditions will have no condence that restored communion with Rome can mean anything other than an abandoning of all they hold dear and conformity to the present Catholic state of things. As he writes: So long as reunion with Rome seems to them no more than the absorption of one particular communion in another, and they have the impression that in order to enter the Church they must leave their own special values outside, our separated brethren will remain where they are.71 For this reason, whilst the business of information, refutation, contact and discussion has its useful and necessary place . . . the true cumenical work is the one which the Church carries out by her efforts to realize in all its fullness the grace of her Catholicity (p. 273). As such, Catholic ecumenical commitment must, if serious, work hand in glove with commitment to Catholic reform. He asks, [W]hy should we be scared of that? and continues, The Church is always reforming herself; it is the way she keeps her life (p. 272). Once again we hear clear anticipatory resonance with the semper puricanda of LG 8 and the perennem reformationem of UR 6. But not just any reforming concern will do. In a line that could be an advert for his next great work, his Vraie et fausse rforme dans lglise of 1950, he writes of the need to discriminate between a genuine reform of the Church and a reform based on false principle and inevitably schismatic (p. 186). Consequently, recognizing that God alone can rebuild Jerusalem and gather together the dispersed of Israel yet that He will not do it apart from His creatures, central to such integral Catholic reform and sound ecumenical engagement for Congar must be a peculiar combination of patience and the impulse of a certain graced activism.72 As he writes: While it would be futile to try to picture it to ourselves, planning it beforehand and conducting it as though it were a purely human affair, we can none the less
70 For independent development, compare RE&CCL, pp. 67, 1417. 71 DC, p. 271; also pp. 40, 46, 2501, 259. 72 DC, p. 2; also pp. 135, 24950.
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prepare for it . . . disposing ourselves to be, with the least possible imperfection, instruments of the peace of God.73 A work that starts out, ostensibly, questioning whether there can be any such thing as Catholic ecumenism, ends having identied ecumenical receptivity and associated Catholic reform as central to the full realization of catholicity and as pertaining to the entirety of Christian vocation.
Expanding catholicity through ecumenicity in Dialogue between Christians

