Abstract: French Dominican Yves Congar is widely recognized as the most important Roman Catholic ecclesiologist of the twentieth century. He was a leader in the ecumenical movement in Europe and one of the most influential theological advisors at the Second Vatican Council. In this book, Groppe analyzes Congar’s theology of the Holy Spirit. She systematizes his pneumatology and identifies its primary contribution. Congar, she argues, advanced Roman Catholic pneumatology through his elaboration of a theology of the Holy Spirit that is at once a theological anthropology and a theology of the church. The early twentieth-century Roman Catholic pneumatology that Congar inherited consisted primarily of a spiritual anthropology—a theology of the Spirit’s indwelling of the human person—while giving little or no attention to the theology of the Holy Spirit within the discipline of ecclesiology. Congar saw this divorce of spiritual anthropology and ecclesiology as a betrayal of Christianity’s biblical and patristic heritage and of his Thomistic tradition. His own theology reintegrates a theology of the Spirit’s indwelling of the human person with an account of the Spirit as co-institutor and life principle of the church, and his approach has significant implications for contemporary discussions in the areas of ecclesiology, theological anthropology, sacramental theology, ecumenism, and spirituality. The book includes extensive notes and bibliography and is important both as an introduction to Congar and a contribution to a contemporary theology of the Holy Spirit.

Keywords: Yves Congar, Holy Spirit, Pneumatology, Ecclesiology, Theological anthropology