Yves Congar, True and False Reform, Part 2, True Reform by Returning to Tradition

Today we will learn and reflect on the second section
of Yves Congar’s book, True and False Reform.
True reform seeks to return to the sources, the
sources of our tradition, the sources of our faith, true
reform recovers the truths that have been forgotten.

Yves Congar reflects: Who were the successful reformers? Who were the
divisive reformers? Successful reformers are those reformers who respect
the tradition of the church, whose reforms seek to return the church to
its ancient traditions recently forgotten, to return to the ancient sources
of the faith. These successful reformers include St Francis of Assisi, and St
Thomas Aquinas, and he contrasts them with reformers who broke with
the church, including Peter Waldo and Luther, while being careful to
acknowledge when these divisive reformers did provide valuable spiritual
and practical insights.
The first video reflected on the first part of his book on finding common
ground, and we reflected on the true reforms that are true to the
traditions of the church.

At the end of our talk, we will discuss the sources
used for this video. Feel free to follow along in the
PowerPoint script we uploaded to SlideShare. Please,
we welcome interesting questions in the comments.
Let us learn and reflect together!

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Yves Congar, True and False Reform, & Pope John XXIII

It is helpful to review an outline of what Yves Congar
discusses in this second section:

Part Two. Conditions for Authentic
Reform Without Schism
Understanding the Problem.
• First Condition: The Primacy of
Charity and of Pastoral Concerns.
We should love our fellow
Christian, and address him in
charity and kindness, respecting his
beliefs, although when we believe
they are wrong.
• Second Condition: Remain in
Communion with the Whole Church
• Third Condition: Be Patient With
Delays.
• Fourth Condition: Genuine Renewal
Through Tradition, and Not Through
Novelties

Part 2. Authentic Reform Without Schism

PART 2. CONDITIONS FOR AUTHENTIC REFORM
WITHOUT SCHISM, UNDERSTANDING THE PROBLEM.
The first successful reformer, though we do not ordinarily
think of him as a reformer, was St Francis of Assisi. Early in
his ministry, he led his small band of mendicant followers
to Rome, where he sought the blessing of Pope Innocent
III. St Francis always insisted on working within the
church, teaching more by example than exhortation,
always respecting the authority of the church.

Pope Innocent III
approving the
statutes of the Order
of the Franciscans, by
Giotto, 1295–1300

Yves Congar quotes from Lacordaire’s Life of St
Dominic when he compares Peter Waldo to the
two great Catholic saints of his day. Like St
Francis, Peter Waldo lived a life of holy poverty,
but he was condemned as a heretic when he
broke away from the Catholic Church. “How
small is the difference between the way great
men think and the way public nuisances think.
If Peter Waldo had more virtue and genius, he
might have been a St Francis or St Dominic. But
he gave in to a temptation that has spoiled
people of great intelligence throughout history.
He thought it was impossible to save the
church through the church.” 1868 statue of Peter Waldo at the
Luther Memorial in Worms, Germany

Yves Congar sees in the early Luther “an
insight whose richness includes some
ambiguity, and that this ambiguity exists not
only with Luther before his break with the
church but also to some extent with
Augustine and the Augustinian tradition.” The
break with the church was forced at the Diet
of Worms, where the theologians refused to
debate with Luther, they simply stacked his
books on a table and gave him a choice,
RECANT, or be placed under a death sentence.
After thinking about it overnight, Luther
delivered his famous short speech, “Here I
stand, I can do no other. God help me.”
Martin Luther as an Augustine Monk,
Lucas Cranach the Elder, after 1546

Luther, and especially Calvin and
succeeding Protestant reformers,
criticized the ornate rituals of the
mass and the sacraments as being
merely works that do not lead to
salvation. This is certainly a spiritual
danger, but as Yves Congar notes,
“it was a tragic excess on Luther’s
part, from which Protestantism has
never totally escaped, to consider
every ‘form’ as an expression of a
‘letter’ that inevitably betrays the
spirit,” referring to 2 Cor 3:6: “For
the letter (of the law) kills, but the
Spirit gives life.”

Yves Congar warns, “the
possibilities for self-criticism
in the church practically
dried up following the
excessive criticisms of Luther
and the attacks of Voltaire,”
the French philosopher who
paved the way for the
French Revolution.
Martin Luther Translating the Bible, Wartburg
Castle, 1521, by Eugène Siberdt, 1898

I was brought up and confirmed a Lutheran, and in my
youth, I decided to read Luther’s works in the original
rather than in friendly summaries. I was appalled at how
Luther constantly called the Pope names, sometimes
vulgar names. The polemic battles were so heated that
the Catholic Church was forced to dig a moat around the
church and fill it with alligators, and this defensive
attitude persisted until the Second Vatican Council.

