Journal of a Theologian 1946-1956
YVES CONGAR, TRANS.  DENIS MINNS

Yves Congar, the French Dominican scholar who played a key role in drafting texts for the bishops at the Second Vatican Council, died in June 1975 in the Hôpital des Invalides, the hospital in Paris for disabled war veterans. A few months earlier, he had been made a cardinal by Pope John Paul II  – “Trop tard”, as Congar reportedly said.  This substantial collection of the autobiographical notes that he made during the saddest decade of his life has been splendidly translated by the Australian Dominican Denis Minns. It includes a reflective foreword by the American Dominican Thomas J. O’Meara and a scene-setting introduction by Étienne Fouilloux, the leading historian of twentieth-century French Catholicism, who also provides some enjoyably dry footnotes.

Congar’s notes are grouped in eight sections: (i) an account of the origins in 1932-34 of his desire to work for Christian unity; (ii) a visit to Rome in May 1946, reflecting enthusiasm for the immediately post-war vitality of French Catholicism; (iii) accumulating frustrations on the ecumenical front; (iv) hostility to his book Vraie et fausse réforme dans l’Église (Congar seemingly never understood that, while we would settle at Vatican II for “renewal”, most Catholics back in 1950 could not deal with “reform” in the Church); (v) the dismissal by the master of the order in 1954 of the French Dominican leadership, for their support of the worker-priests, largely at the behest of the French bishops; (vi) the three months in 1954/55 that Congar was kept hanging about in Rome waiting for a condemnation by the authorities of his ecumenical ideas (which never happened); (vii) his participation as an elected delegate in the Dominican general chapter in Rome at which the Irish Dominican Michael Browne was elected master; and finally (viii) the depressing story of Congar’s exile with the English Dominicans in Cambridge and his meeting there with Browne.