In making available the journal kept by Marie‐Dominique Chenu during the first year of the Second Vatican Council, Alberto Melloni has contributed significantly to the historical study of Vatican II. Simultaneously, he has provided valuable resources and provocative stimulus for continuing theological and especially ecclesiological reflection. His painstaking editing of Chenu's notebook, with comprehensive footnotes, has produced a text primarily of value to the specialist, but also of more general interest, allowing vicarious entrance into the unfolding conciliar drama.
The very thoroughness of Melloni's editing is occasionally frustrating ‐ most readers will not need to be told that when Chenu writes Belg he means Belgium ‐ whilst some of the anecdotal material is, at first sight, light‐weight, even gossipy in tone. Thus, for instance, the story of the head of the Doctrine Commission being taken, literally, for a ride when a Roman taxi driver, asked to convey the notably conservative Cardinal Ottaviani to the Council, heads out of the city towards Trent. A smile is similarly raised by Chenu's retailing at second hand of a description of the elaborate liturgical functions in St Peter's for the anniversary of Pope John's coronation as ‘Mass before the Holy Father Exposed’.
But Chenu's occasionally acerbic irony and his interest in the apparently superficial and ephemeral, however entertaining, should not be allowed to become a distraction. Those concerned with a properly theological account of the work of Vatican II will find much here to inform and nuance their evaluations. This holds true for those on both sides of most debates about the conciliar legacy. One does not have to be committed, as Melloni implicitly is, to a hermeneutic of the Council as event, to be impressed by the ecclesiological richness of the Melkite Archimandrite Oreste Kerame's intervention, edited by Chenu and reproduced in full in a lengthy footnote, on the original draft schema on the Church. Nor does one have to be as convinced as Chenu himself of the exclusively and irredeemably ‘juridical ‘ character of that schema (and thus of an ecclesiological volte‐face between this and Mystici Corporis on the one hand, and Lumen Gentium as it was finally promulgated on the other) to be struck by Chenu's early expression of the oft repeated, though contestable, assertion of the significance of the position in subsequent drafts of a chapter on the People of God. ‘Conservatives’ and ‘liberals’, proponents of hermeneutics of reform and rupture, all alike may find their understanding of ‘what happened at Vatican II’ both called in question and expanded by a careful reading of the notebook.
Chenu's ‘notes like a journal’ witness to the fault lines within the theological consciousness of the immediately preconciliar Church. Thus he records Aniceto Fernández's dismissal of the proposed new schema on the Church drafted by Karl Rahner amongst others as ‘a text for a spiritual retreat, not for deliberation by a Council’. Chenu's estimation of the Dominican Master General's comment as ‘a very significant remark, revealing his lamentable separation of theology (abstract intellectualism) from spirituality (living faith, Gospel)’ encapsulates the extent to which debate between neothomism and its opponents had, by the early 1960s, become a dialogue of the deaf. At the very least, it is to be hoped that by highlighting this vitiating factor in 20th‐century Catholic theology, the notebook might encourage contemporary ecclesiologists in particular to strive to avoid analogous potential stalemates in the future.
Melloni's introduction, setting Chenu's notebook in the context of both a typology of Vatican II journals, and a much wider historical perspective, provides further inspiration and challenge here. It is intriguing to note, for instance, potentially to the equal discomfiture of contemporary ‘progressives’ and ‘traditionalists’, that the use of journals first made its way into conciliar hermeneutics, not in the interests of amplifying voices from the margins, but rather to ensure a magisterially correct interpretation of the intentions of the Fathers of Trent.
The introduction also features a valuable of eyewitness accounts of the first day of the Council. Richly fascinating as the extracts are, they serve to highlight what is from the perspective of the early 21st century the shockingly insular character of the ecclesial culture in which all the conciliar participants were inevitably embedded, irrespective of theological affiliation. It is unthinkable, for instance, that even the least ecumenically minded Catholic commentator today would speak of ‘the abbot and a monk from the Calvinist monastery of Taize in Switzerland’, as the markedly innovative Cardinal Lercaro of Bologna does in his simple and moving account of the opening ceremonies written for the youth of his diocese.
Such embarrassments are, however, the flip side of a very positive coin: namely, a vivid reminder of the necessarily contextual dimension of theology, including magisterial theology. As both Chenu and the other sources assembled by Melloni make clear, the documents of Vatican II were not produced in a vacuum, but at a particular moment in history, in which the complexities and complicities of the Cold War loom large, and by men scarred to a greater or lesser extent by events on the world stage.
Something similar could justly be said about the latest volume of Yves Congar's diary to be made available in English. For the four years of the First World War, from the age of 10 to 14, Chenu's compatriot and future Dominican confrere kept a methodical, and occasionally dramatic, account of his life in occupied France. Replete with details of diet (and crushing dietary restrictions), descriptions of family and parish celebrations under unconventionally trying circumstances, second‐hand accounts of wartime atrocities and self‐confident poetic expressions of patriotic sentiment, it would be regrettable if the text were to be dismissed patronisingly as a touching period piece. This is not to deny its considerable charm, accentuated by the reproduction of both Congar's own illustrations and contemporary photographs. Rather, it is in its own right an intrinsically valuable contribution to our understanding of the formation of an influential conciliar voice. Vatican II studies will be the richer for its publication.