Another theologian who was also influential at Vatican II
and who reminds me of Martin Luther was Hans Kung.
Like Luther, Hans Kung was brilliant, and was an amazing
prolific writer who wrote multiple thousand-page books
of captivating and engaging prose, but his brilliance got
the better of him, he got the sense that he alone
possessed the vision to guide the church into a new age.
What was worse was he insisted on holding press
conferences where he, in essence, railed at the church for
not listening to him. Even his friendship with the future
Pope Benedict XVI could not save him.

Primacy of Charity and Pastoral Concerns

PART 2. FIRST CONDITION: THE PRIMACY OF CHARITY
AND OF PASTORAL CONCERNS
Yves Congar provided the narrative for the calling of the
Second Vatican Council, this would not be a condemning
council, quick to issue anathemas against the enemies of
the church; rather, this would be a pastoral council, the
Catholic Church reaching out to the world with charity,
compassion, and brotherhood. As Yves Congar notes,
“Successful reforms are motivated by pastoral concerns,”
reform is not an intellectual endeavor, but seeks to enrich
the spiritual and moral life of all the faithful.

A procession of
Cardinals enters St.
Peter's in Rome,
opening the Second
Vatican Council.
Painting by Franklin
McMahon

This can be seen in the
reforms after the Council of
Trent. These reforms were
both theological and pastoral;
first, there was an “enormous
effort addressed to
apologetics and theology to
counter the Reformation, and
there was a great pastoral
effort to encourage religious
renewal aiming at holiness,”
these pastoral efforts
continued, becoming part of
the Catholic tradition.

Yves Congar admits that
Protestants also had a pastoral
concern for their flock,
“everything great and fertile”
from the theology of Karl
Barth derived from his simple
question as a young pastor,
“What should I preach and
how should I preach to the
faithful on Sunday?”

Yves Congar recalls a rule of reform
set down by Mohler, “The Christian
shouldn’t try to perfect Christianity,
but rather desire to perfect himself in
Christianity.” Yves Congar teaches us,
“For the reformer who wants to
remain in harmony with the Catholic
communion, the church has to
remain a given, not only intellectually
but also existentially. The reformer
can never step outside the church to
judge it, but can only remain
committed within its existing
conditions, especially if there is need
for some dimension of reform.”

Yves Congar quotes Pope Pius XI, the pope
who signed the Lateran Treaty with
Mussolini creating the Vatican City, serving
until the eve of World War II, “Every true
and lasting reform had its point of
departure in holiness, by those who were
inflamed and impelled by the love of God
and neighbor. Generous, ready to listen to
every call from God and to respond
immediately within themselves, and yet
sure of themselves because of their
vocation, they grew to become true lights
and sources of renewal for their time.”

Pope Pius XI continues, “By contrast,
where the zeal of the reformer did
not arise from personal purity, but
was the expression and the
outburst of passion, it was a source
of disturbance rather than
illumination, destructive rather
than instructive, and more than
once the source of distortions more
damaging than the evils to which
they claim to remedy.”

Remain in Communion With Whole Church

PART 2. SECOND CONDITION: REMAIN IN
COMMUNION WITH THE WHOLE CHURCH

Yves Congar opens this chapter with a
quote from Mohler, “no one can live a
Christian life, or be at home in their
religion, without the influence of the
community of the faithful enlightened
by the Holy Spirit.” The apostles only
received the Holy Spirit when they
were “gathered in the same place,
with one heart, forming a single
gathering of brothers.” Reformers
cannot reform alone.
Pentecost, Museo Del Prado

Yves Congar teaches us, “The scholar or
reformer who, while affirming a particular
aspect of truth, clings to the desire not to deny
other aspects and to remain in communion with
all the others in the church, remains Catholic. By
contrast, the scholar or reformer who insists on
‘being himself,’” “risks falling into schism. When
St Ignatius of Loyola published his Exercises,
which were a novelty at the time, he appended
to them ‘Rules of Orthodoxy,’ which testified to
his concern to keep his initiative in communion
with the church.”
St Ignatius of Loyola's Vision of
Christ, by Domenichino, 1622

Yves Congar teaches us, “Communion
will always mean not something
servile or mechanical, but a living
relation to the apostolic authority
given by the Lord to structure his
church, both at the local and the
universal level. By this very fact,
communion means a kind of
submission that is neither servile nor
mechanical, but enthusiastic, loving,
and simple, like the acquiescence of
children. The Catholic Church has
always seen pride and self-
centeredness in the perpetrators of
schism or heresy.”

