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Viewpoint Silenced for saying things Rome didnt
like to have said
By YVES CONGAR
What I am blamed for is usually very
little. Most of the time, whatever problem is raised about an idea in my work
is explained in the preceding line in that same work. What has put me in the
wrong (in their eyes) is not having said false things, but having said things
that they do not like to have said. I have touched on problems without always
aligning myself to the one point of view which [Rome] wants to impose on the
comportment of the whole of the Christian world and which is: to think nothing,
to say nothing, except what they propose.
There is one pope who thinks everything, who says everything, and
the whole quality of being Catholic consists in obeying him. They want to be
absolutely the only ones to think or say anything, except on a small area of
inconsequential topics. It is absolutely required to repeat and orchestrate
their oracles, declaiming, Ah, isnt this wonderful! [Rome]
has attributed to me an audience and an influence that I know very well I have
never had. But they will listen to nothing about that.
The present pope [Pius XII] has (especially since 1950) developed
almost to the point of obsession a paternalistic regime consisting in this:
that he and he alone should say to the world what it has to think and what it
must do. He wishes to reduce theologians to commenting on his statements and
not to dare to think something or undertake something beyond mere commentary;
except, I repeat, in a very small and safeguarded area of inconsequential
problems.
The French Dominicans have been persecuted and reduced to silence
because they have been the only ones who have had a certain freedom of thought,
initiative and expression. In all cases this has been a matter of a freedom
within orthodoxy, but an orthodoxy whose sources are the Bible, the Fathers of
the Church, etc. The first warning I was given, perhaps the only clear one,
came in 1938 or 39; Père Gillet [the Dominican master general]
said to me: They complain about you for calling for a return to the
sources of theology. And of course there are others who have also lived
and worked in this same direction. Indeed, there are many, perhaps more and
more. But we know that it is in large part thanks to us (the role of
Editions du Cerf [the Dominican press in Paris], etc.) that we are so
visible. And above all, we are the only group as a group to be free in the
service of truth, the only ones to put truth above everything else.
It is clear to me that Rome has never looked for and even now does
not look for anything but the affirmation of its own authority. Everything else
interests it only as matter for the exercise of this authority. Except for a
certain number of cases dealing with people of holiness and creativity, the
whole history of Rome is about insisting on its own authority and the
destruction of everything that cannot be reduced to submission. If Rome, 90
years late regarding the initiatives of the liturgical movement, now takes an
interest in this movement, for example, it is so that the movement wont
exist without and wont be able to escape its control. And on and on.
Practically speaking, they have destroyed me as far as it was
possible for them. Everything I believed and had worked on has been taken away:
ecumenism, teaching, conferences, working with priests, writing for
Témoignage Chrétien, involvement in conventions, etc.
They have not, of course, hurt my body; nor have they touched my
soul or forced me to do anything. But a person is not limited to his skin and
his soul. Above all when someone is a doctrinal apostle, he is his
action, he is his friendships, he is his relationships, he
is his social outreach; they have taken all that away from me. All that
is now at a standstill, and in that way I have been profoundly wounded. They
have reduced me to nothing and so they have for all practical purposes
destroyed me. When, at certain times, I look back on everything I had hoped to
be and to do, on what I had begun to do, I am overtaken by an immense
heartsickness.
The full text of Congars letter appears in the March 2000
issue of La Vie Spirituelle. This excerpt was translated by an American
Dominican.
National Catholic Reporter, June 2,
2000
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