I shall be in Ireland this week, giving a paper at an international conference marking the 100th anniversary of the late Cardinal Yves Congar's birth. Congar was surely one of the 20th century's most productive and respected theologians, and the most distinguished ecclesiologist in the history of the church.

Because he was far ahead of his time on church reform, the role of the laity, ecumenism and so many other issues, he also suffered the fate of a prophet, who, as the Lord himself once reminded us, "is not without honor except in his native place and in his own house" (Matthew 13:57).

Congar wrote the pioneer Catholic work on ecumenism, Divided Christendom, in 1937. As late as 1947, he was still taking flak from the Roman Curia over things written in that book.

When he submitted a revised edition to the censors of his Dominican Order, he heard nothing for two years, then was told by the Order's Master General that Pope Pius XII was about to come out with an encyclical that would make life more dangerous for theologians. The new edition was never published.

He was subsequently forbidden by Vatican authorities to accept an invitation to attend the 1948 general assembly of the World Council of Churches in Amsterdam because his ecumenical work was "suspect."

The first edition of his Vraie et fausse réforme dans l'Église ("True and False Reform in the Church," 1950) sold out almost immediately, but when an Italian translation was readied for publication, it was suppressed and a prohibition imposed on all future editions and translations.

From February 1952, he was ordered to submit all of his writings to Rome for approval. His censors there were marked by "incredible narrowness," Congar later wrote.

Sometimes, however, the measures were relaxed. His Lay People in the Church (original French edition, 1953) was never condemned or withdrawn, even though his words about the role of the laity in the church fell on deaf eyes --- until Vatican II.

According to Congar's own testimony, "from the beginning of 1947 to the end of 1956 I knew nothing from [Rome] but an uninterrupted series of denunciations, warnings, restrictive or discriminatory measures and mistrustful interventions" (Dialogue Between Christians, p. 34).

Summoned to Paris by the Master General in February 1954, he was informed that his writing, teaching and lecturing would have to be curtailed even further. He also learned that three provincials had been dismissed and three fellow Dominican theologians, including the great M. D. Chenu, had been disciplined.

It was "suggested" that Father Congar should go to Jerusalem, where he would write The Mystery of the Temple, a book that would require seven censors and more than three years before it could be published.

When he returned from the Holy Land in September 1954, he was told that he was to go to Rome, just as he was about to begin a previously committed series of conferences and lectures in France. Five months later he was assigned by the Master General himself to Cambridge.

Congar later admitted that the ten or eleven months in England were unusually difficult for him. He was, in effect, under a kind of ecclesiastical house arrest. There were to be no contacts with Anglicans and no ecumenical activities of any kind.

Through it all, Congar developed a spirituality of suffering. He acknowledged later that his thinking grew out of a text from St. Paul, "Patience breeds hope" (Romans 5:4).

"One would have thought," Congar wrote, "that it was just the reverse, that a man could wait patiently because he had hope in his heart." But the way St. Paul had put it opened up a more profound truth for him.

"Those who do not know how to suffer, do not know how to hope either," Congar observed. "Only when a man has suffered for his convictions does he attain in them a certain force, a certain quality of the undeniable and, at the same time, the right to be heard and to be respected. O crux benedicta ('O blessed cross')" (Dialogue Between Christians, p. 45).

So he continued working, in spite of the constant opposition and harassment from church officials. But then came the death of Pope Pius XII in 1958 and the election of John XXIII.

There was to be a council. Congar received word that he would be a consultor on its Theological Commission and then a peritus ("expert") at the council itself.

His ecclesiology, for which he had suffered so much in the past, would become the ecclesiology of Vatican II itself. Later, in 1994, he was named a cardinal.

Resurrection followed the "blessed cross."

Father Richard P. McBrien is the Crowley-O'Brien Professor of Theology at the University of Notre Dame.