Yves Congar observes, “If people were always
required to conform themselves to the actual
state of theological thinking, church practice,
spirituality, and administration of the church,
there would never be adaptation, reform, or
progress. We would never have had religious
orders, frequent Communion, devotion to the
Sacred Heart, the Summa Theologiae, Catholic
Action, missionary renewal,” “or any other
moments of church renewal that fill history.”
“These innovations are taken for granted today,
they are no longer daring, they have become a
sacred tradition.”
Yves Congar laments, “it is so tragic that so
many great minds believe they could be
faithful to the truth only by clinging to their
own interpretation, rather than to
interpretation of the church.” Pope Paul VI presiding over the introductory ingress
of the council, Cardinal Alfredo Ottaviani

PART 2. THIRD CONDITION: BE PATIENT WITH DELAYS

Reformers are by nature impatient, but the
impatience of reformers endangers their reforms. Yves
Congar agrees, “Reformers always have a tendency
not only to initiate things but also to rush their
development. They not only want to clean up the
field; they want to free it of every weed. The Gospel
parable of the wheat and the weeds, however, exhorts
us to respect the period of waiting until the harvest
for the growth of the seeds. It exhorts us not to
anticipate the harvest with impatient efforts to clean
things up, lest ‘in gathering the weeds you would
uproot the wheat along with the weeds.’”
A saying from Christian Africa was that “Christ didn’t
say, ‘I am custom,’ but ‘I am truth.’ No matter how old
or widespread a custom may be, it has to give way to
truth.”
The Enemy Sowing Tares, by John Everett Millais, 1865

Yves Congar is both sympathetic and critical
towards Luther, he mentions him often. But his
insight here provides lessons for many.
“Unquestionably, Luther was a theological genius,
but he allowed himself to be guided and finally
ruined by polemic,” like calling the Pope names.
“Luther allowed himself to be pushed into
becoming the founder of a church and into
rethinking the meaning of Christianity all by himself.
The fatal logic of his position was this: he had to
reinvent Christianity not with the whole church and
within it, but against the church and against the
integrity of its tradition.” But we must admit his
hand was somewhat forced by the heavy-
handedness of the Catholic leaders of his time.

Yves Congar observes, “Those responsible for the
administration of an organization don’t like
things to be called into question. Novelty always
looks dangerous to them and reformers
inopportune, indeed troublesome. In fact, the
impatience of reformers often enough risks
spoiling everything. The impatience of reformers
doesn’t take account of the delays needed for
transformation to take place,” in fact,
impatience could cause the “organization to self-
destruct, since the best sometimes is the enemy
of the good. The church is decidedly in favor of
the good, and only welcomes the better if it
builds up more than it risks breaking down.”

An excellent secular example of the need for
reformers to show patience is when the Supreme
Court issued the order to desegregate schools in
1954, Brown v Board of Education, when it declared
that this decision should be implemented “with all
deliberate speed.” They knew it would take years of
effort and litigation to persuade the Deep South
segregationists to allow black children into the
public schools, they also knew that the more they
rushed the reform, the greater the violence.

Nine students leave Central High, Little Rock,
Arkansas, under U.S. Army escort, 1957

Genuine Renewal Through Tradition

PART 2. FOURTH CONDITION: GENUINE RENEWAL
THROUGH TRADITION, AND NOT THROUGH NOVELTIES
Yves Congar is not a radical reformer, his idea of reform is
to return to the sources, return to tradition, return to the
core of the faith as expressed in the early church.

Yves Congar: there are only two types of renewal:
• Reforms formed in the minds of men, a new
novel ideology that is novel and schismatic, a
novelty that can bring disunity to the church.
• Reforms formed by men reflecting on the mind
of God, reforms that seek to renew the core of
the Christian faith, “a genuine renewal that is a
reform in and of the church, a reform without
schism,” where the “reformer works within the
church.” To bring about genuine reform without
schism, “we must study Catholic Tradition and
not turn to masters foreign to the Tradition.”
“Catholicity is like the branches of a great tree
receiving life from the unity of its trunk;
catholicity is not like a mound of cut branches
scattered in a pile around the trunk of the tree.” St Francis receives stigmata, El Greco, 1614

