Card. Yves Congar passed away in 1995. He forbade his diary on Vatican Council II to be published before 2000. It was published in 2002. He assisted at the Council as an insider and an expert who worked on 14 of the 16 final documents.
The Council started on October 11, 1962. On the 14th of that month, Fr. Congar attacked the Donation of Constantine. This refers to the City of Rome and other territories and privileges that Constantine gave the Papacy after he was baptized by Pope St. Sylvester. The Pope became King of Rome and the Papal Territories until 1878. This influenced the development of the Church, which was conceived as a Monarchy surrounded by pomp and solemnity. Congar revolted against these aristocratic aspects of the Church and swore their destruction.
At right, the cover of My Journal of the Council, below right, photocopies of the entry of October 14, 1962 from the original French; below left, our translation of the highlighted texts.
Visit of Jean Guitton, who is present here as a representative of both Le Figaro [newspaper] and the French Academy. As a member of the Academy, he is well received and honored. He has open doors to Card. Montini. He told me that the beatification of Pius IX is really and seriously foreseen: the Pope [John XXIII] wants it in order to link Vatican II to Vatican I.
The more I think about it, the more I consider Pius IX small and catastrophic. He is the first to blame for the bad orientation that has weighed over French Catholicism for 60 years. When the events of the time invited him to abandon the terrible lie of the Donation of Constantine and finally assume an evangelical attitude, he did not respond to that appeal, but plunged the Church into demands proper to a temporal power.
Now then, this temporal behavior still weighs heavily over the Church today. This weighty and expensive system - prestigious and full of itself, prisoner of its own myth of feudal grandeur - is the non-Christian part of the Roman Church that jeopardizes, or better prevents, openness to a totally evangelical and prophetic task: all this comes from the lie of the Donation of Constantine. This has become evident to me these days. There is nothing decisive that can be done unless the Roman Church TOTALLY abandons its feudal and temporal pretensions. It is necessary that ALL THIS be DESTROYED: AND IT WILL BE!
... It is necessary to completely turn our backs on all this and reinvent something else, a modern evangelical style that is also communitarian, not satrapic [aristocratic].
(Yves Congar, Mon Journal du Concile, Paris: Cerf, 2002, vol. 1, pp. 114-116)
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