Where Chrtiens dsunis originated as a series of lectures, Congars second major work on ecumenism, Chrtiens en dialogue (1964), consists of a collection of occasional pieces stretching from 1935 to 1963. It would be foolish to treat such a collection as a uniform whole. Correspondingly, rather than chart the reprisal of the various themes identied in Chrtiens dsunis, such continuity will merely be indicated and attention focused in the main on points receiving either signicantly more developed or entirely fresh treatment. Whilst taking a more positive stance in regard to Life and Works ecumenism (see n. 62 here), he steadfastly reiterates that the goal of ecumenical activity can be nothing less than full structural and sacramental unity. Although the doctrinal agreement this requires need not equate with uniformity of expression, vague formulas, wide enough to include all opposing views serve no good purpose.74 All such confusionism and syncretism and doctrinal indifferentism is to be rejected.75 Again we hear that in Catholic understanding this desired visible unity of the church does not simply await realization in the future but already genuinely exists in the Catholic Church.76 The more fully realized unity and catholicity that will ow from the overcoming of current divisions will lie along the line of development of the Catholic Church,77 but will also very denitely represent an enrichment and expansion thereof:
73 DC, p. 250; again compare In this perspective, the Christian task is not so much to assert and to construct the Kingdom as to lean into its coming; to be shaped and formed in accordance with it so as to become channels for its anticipatory realization and showing in the world. RE&CCL, p. 11. 74 The Catholic Church and the Ecumenical Movement, DBC, p. 73. 75 The Catholic Church and the Ecumenical Movement, DBC, p. 74 and The Ecumenical Approach, DBC, pp. 1201; also The Catholic Church and the Ecumenical Movement, DBC, p. 72. 76 See The Catholic Church and the Ecumenical Movement, DBC, pp. 74, 76; also The Ecumenical Problem, DBC, p. 115; The Ecumenical Approach, DBC, pp. 11920. 77 The Catholic Church and the Ecumenical Movement, DBC, p. 95; also p. 97.
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Paul D. Murray In this sense it is true to say that after reunion, and thanks to it, the Church will be something more than she is now. She will be more fully catholic, partly because of the contributions of the dissident sects whose secession has left so sad a void in the body of the Church.78
Indeed: We can freely admit . . . that if reunion does take place one day it will be with a Church which differs in some ways from the present conditions of the Catholic Church, different because it will have developed and been puried and reformed in more than one respect.79 As such, right from the very earliest essays in the volume we nd the same distinctly qualied articulation of an ecumenism of return that we found in Chrtiens dsunis.80 As he expresses it in his 1947 paper The Catholic Church and the Ecumenical Movement on the Eve of the Amsterdam Assembly: The idea of submission certainly expresses something incontestably true . . . but it cannot express the whole reality of reunion. It does not express the purication, the development and re-evaluation which must take place on our part to make reunion possible, nor the positive contribution which our separated brethren can bring to reunion.81 As this suggests, once again the distinctive values of the other traditions must not only be respected; we must also, through dialogue, be receptive to them: [E]ach great Christian community has its own particular attributes and values . . . something
78 The Ecumenical Problem, DBC, p. 115. See here also the second quotation at the head of this chapter from The Call to Ecumenism and the Work of the Holy Spirit, DBC, pp. 1045 which leads on to: Beyond the purely confessional and somewhat narrow meaning of that ne name catholic, we shall discover a truer sense of what we are and learn to become all that name implies, to make it a reality rather than a mere label and ourselves become more catholic, more universal. In doing this we shall rediscover parts of our heritage of which we never dreamed. We shall recover that part of our common heritage which our separated brethren retained in parting from us and which they have perceived, developed and lived with greater intensity than we have. (DBC p. 105) 79 80 Compare Congar, Fifty Years of Catholic Theology, p. 56. On the Eve of the Amsterdam Assembly, DBC, pp. 956. The earliest and strongest, yet nevertheless qualied, reference is in his 1935 piece, The Protestants and Us: We believe in the one, holy, catholic and apostolic Church; as the end and purpose of our efforts, we can think of nothing else but the return of our separated brethren to unity through the grace of God. We are convinced, however, that this return presupposes on our part much preparation and rectication . . . We also believe . . . we also have suffered from their recession. (DBC, pp. 2901) 81 DBC, p. 96; also pp. 76, 97; The Ecumenical Problem, DBC, pp. 11415.
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peculiarly its own to say and to give to others.82 Moreover, it is more clearly emphasized that in as much as these values and attributes are matters of life and not simply doctrine, then the required ecumenical attention and receptivity must involve other modes of approach, such as the sociological, than the directly theological alone.83 Similarly, there is again the correlative emphasis on the need for integral Catholic reform and continuing conversion, but this is also given with fresh emphasis. Whilst the achievement of reconciled unity is fundamentally Gods work rather than ours, in which we share with a spirit of active patience,84 the most appropriate way for us to dispose ourselves for this is by taking responsibility for living the calling of our own tradition well: each individuals ecumenical task is in the rst place at home among his own people.85 Also, corresponding to the recognition that unity and catholicity are both extant in the Catholic Church and yet to be realized more fully and that, as such, the Church of eventual reunion . . . lies before both us and our separated brethren,86 there is an intensied emphasis on the eschatological, forwards-looking dimension to
82