One of Yves Congar’s other groundbreaking works
published in 1960 that influenced the Second
Vatican Council was his book, Meaning of Tradition.

https://youtu.be/f0gQ_Y9tROo
Tradition is alive, Yves Congar emphasizes that “tradition
does not mean ‘routine,’ no more than it means something
‘in the past.’ Of course, tradition has an aspect of the past;
it is the treasury of texts and realities from the church’s
past. But tradition is also much more than that.”

https://youtu.be/f0gQ_Y9tROo
Tradition is the continuity of development from the initial gift of the
church, “Scripture, the thoughts of the Fathers, the faith, the liturgy, or
the prayer of the whole church,” the church fathers and theologians
over the ages, “the development of piety and doctrine, and finally,
leading to the thinking and development of the actual church. That
means today’s church is perpetually seeking to express its faith in praise
and contemplation,” “all under the guidance of the magisterium.”

Genuine reform, “returning to
tradition,” “means earnestly
studying the very sources of
Catholicism.” “To return to
principles, to ‘go back to the
sources,’ means to rethink our
current situation in the light and
spirit of everything that the
integrity of tradition teaches us
about the meaning of the church.”
St Francis Xavier preaching and
healing, by Peter Paul Rubens

Reform is an intellectual effort, as we
genuinely reflect on the core teachings
of the church, which takes study, but it
is also much more than an intellectual
effort. Yves Congar teaches us, “Reform
is a renewal of life.” Without this
personal renewal leading to living a
godly life, a reform effort, even when it
is focused on “an intellectual return to
the sources and a recentering, will not
possess a spirit of evangelizing or the
fullness of authenticity and efficacy.”
St Francis in Meditation, by Lodovico Carracci, 1580s

Yves Congar provides an example of a reformer who
successfully brought modern ideas into the church
according to these guidelines. St Thomas Aquinas, who
was modern in his time, and controversial, “introduced
Aristotle into theology without violating either Catholic
dogma or the spirit of evangelization,” because he
profoundly understood and respected Catholic tradition.
Yves Congar also has an extended discussion of the
successes and shortcomings when Catholicism encounters
Modernism in recent times.

St Thomas
Aquinas, by
Luis Muñoz
Lafuente,
1795
St Thomas
Aquinas, by
Carlo Crivelli,
1476

Cardinal Ratzinger, future Pope Benedict XVI, and Yves Congar
Successful reforms bring to life
aspects of our long Christian
tradition that have been forgotten
or neglected. Yves Congar teaches
us, “a genuine development of
tradition with all that implies, a
return to deep sources,
discernment and purification, a
balanced and fully spiritual
communion, this transcends the
efforts of one person or team, it
must be the work of a generation.”
Reformers must inspire others to
persevere; otherwise, there is no
genuine reform.

Church in Contact With Deepest Traditions

THE CHURCH NEEDS TO LIVE IN CONTACT WITH ITS
DEEPEST TRADITION
Yves Congar endured a decade where the top Vatican II
officials tried to silence him, when he was forced into
physical and spiritual exile and quietude, but yet he
neither left the church, nor did he call press conferences
to protest his treatment, as Hans Kung would later do.
Even during these dark times, he respected the authority
of the church, showing charitable forbearance and
patience.

Yves Congar had been patiently
enduring criticism for a few years
when he reflects that “in the process
of discernment and purification, by
way of returning to the depth of
principles, this moment of checkmate
or even of condemnation” by church
authorities “plays an important role
that can be positive, despite
appearances.” These church
authorities have an immense flock of
souls they must guard, they are
properly not eager to welcome
criticism and all calls for reform.
Good shepherd, Tadeusz Makowski, 1918

But the church must not plug its ears
for calls to reform, although she is
justified by her initial reticence. Yves
Congar teaches us that this initial
refusal of “novelty does not reduce
the church’s overwhelming duty to
keep itself deeply in contact with its
tradition. This means contact not
only on the surface and according to
the letter of the law but also in
depth and according to the reality of
the progressive change that gives
this tradition its full meaning.”
Yves Congar, Vatican II Council, 1964

Although the Pius popes were resistant to
Modernism, in their own ways they also advanced
reforms that helped prepare the church for the
Second Vatican Council. Pope Gregory XVI, who died
in 1846, famously forbid the building of trains in the
Vatican, saying “road of iron, rod of hell,” but
construction of a railroad connecting Vatican City to
the rest of Italy was made possible by the 1929
Lateran Treaty signed by Pope Pius XI and Mussolini.

