Mary on the Eve of the Second Vatican Council

John C. Cavadini, Danielle M. Peters, John C. Cavadini, Danielle M. Peters

• Publisher: University of Notre Dame Press
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9780268101619
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Christian Theology

The Blessed Virgin Mary is uniquely associated with Catholicism, and the century preceding the Second Vatican Council was arguably the most fertile era for Catholic Marian studies. In 1964, Pope John Paul VI published the Dogmatic Constitution on the Church, or Lumen Gentium (LG), the eighth chapter of which presents the most comprehensive magisterial teaching on the Blessed Virgin Mary. As part of its Marian Initiative, the Institute for Church Life at the University of Notre Dame invited scholars to a conference held at Notre Dame in October 2013 to reflect the rich Marian legacy on the eve of the Second Vatican Council.

The essays unanimously stress that the Blessed Virgin Mary is not merely a peripheral figure in Christian faith and in the panorama of theology. More than fifty years after Lumen Gentium, students of theology as well as Marian devotees take their bearings from this document in order to promote the person of Mary and the study of Mariology, as well as grow in authentic Marian piety. This book will have great appeal to students and scholars of Catholic theology and history, particularly those interested in Mariology.

Contributors: Ann W. Astell, Peter Casarella, John C. Cavadini, Lawrence S. Cunningham, Brian Daley, S.J., Peter J. Fritz, Kevin Grove, CSC, Msgr. Michael Heintz, Matthew Levering, Danielle M. Peters, James H. Phalan, CSC, Johann G. Roten, S.M., Christopher Ruddy, Troy Stefano, and Thomas A. Thompson, S.M.

RESSOURCEMENT THEOLOGIANS AND RESPONSE

CHAPTER 4

“A Very Considerable Place in the Mystery of Christ and the Church”?

Yves Congar on Mary

CHRISTOPHER RUDDY

It must be admitted from the outset: Mary plays a marginal role in Yves Congar’s theology, one more corrective than constructive (or, at most, constructive by way of correction). Of his nearly one thousand publications from 1924 to 1967, for instance, Mary figures prominently in fewer than twenty—the most significant of which were a short book and a handful of articles published largely between 1950 and 1955.¹ Such massive, influential works as True and False Reform in the Church or Lay People in the Church make virtually no substantial reference to Mary, to the point that it is nearly impossible to imagine someone writing a book on the “Marian profile” of Congar’s ecclesiology, as has been done regarding that of Hans Urs von Balthasar.² And when one considers his sustained, even violent, polemic against the “galloping Mariology” that he held to have afflicted much of the Catholic life and thought of his era,³ one might reasonably wonder what good might come from a closer examination of his thought on Mary. Where does one go after reading passages from his personal journals such as the following, written after a discussion in September 1963 with the Belgian Cardinal Leo Suenens, one of the Second Vatican Council’s four moderators: “The mariological zelanti would like ‘to add new flowers’ to Mary’s crown. This maximizing theology is not healthy. IT WOULD BE MUCH BETTER TO DO NOTHING.”⁴ Or this comment, in response to a Spanish bishop’s conciliar intervention on Mary: “IDIOCIES: a combination of verbalism, abstract dialectic and sentimentalism.”⁵

And yet Congar’s writings on Mary, secondary as they may be, merit exploration because they help to shed light on the mystery of Christ and the Church, offer a window into Congar’s own life and thought, and help us understand the historical and theological movements that shaped twentieth-century Catholicism, especially in relation to Vatican II. Congar identified three different Marian “periods” in his life: (1) the period of the “simple” devotion of his youth and early religious life, which saw him writing “Ave” at the top of his papers, as did Aquinas, he notes with perhaps some defensiveness; (2) the period of his struggle against a “galloping Mariology,” a period that overlapped with Pius XII’s pontificate; and (3) a “third stage” from the 1960s onward, marked by his standing in the “mainstream” of Catholic and ecumenical theology.⁶ This chapter, befitting a book about a conference on Mary on the eve of the Second Vatican Council, focuses on the second of these periods, wherein Congar labored against an untethered Mariology, even a Mariolatry, and for an integrated, ecumenical Mariology situated firmly in the twinned saving mysteries of Christ and his Church. One can only smile, in this context, when one reads the full title of the eighth and concluding chapter of Lumen Gentium: “The Blessed Virgin Mary, Mother of God, in the Mystery of Christ and the Church.”