The Encounter Between Christian Confessions, DBC, p. 155; also The Ecumenical Problem, DBC, p. 111; Towards a Study of Protestant Sensibility (1938), DBC, p. 311; The Ecumenical Approach, pp. 1278. 83 The Encounter Between Christian Confessions, DBC, p. 158; also pp. 1445; Notes on the Words Confession, Church and Communion , DBC, p. 191. 84 On unity as Gods work, see The Catholic Church and the Ecumenical Movement, DBC, pp. 745; on The Role of Patience, see Preface, DBC, pp. 445. 85 Preface, DBC, p. 21; also p. 31; Introduction, DBC, p. 64; I have always conceived ecumenical work to take place rst in ones own house, in ones own world in Remarks on the Occasion of Receiving the Watson Prize for Ecumenism, Ut Unum Sint, Newsletter of the Dominicans of the Province of Paris (December 1984), cited in Thomas F. OMeara, Reections on Yves Congar and Theology in the United States, U.S. Catholic Historian 17 (1999), pp. 91105. Compare: Receptive Ecumenism is concerned to place at the forefront of the Christian ecumenical agenda the self-critical question, What, in any given situation, can ones own tradition appropriately learn with integrity from other traditions? and, moreover, to ask this question without insisting, although certainly hoping, that these other traditions are also asking themselves the same question. (Murray, Receptive Ecumenism and Catholic Learning: Establishing the Agenda, RE&CCL, p. 12) Also: for this process of overcoming stasis to begin, it requires some to take responsibility, to take the initiative, and this regardless of whether others are ready to reciprocate . . . Similarly, the ethic at work in Receptive Ecumenism is one wherein each tradition takes responsibility for its own potential learning from others and is, in turn, willing to facilitate the learning of others as requested but without either requiring how this should be done, or even making others learning a precondition to attending to ones own. (RE&CCL p. 15) 86 The Catholic Church and the Ecumenical Movement, DBC, p. 95.
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ecumenical aspiration. It proceeds not by a return to the past but by a development which will be a step forward towards the kingdom of God.87 Frequent reference is made to an orientation towards plenitude.88 Here heart can be taken from the achievements thus far so substantial that one can only see in them a wholly new intervention of Gods mercy, the extent of which it is no mans right to limit in advance.89 Signicantly intertwined with this heightened emphasis on the forwards-looking dimension to ecumenical work is the introduction into Congars thought during this period of the category of development. As he states, I have come to a better understanding of the . . . riches and the essential nature of the notion of development.90 It is this that gives him his needed solution of an antinomy . . . at the heart of ecumenical work as to how things can change with integrity intact.91 In turn, this enables him to begin thinking in terms of the possibility of a genuinely theological receptivity rather than one limited, as in Chrtiens dsunis, to the levels of cultural expression and spiritual patrimony. This ability to recognize identity across diversity of form is key, as we shall see, to Congars later attempts to think in terms of doctrinal agreement that does not presuppose uniformity of expression. Perhaps the single most signicant departure in Chrtiens en dialogue relates to the attention Congar gives at various points to the actual character of the required dialogical approach and related matters. As he describes: it is necessary to foster an initial stage of approach in which all apologetic haste is laid aside and we humbly, simply and laboriously make the effort to put ourselves on the plane of this particular spiritual world and attempt to understand it.92 This will require the preparedness both to take the rst step, making oneself vulnerable by gratuitous acts of candour, and to accept the other as other, to admit that he may have some contribution to make and to keep ones mind open to it.93 With this, one needs to take seriously at least the possibility that the others position may be right, or at least that they may have reasons for thinking differently from us which are valid from certain points of view.94
87
88 89 90
91 92 93 94
Historical Considerations on the Schism of the Sixteenth Century, DBC, p. 357; also Ecumenical Experience and Conversion, p. 83; also Ecumenism is a present enterprise which draws its life from a movement towards eschatological realisation. It essays anticipations in history of the full unity in Reality, Reections on Being a Theologian, p. 407. For example, The Catholic Church and the Ecumenical Movement, DBC, p. 97; The Call to Ecumenism and the Work of the Holy Spirit, DBC, p. 104. Historical Considerations on the Schism of the Sixteenth Century, DBC, p. 357. The Catholic Church and the Ecumenical Movement, DBC, p. 96 n. 42; also the Catholic hierarchy has fostered the possibility of genuine development, adaptation and progress, capable of constituting a true development of tradition and not a purely external change, The Catholic Church and the Ecumenical Movement, DBC, p. 78. The Ecumenical Approach, DBC, pp. 1289. The Ecumenical Approach, DBC, p. 128; also First, Understand, DBC, pp. 2978. Introduction, DBC, pp. 567. Introduction, DBC, p. 57; also pp. 578.
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This last point brings us very close to the issues of truth and plurality that come to focus in discussion of Diversits et Communion and the use that is made there of the concept of reconciled diversity. Congars way of handling these matters in Chrtiens en dialogue is essentially to reject a binary logic, wherein positions are either true or false without qualication, and to distinguish between the fact of a belief articulating truth and it articulating such truth in an exhaustively adequate manner. As he puts it: Openness to dialogue necessarily entails an adequate realization that I cannot completely identify what I now hold, and the way in which I hold it, with the absolute truth to which I profess to be dedicated.95 In this regard he employs Thomas Aquinas denition of dogma as a perception of truth tending towards truth itself.96 That is, far from the more qualied understanding of truth-claims that Congar here advocates being complicit in any form of relativism, it is actually impelled by a very strong understanding of truth as always surpassing our current articulations of it.97 This is a plenitudinous understanding of truth rather than a relativistic one. It is not that all truth-claims are made relative by each other but that they are made relative by the plenitude of truth which means that even when they truly express something of such plenitude they can only ever do so in part. The acquisition of truth, he tells us, is a dialectical process: Opponents whose conclusions clash, who take the time to understand each other better and understand themselves better, may come together again at a point at present indeterminate . . . beyond their present positions.98
Seeking catholicity transgured in Diversity and Communion

