Odds & ends.

It was a vintage year. Auguste Rodin unveiled his sculpture Le Penseur in Paris. Rolls-Royce made its first car. The Trans-Siberian Railway linking Russia and China was completed and so was the first electric underground train in London. James Barrie's new play, Peter Pan, opened, and Teddy Roosevelt was elected president of the United States.

Among the myriad unnoticed cents in 1904 were three births--John Courtney Murray in the United States, Karl Rahner in Germany, and Yves Congar in France. Now, 100 years later, these three luminaries are remembered for changing the face of Catholicism forever.

Was there something in the baptismal waters that year? Perhaps a more than generous movement of the Holy Spirit?

The American of the group, John Courtney Murray, a Jesuit, worked most of his professional life to promote a civic and theological vision of religious liberty that embraced all religious and spiritual traditions. He was an editor of the the scholarly journal Theological Studies.

German-born Karl Rahner, also a Jesuit, produced thousands of publications during his lifetime and is often compared to Thomas Aquinas. Rahner's theology, though not light reading, was always pastoral and focused on significant contemporary issues of the 20th century. His most significant writings were published in a 23-volume series titled Theological Investigations.

Frenchman and Dominican Yves Congar, another prolific theologian, spent his professional career writing on the church, ecumenism, and the laity. Five years of his life were spent as a prisoner of war during World War II, and he was a founding member of the theological review Concilium.

The ideas of these three men at first diverged from church authority and then converged at the Second Vatican Council. Like Jesus, they dashed with the established religious authorities of their day. Murray was not permitted to write or speak about religious freedom during the 1950s. Rahner incurred Vatican censorship that same decade, and the powerful Cardinal Ottaviani tried in vain to ban him from Rome as Vatican II began. Pope John XXIII declined Ottaviani's request. Congar, too, was ordered to stop teaching in 1954.

But Murray, Rahner, and Congar ended up as primary architects of Vatican II. Rahner's understanding of grace--that it is offered to humans universally--eventually undergirded all the council's documents. Murray's deep insights into religious liberty became manifest in the Declaration on Religious Liberty. And Congar's theology of the laity as the vital epicenter of church won the day in other council documents. A year before his death in 1995, he was named to the College of Cardinals. Funny how things turn out.

One hundred years from now, in 2104, will the church look back on the notable theologians born this year? No doubt they will be different. Some will be women and some will be laypeople.

Might they be silenced also for a period of time? Probably a pretty good bet. Might they be the architects of another church council? Maybe so. Or maybe it will depend on the quality of the baptismal waters this year.

PETER GILMOUR ([e-mail]) teaches at the Institute of Pastoral Studies of Loyola University Chicago.