A Church Fully Engaged: Yves Congar's Vision of Ecclesial Authority

The French Dominican, Fr. Yves Congar, was deeply convinced that in the church's ongoing tension with the secular world it was led to adopt very much the same attitudes as the temporal power itself, to conceive of itself as a society, as a power, when in reality it was a communion, with ministers and servants. It was Congar's lifelong theological project to help restore to the church a more evangelical, gospel-based understanding of her life. From the vast corpus of this great expert of the Second Vatican Council, this book gathers his efforts as they pertain specifically to the issue of authority in the church. The often hot-button nature of any discussion on how authority is exercised in the church will only benefit from the retrieval of the theological tradition on this issue brought forth by Congar. Congar's Vision ultimately demands that our understanding of authority must flow from our understanding of God as a Trinity of Persons and, therefore, be practiced in the mutuality of relationship and always be directed at growth in authentic relationship.

Fr. Anthony Oelrich is a priest of the Diocese of St. Cloud, Minnesota, serving as rector and pastor of three parishes and the diocesan director of continuing education for clergy. He received his doctorate in theology from the Pontifical University of St. Thomas Aquinas in Rome.