Diversits et Communion has its origins in a seminar course Congar taught in 1980 in the form, as the French subtitle suggests, of a combination of historical documentation and theological analysis (Dossier historique et conclusion thologique). The integrating focus is to examine whether one can nd a foundation for a pluralist unity or a reconciled diversity, which might be the form in which communion is re-established, in the idea of fundamental articles .99 The context prompting this question was a realization on Congars behalf that further ecumenical progress requires a more constructive approach to the issue of difference and diversity than has frequently prevailed in Christian history.
95 Introduction, DBC, p. 59. 96 Introduction, DBC, p. 60, citing Summa Theologi, IIaII 1.a.6. 97 Introduction, DBC, pp. 601; compare Paul D. Murray, Reason, Truth, and Theology in Pragmatist Perspective (Leuven: Peeters, 2004), particularly pp. 73, 98, 11317. 98 Introduction, DBC, pp. 66 and 58, citing, in the latter regard, Gilsons Reexions sur la controverse S. ThomasS. Augustin, in Etienne Gilson, Mlanges Pierre Mandonnet, I (Paris, 1930), p. 371; also The Ecumenical Approach, DBC, p. 128. 99 D&C, p. 1. Subsequent in-text references are to D&C.
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What he refers to as the polemical approach, of seeking to convince the other, has not succeeded (p. 2). In turn, ironically, ecumenical engagement has, if anything, tended . . . to revive and reinforce . . . the confessional conscience of the various groups rather than help overcome such differences (p. 2). As he later tells us: In the study I have made of attempts at union and dialogues carried on down to the present day, I have been struck by the fact that each side jealously preserves its identity, judges the other by comparison with itself and basically is not very open to that part of the truth with which it is confronted. There is little departure from the confessional.100 For its own part, implicated in this also is the Catholic default to a uniform and hierarchical conception of unity, of a military kind (p. 41). In the terminology of Receptive Ecumenism, Congar here identies the tendency of traditions to focus more on the question as to what they each have to teach their others than on what they themselves have to learn, in such a fashion as leads both to a clearer understanding of respective identities but also to a more entrenched confessional stalemate and this regardless of whether or not relationships and pastoral cooperation have become warmer and easier in the process. In this context, he writes in the conviction that we need to recognize differences as real: that we cannot get to unity by either ignoring them and settling for mere peaceful coexistence (p. 3) or treating them as made irrelevant by aiming for a syncretistic loose federation of Christian traditions regardless of continuing signicant divergences of belief, structure and practice.101 The implication is that the path to unity must be through rather than in spite of difference, by taking differences seriously and asking: what they each respectively actually represent; how fundamental they in fact are; whether it is possible to identify inessential differences; and whether and how it is possible to learn across such differences. As he writes: What is relatively new is the recognition of the other as such. For centuries people have attempted to make others conform to them . . . The new development is marked by an interest in the other precisely where he or she differs (p. 35). Noting that the practice of ecumenical dialogue together with his training as an historian have enabled him to realize the relativity of more than one position, he states his concern as being to examine the possibility of a unity which allows for quite widespread diversity, wherein differences are not necessarily regarded as irreconcilable (p. 3). It is in this context that he rst makes mention of the Lutheran notion of reconciled diversity (p. 4, also p. 149). Rather than looking for the rediscovery or restoration of a supposedly homogeneous unity that has
100 D&C, p. 222 n. 3.The resonance with Mhlers language of egocentric preservation of ones own truth rather than concern to bring it into correlation with the whole is again signicant. 101 D&C, pp. 2, 119; also pp. 34.
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been lost, Congar is in search of a unity which allows of [legitimate] diversity (p. 21), citing, at one point, Pope John Paul II in ofcial support: Unity whether on the universal level or at the local level does not signify uniformity or the absorption of one group by the other. It is rather at the service of all groups, to help each one to give better expression to the gifts which it has received from the Spirit of God.102 With this, he imagines a time in which as most notably came to pass with the formal endorsement of the Joint Declaration on the Doctrine of Justication by the Lutheran World Federation and the Catholic Church in 1999 the authorities concerned should note publicly at the highest level that in certain terms, on particular points, there is no (or there is no longer any) difference (p. 141, also p. 1). As to how we are to understand all of this in relation to a continued concern for doctrinal truth rather than fudge, Congar appeals again to the Thomistic description of dogma, already drawn upon in Chrtiens en dialogue, as a perception of divine truth moving towards the truth itself (p. 40, see n. 96 here). Applying this to the ecumenical context, he notes that each group has only a certain number of