Yves Congar

Yeah, I'm, like, envisioning his name on the thing, and there's letters after it, so that would be [laughs]...

Is it Congar?

What?

Was it Congar or somebody else?

No.

I like Congar.

I'm gonna criticize this, this other author.

[laughs]

Others felt Vatican II was a refreshing house cleaning that did away with ossified teachings and stultifying practices while conforming the, the Church to the modern world.

But then there are still others of the communio theological sensibility, figures like Romano Guardini, Henri de Lubac, Hans Urs von Balthasar, Yves Congar, and Joseph Ratzinger, who preserved the precious repository and sacred ritual of the faith while discerning the best approach to evangelizing the uncertain modern world.

Dr. Tracey Rowland on her extraordinary new book, Introducing Communio Theology, now.

[upbeat music] My name is Todd Warner, and this is the Evangelization and Culture podcast from Word on Fire.

... after reading de Lubac.

I also read Yves Congar-

That's right

... on tradition.

But it's, but Scripture doesn't have a list of the books, so where is it revealed? It's revealed by the Holy Spirit to the apostles before the death of the last apostle and passed along.

Now, there's a lot of difficulties that come, and right now it's, it's difficult because, uh, in the Catholic world, speaking of the ecumenical movement, um, for ecumenical purposes, for the, in the hopes, with good intentions of reuniting with Protestants, a number of Catholics like Yves Congar and otherwise decent folks in some respects at least, um, wanted to kind of downplay this difference and say, "You know what? There is no Catholic teaching that you have to hold.

There's content and tradition that's not already found in Scripture.

Scripture is sufficient." That's the Protestant view, right? And so a, uh, so the trend for over 50 years in the Catholic world of, of theology, of academic theology, has been to, to deny that tradition has content and to say, "That's a, that's an invention of Baroque Scholasticism."

Mm

...

Yves Congar, and others, and it's just become kinda standard fare, right?

But that whole-

So if we set aside that early issue, then I would say if you look at the 11th century, there's a huge revolution that even Roman Catholic scholars would admit.

You have people like Congar and Dvornik, the famous Unionist scholar, They admit that there's a revolution in ecclesiology in the West.

It's known as the Gregorian reforms.

And what's unique about this is that the papacy began to take on a new geopolitical role.