Pope Pius IX,
successor to Pope
Gregory XVI, on the
new papal train.

Pope Leo XIII had issued the progressive Rerum Novarum
encyclical on the rights of the laborer under capitalism,
strengthening the social justice doctrine. He was
succeeded by the reactionary Pope Pius X, who
condemned Modernism, restricting how scholars could
interpret Scripture, and mandating that theologians and
Catholic professors could only teach the “safe” doctrines
of St Thomas Aquinas. But he also reformed the church
when he encouraged the faithful to partake of the
Eucharist more frequently, even weekly, and lowered the
age of first communion from twelve to seven.

Pius X in his
study while
receiving a
portraiture.

Yves Congar says this about
Pope Pius X, “By putting
conservative piety back at the
center of Christian life,
resuscitating the church once
again on the soil of primitive
dogma and insisting on this for
the interior life, the Pope is
actually clearing the way for a
future assimilation of useful
aspects of modern culture.”

Rehabilitating Yves Congar, Henri de Lubac

Yves Congar did not show any rancor after he and Henri
de Lubac were rehabilitated and asked to be consultors to
the Preparatory Commission to Vatican II. Initially they
were somewhat ignored by the reactionary chair of the
commission, Cardinal Ottaviani, and wondered whether
they were wasting their time. They did not realize that
they were there at the direct intervention of Pope John
XXIII; wisely, nobody told them this was the case, and
wisely the pope did not interfere with the workings of the
commission.

Yves Congar remembers talking to the
chairman of the Preparatory Commission
for the first time:
“I waited a long time to talk to Cardinal
Ottaviani. The cardinal said at once that my
report had provoked criticism: ‘Why could I
not keep in line?’ He said I was intelligent
and learned, and my book on Reform has
some very fine pages,” and other pages that
were not so much. Ottaviani asked, “Why
must one always point out the weaknesses
of the Church? By doing so, one
undermines confidence in the hierarchy
and the Magisterium.”

Although Yves Congar was respectful, he
held his ground, defending his views. Yves
Congar responded that “he had no
intention of undermining respect in the
hierarchy, but that the Church ought to at
least think about herself: if she were giving
herself completely to the service of the
Gospel, all authority would flow to her.”
The cardinal responded, “the bishops, the
priests, the professors in the seminaries, do
nothing but serve.”

Yves Congar said that “he had noticed
and deplored a breach between the
theology one expresses and the Christian
people.” The church is not only ceremony,
“The church is FOR THE PEOPLE.”
The cardinal responded that “it was a
question of pastoral care,” then he said
something about catechesis that Congar
could not follow, and Congar remembers
“that the conversation left me somewhat
dismayed.”

Everything that Cardinal Ottaviani said was reaffirming
what Yves Congar has said in this section of the book, but
the cardinal was accusing him of not believing it, or
maybe the accusation was that he did not say it.
What makes this exchange so poignant was that Cardinal
Ottaviani was likely involved in the persecution of
progressive reformers like Congar for close to a decade.
Nearly all the leading theologians at the Council had been
under interdict.

John O’Malley in his reflections on the sessions of
Vatican II tells how the bishops humbled Cardinal
Ottaviani in the first session, refusing to rubber-
stamp the often reactionary first drafts of the
commission, and eagerly listened to the lectures by
Congar and Lubac and other progressive
theologians, so Ottaviani was compelled to be the
one showing humility and deference.

Ottaviani (second from right) at the signing of the Reichskonkordat in 1933, the Concordat with Nazi Germany

In our next video, we will reflect on Yves Congar’s
concluding remarks in his final section, and then we
will reflect on Pope John XXIII’s speech opening the
Second Vatican Council, and the themes it shares
with Congar’s book, True and False Reform.

DISCUSSION OF THE SOURCES
We found True and False Reform to be very readable, but you need some
patience and dedication, Yves Congar was not writing for a mass
audience, but was writing for fellow priests and academics. If you were a
scholar wanting to precisely assess how this ground-breaking book
influenced the Second Vatican Council, you would want to examine the
first edition of this book published in 1950, comparing it to the second
edition printed in 1967, which we used for this video.
We found the discussion between Yves Congar and Cardinal Ottaviani in
the published diary kept by Yves Congar during the council, which
documents his perspective of the evolution of the views in the Council.
We also have a book review video on our sources for our videos on the
history and decrees of Vatican II.

To find the source of any direct
quotes in this blog, please type in
the phrase to the search box in
my blog to see the referenced
footnote.
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