experiences and realizes only a part or certain aspects of the truth, and draws the conclusion: If ecumenism is a quest for the purity and the fullness of the truth about God and the mysteries of salvation, it must be specically and supremely a welcoming of differences on the basis of a common point of reference and a common destiny (p. 41). But nor is this a process without limit: There are demands which we cannot surrender (p. 43). Bringing these lines of thought to focus specically in relation to Congars appropriation of the concept of reconciled diversity, all that we have seen leads us to assume with some condence that he will by no means put this to work in such fashion as, in Flynns terms, evades institutional/structural transformation in favour of the harmonious coexistence of separate confessional churches.103 Indeed, at the very outset of his most extended treatment of the concept (pp. 14952) he identies as inaccurate the World Council of Churches tendency to interpret this phrase in support of the vision of a conciliar community of diverse confessional groups, structurally separate yet coexisting alongside each other (pp. 14950). Then, interestingly, he reinforces his rejection of ecumenical federalism wherein each simply agrees to recognize the legitimacy of the others by lengthy citation from an essay from 1938 (one year after the publication of Chrtiens dsunis) by his Jesuit contemporary, Yves de Montcheuil, from a volume to which Congar also contributed, dedicated to exploring the ecclesiological and ecumenical implications of
102 D&C, p. 33, citing Pope John Paul II, Address to a Delegation of the Coptic Orthodox Church (23 June 1979), ofcial text available at http://www.vatican.va/holy_father/ john_paul_ii/speeches/1979/june/documents/hf_jp-ii_spe_19790622_chiesa-coptaortodossa_en.html (accessed 2 April 2011). 103 Flynn, Receptive Ecumenism and Catholic Learning, p. 411 n. 22.
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Mhlers thought.104 Particularly signicant is a balanced pair of principles, each reecting Mhlers inuence, pertaining to the appropriate relation between unity and diversity. First, [I]t is not enough to recognize the right of the other groups to exist: what is needed is to assimilate the truth possessed by each of the others, excluding their exclusiveness. And second, But also . . . there is nothing more contrary to true Christian unity than the quest for unication. This always consists in wanting to universalise one particular form, to endorse life in one of its expressions (p. 150). Taking his leave from de Montcheuil, Congar proceeds with his own discussion of Mhler relative to the notion of reconciled diversity, particularly in relation to Mhlers distinction in Einheit 46 and elsewhere between Gegenstze antitheses or contrasts / distinctions / oppositions and Widersprche contradictions.105 Where Gegenstze are partial expressions of a greater, complex, multifaceted, yet unied truth that require to and can be held in tension in Congars terms, contrasted positions which express different aspects of reality (p. 151) Widersprche are articulated in opposition to each other and allow for no higher resolution. Again, where the catholicity of the church is the embodiment of the Gegenstze, heresy is the natural manifestation and result of the Widersprche.106 Of the Gegenstze Congar writes: When they are held in the living unity of the church which embraces them, each one is corrected by at least a potential openness to the complementary aspect (p. 151). From such ideas Congar takes the notion of a restored unity that is not as he incorrectly takes the Hegelian aufgehoben to imply a attened, uniform reconciliation of contradictions among themselves but a living exchange, a unity of diversity which constitutes an organic totality (p. 151). Viewed in this way, One cannot avoid seeing the church as plenitude (p. 152). In order to corroborate his reading of reconciled diversity as not just a possible Catholic reading but one entirely in accord with recognized Lutheran understanding, Congar includes as an Appendix a series of extracts from a dossier of relevant Lutheran writings sent to him by Harding Meyer (pp. 1538). Here again we nd condemned as agrant misunderstanding the notion that it refers to the persistence of the coexistence of separate confessional groups (p. 156). The point is that reconciliation between the hitherto separated confessions is inconceivable without renewal and change at the heart of the different confessional identities (p. 156). Far from leaving the traditions as they were, with continuing signicant differences covered over by a mood of peaceable coexistence, reconciled diversity, properly understood, presupposes a process that could be described as a redenition of the confessions by dialogue (p. 157). And in words
See Yves de Montcheuil, La Libert et la Diversit dans lUnit, in Chaillet, Lglise est une, pp. 23454. 105 D&C, pp. 1512; compare Mhler, Einheit 46 (pp. 1948); also 48 (pp. 2015); 32 (pp. 15760). 106 Somewhat surprisingly, for his own part de Lubac makes no reference whatsoever to Mhler throughout Catholicism, even in its later editions, although there are a number of places where the resonance is very striking, see e.g. de Lubac, Catholicism, pp. 523, 298, 300, 330.
104
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that provide tting closure here: It is rather a matter of reconciliation and community through the vigorous afrmation of the other with his otherness redened, in a way which shows its legitimacy (p. 157).
Conclusion: abiding orientation and continuing call to the fullness of catholicity

