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

Abstract

My Journal of the Council. By Yves Congar, O.P. Translated from the French by Mary John Ronayne, O.P., and Mary Cecily Boulding, O.P. English translation edited by Denis Minns, O.P. (Collegeville, MN: Liturgical Press. 2012. Pp. lxi, 979. $69.95. ISBN 978-0-8146-8021-2.)During the fiftieth anniversary of the opening of the Second Vatican Council, an excellent way to revisit the Council and grow more appreciative of it would be to study the diary of that event of Yves Congar, O.P. The work records Congar's myriad activities, impressions, and judgments beginning in mid-1960, when he became a peritus of the Preparatory Theological Commission, and continuing to the September 1966 congress in Rome on the theology of the Council.Two great dramas of the Council unfold before the reader as they involved this committed exponent of ecclesiological ressour cement. First, one learns much about how the Council was prepared and then how major portions of this preparation were criticized, set aside, and began to be replaced during the 1962 and 1963 conciliar working periods. Second, Congar participated in the struggles of 1964 and 1965 to create, after long hours of study and discussion in commissions, revised texts that would realize the aims of the Council in ways satisfactory to most Council Fathers, so that the texts would gain a virtual unanimity of approval in the final votes before their promulgation.Congar's French original came out in 2002, from which we have now an easily readable translation.The publication enhances the diary itself by offering five introductory texts-namely, a family note by the theologian's nephew, Dominique Congar; an informative introduction to the diary's contents by Eric Mahieu, who edited the French original; a review (not accurate in every respect) by Mary Cecily Boulding, O.P., of the Council documents; an interpretation by Paul Philibert, O.P., of the integrisme of the Council minority that Congar had described-and sharply criticized-in an appendix of his 1950 work on true and false reform; and Mahieu's note on Congar's manuscript and typescript of his diary.The introductions by Boulding and Philibert are new in this translation. At the end, appendices are translated from the French that supply information on the timeline of the Council, a chronology of Congar's work of assisting Council members and Commissions on nine Council documents, lists of Latin titles used by Congar for preparatory schemas and conciliar texts, the official and unofficial names of the Commissions, a Council glossary, works by Congar mentioned in the diary (but without indication of English translations), a map of Rome showing places to which Congar went for meetings, and indices of the diary's references to Council Fathers and other persons. …