I proceed in three steps. First I look at Congar’s critique of a maximalist Mariology and his counterpointed effort to develop a more balanced, soteriological theology of Mary. Second I examine his correction of the Marian “minimalism” that he saw as characteristic of Protestantism, particularly in its Barthian, neoorthodox strains. Finally I consider the achievements and legacy of Congar’s Mariology, taking into account our sometimes markedly different contemporary ecclesial and theological context.

CONGAR’S CRITIQUE OF A MAXIMALIST MARIOLOGY

Congar wrote: “I saw [during a September 1961 meeting of the Council’s Preparatory Theological Commission] the drama which I have experienced all my life. The need to fight, in the name of the Gospel and of the apostolic faith, against a development, a Mediterranean and Irish proliferation, of a Mariology which does not come from Revelation, but is backed up by pontifical texts.”⁷ Congar’s Mariology unfolded largely in the clash between two theological approaches: an isolated maximalism and an economic-soteriological integration. This conflict took place on the level of both method and doctrine. Methodologically, Congar’s thought was marked by a sustained polemic and argument against what he called a “separated Mariology”⁸ in which theologians considered Mary apart from economic or soteriological concerns and considered Mariology as a separate branch of theology. He held that such separation was inseparable from a broader “movement which isolated mediations and magnified them to excess.” The pope was isolated from the college of bishops; religious from other believers on account of their purportedly greater call to holiness; and priests from their people, both liturgically and culturally.⁹

In Congar’s view, this isolation had medieval roots, stretching back to the eighth century. Most broadly, it dovetailed with the rise of Scholasticism and dialectic. Dialectical Scholasticism studied things “not so much in a total synthesis, according to their meaning and relationships, as in themselves, in their nature and their own contours; then [it sought] to analyze the nature and the properties of each thing thus considered in itself and for itself.”¹⁰ Scholasticism, Congar writes, was an intellectual advance, prioritizing “analytical knowledge, explicit and precise, according to a somewhat Cartesian ideal.”¹¹ But he also notes its flaws. First it gave rise to separated theological treatises on Mary and on the Church especially, which formerly had been integrated, as with Aquinas, into the treatise on Christ.¹² Mariologically, Congar locates the source of this shift from an economic, integrated approach to a separated, self-contained one in two monks: the eighth-century Ambrosius Autpertus and the ninth-century Paschasius Radbertus. The former was the first in Latin literature to give sermons whose subject was Mary herself, while the latter placed Mary above the Church and began to apply themes to Mary as an individual that had previously been applied to the Church as a whole.¹³ Congar sees a similar evolution at work in iconography, whereby in the West, from the twelfth century onward, Mary was increasingly depicted by herself or even as being at the center, crowned by Christ. He notes the then-Protestant Max Thurian’s comment that the Miraculous Medal depicts Mary “with open arms, without Jesus.”¹⁴ In contrast to what was seen in a more patristic mode of theology and iconography, Mary “began to be considered in herself and no longer in the economy of salvation. The doctrine of her personal privileges was developed.”¹⁵

One consequence of this isolated method was a methodological maximalism in which theologians and church leaders sought to “obtain the maximum ‘development’ of certain mariological theses.”¹⁶ Such development was a farce, in his view, given its ahistorical, decontextualized proof texting of Scripture and tradition. This thoroughly “non-resourced” Catholicism stood in contrast to a genuinely “re-sourced Catholicism,” centered in Christ and equally “biblical, liturgical, paschal, communitarian, ecumenical, and missionary.”¹⁷ Writing in his journal a year before the Council began, he noted the parallels between the incremental yet seemingly inexorable growth of papal authority and that of Mariology:

It is the same way of behaving, the same process. In both cases, an enormous outgrowth resting on two or three texts, with no certainty that these texts meant originally what they are now being taken to mean, and in which the ancient tradition had not seen all that is now seen in them, even if, sometimes, it had not understood the opposite. They go on repeating, here “Tu es Petrus,” there “gratia plena,” “stabat,” “conteret caput tuum,” etc. In each case, tirelessly, patiently, across the centuries little steps forward are constantly being taken which, at the time, seem of little account. One is not too happy, perhaps, indeed, one does not agree; but one will not create a schism over that, one will not even maintain simple resistance over such a trifle. In each case, there is ONE idea only: to increase, to take as far as possible either a power or a glory. In each case, there is only one aim, and advantage is taken of everything for the sake of that. EVERYTHING IS MADE USE OF. In each case you are told, it is pointed out to you that, having granted such and such, you cannot refuse such other; that having gone as far as three, you cannot not agree to go as far as ten.… In each case, a point gained is never let go of, they just go on adding to it.¹⁸

The end result was a degeneration into an amateurish “spiritual theology”¹⁹ originating from a particular spiritual experience or devotion; lacking a perspective on the whole Christian mystery; cut off from the sources of Christian tradition; wanting in scholarly rigor and submission to objective, revealed truth; cheapened by sentimentality; and propounded by “fourth-rate theologians” unknown in other fields of theology and not distinguished “by the balance of [their] thought.”²⁰ These are the very “idiocies” derided by Congar in his conciliar journal.