This article started out by establishing that an intrinsic dual relationship exists between ressourcement and ecumenism: on the one hand, twentieth-century Catholic ecumenism was both dependent in general on the renewal in Catholic theology that ressourcement represented and specically dependent on the work of historical and scriptural ressourcement that lay behind many areas of doctrinal progress; on the other hand, ecumenism can itself be seen as a powerful agent of ressourcement and Catholic reform in as much as it served to open Catholicism to the challenge and potential of the diverse particular giftedness of the other traditions. Following this a case was made in favour of there being a fundamental continuity of concern across Congars ecumenical writings, with identiable anticipations in the earlier writings of what were later to become developed emphases. The work of Mhler was suggested as a major thread in this line of continuity. As the reading was pursued, it was noted time and again how Congar can be seen to have anticipated and, in many cases, to have signicantly developed the key principles that come to articulation in Receptive Ecumenism: combining steadfast focus on full structural and sacramental unity as the goal of ecumenism, attentiveness to the lived particularity of the various Christian traditions and their respective areas of giftedness and dysfunction, and the need for each to take responsibility for examining seriously how their respective traditions both can be and need to be renewed, expanded and enriched with dynamic integrity in the light of the other traditions. The nal section focused on demonstrating that the concept of reconciled diversity can be given authentic Catholic articulation, providing a challenging vision of expanded catholicity into which Roman Catholicism still has some considerable way to grow. Taken together with comments made earlier in the article, it might even be possible to imagine a scenario wherein with all necessary doctrinal reconciliation achieved, allowing for appropriate diversity of articulation diverse, but not fundamentally contradictory, organizational systems could operate as sub-sets of transgured and expanded Catholic life: either on the model of religious orders, which operate both under their own trans-diocesan organizational systems and under the ordinary jurisdiction of the diocese in which they serve, or on the model of the Eastern Rite churches in full communion with Rome wherein episcopal jurisdiction can operate either on a traditional geographical-territorial model or, in non-Orthodox countries, on a trans-diocesan basis according to afliation.
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A major gap in this article is that whilst focusing on the broad principles of Congars ecumenical thinking across the course of his writing, there has not been opportunity to engage the detail of any of the many specic areas of Catholic theology and life on which he shone the light of integral renewal: the overcoming of a hierocratic church, the vocation of the laity, the understanding of ministry and that of the ordained, and many more.107 These and others most notably the exercise of the ofce of the Bishop of Rome, the appointment of bishops, the structures of decision making and accountability, the relationship between lay and ordained still stand today as the unnished business of Catholic renewal, essential alike both to intrinsic Catholic ourishing and to ecumenical progress. I close by suggesting that the most tting tribute to Congar both in thought and deed is to commit to engaging these and other such specics with the same combination of rigour, courage, delity and active patience that he so exemplied and to do so, as rst step, by collating and assessing his own relevant contributions as also those of the other great ressourcement theologians and theological fellow travellers along with those of the ecumenical dialogues. He continues to help us be responsible both to the inherited past of our tradition and for its future. His is an exemplary performance of what it means to live and work for Catholic plenitude in ecumenical perspective and amidst ecumenical potential.
107
For authoritative treatment, see Flynn, Yves Congars Vision of the Church.
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Expanding Catholicity Through Ecumenicity in The Work of Yves Congar: Ressourcement, Receptive Ecumenism and Catholic Reform

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Expanding Catholicity Through Ecumenicity in The Work of Yves Congar: Ressourcement, Receptive Ecumenism and Catholic Reform

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International Journal of Systematic Theology Volume 13 Number 3 July 2011 doi:10.1111/j.1468-2400.2011.00580.

Expanding Catholicity through Ecumenicity

2011 Blackwell Publishing Ltd

Ressourcement and Catholic ecumenism

Expanding Catholicity through Ecumenicity

Expanding Catholicity through Ecumenicity

Expanding Catholicity through Ecumenicity

2011 Blackwell Publishing Ltd

Expanding Catholicity through Ecumenicity

In search of coherence in Congars ecumenical vision

Expanding Catholicity through Ecumenicity

Expanding Catholicity through Ecumenicity

Expanding Catholicity through Ecumenicity

Rearticulating catholicity in light of ecumenicity in Divided Christendom

Expanding Catholicity through Ecumenicity

Expanding Catholicity through Ecumenicity

Expanding Catholicity through Ecumenicity

Expanding catholicity through ecumenicity in Dialogue between Christians

Expanding Catholicity through Ecumenicity

2011 Blackwell Publishing Ltd

Expanding Catholicity through Ecumenicity

Seeking catholicity transgured in Diversity and Communion

Expanding Catholicity through Ecumenicity

Expanding Catholicity through Ecumenicity

Conclusion: abiding orientation and continuing call to the fullness of catholicity

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