By contrast, Congar proposes an economic, resourced, and holistic approach to Mariology. He situates Mary in the divine plan of salvation and within the Church as a whole.²¹ She must always be located within and not above the Church, not even as the “neck” connecting Christ and the Church, an image of St. Bernard that Congar rejects.²² Second, Congar’s approach undertakes the work of ressourcement. While an isolated maximalism tends to work by deduction from atemporal principles, Congar returns to the sources of Christian tradition, especially scriptural and patristic ones. He is mindful that tradition is not simply a collection of texts but the “living deposit, the living principles of the economy of salvation.”²³ Finally, his method evinces a “healthy respect for the whole of things.”²⁴ It takes seriously the analogy of faith and sees both Christian life and thought as suffused by mediation in every relationship and activity.²⁵

Alongside these theological grounds, Congar’s rejection of an isolated maximalism likely has a deep personal source: his relationship with Daniel Lallement, the priest and philosopher who helped him as an adolescent to discover his priestly and religious vocation and to develop a scholastic rigor of thought. Congar remained grateful for that formation, but the two men grew apart over time due to intellectual and political differences. Congar saw in Lallement’s “Mariolatry” the “substitution for Christianity of a Mariano-Christianity”²⁶ and recalled him saying, “It is no longer I who live, but Mary who lives in me,”²⁷ an obvious allusion to Galatians 2:20. Allied to Lallement’s intense Marian devotion was what Congar described as a supernaturalism that rejected the world and the historical dimensions of human existence.²⁸ Given the almost primal desire for contact with the world that is manifested in Congar’s diaries,²⁹ it seems likely that he associated intense Marian devotion with a reactionary, cramped political, spiritual, and ecclesial worldview.

In terms of doctrine, Congar’s constructive Mariology emerges most clearly in his 1954 article “Marie et l’Église dans la pensée patristique,” which offers a careful reading of patristic thought as a corrective to what he regards as the distorted reception of that thought across succeeding centuries, particularly in Matthias Scheeben and his heirs. Congar begins by noting that the first four centuries of the Christian era offered “three main affirmations” concerning Mary: that (1) Mary is the “Type” of the Church, precisely in her virginal maternity; (2) Mary is the recapitulation of Eve; and (3) there is a continuity between Mary and the Church that parallels that between Christ and the members of his body.³⁰ I focus on this first affirmation, both because Congar considers it the central patristic insight into Mary and because it exemplifies the heart of his mariological thought.

Congar’s point of departure is that the Church Fathers rarely considered Mary in herself; they considered her only in relation to Christ and the Church. In contrast to some postpatristic theologians, they did not speak of her “privileges,” her redemptive causality, or her causality or spiritual maternity vis-à-vis the Church.³¹ “The mystery of Mary,” he writes, must instead be placed “within the framework of the mystery of the Church, and this mystery within the framework of the economy [of salvation].”³² This tethering or integration of Mary to ecclesiology and soteriology is the foundation of Congar’s Mariology.

Congar holds that much modern or even “post-Bedian” Mariology has gone astray by limiting its analysis to the two terms “Mary” and the “Church” while forgetting the broader, more fundamental third reality of the divine economy.³³ The “two-term” approach, which Congar associates with modern-day heirs of Scheeben’s Mariology, results in seeing the Church as dependent on Mary, as a stream depends on a source or spring. Congar admits that some patristic texts, taken in isolation and then used to support Neo-Scholastic “theses” as supposedly “probatur ex traditione,”³⁴ can be interpreted in this manner. This approach, though, reads the Fathers through a lens foreign to them, a lens more Aristotelian than Platonic. According to Congar, where the former approach seeks truth in things themselves or through precise philological and historical studies, the Fathers followed a Platonic approach. They thus “sought truth in an idea above time, of which events were only successive expressions and progressive realizations, and of which texts were but a manifestation or a witness. They contemplated a heaven...