Fifty years ago, Yves Congar voiced concern over what he considered a serious point of confusion in the post-conciliar Church, namely, the meaning of “the sacred” in Christian faith and mission. This essay details Congar's diagnosis of the problem and explores the continued relevance of his constructive response, or, what he calls “sacred pedagogy.” For Congar, the world is not sacred in itself, because the body of Christ is the only sacred reality. Yet the world can become sacred, if we approach it “pedagogically,” as filled with signs that can lead us to grace. In the end, however, all present experience of the sacred will be transcended in the eschatological kingdom of God.

Maurice de la Taille's Mysterium Fidei (1921) was, as one of its reviewers remarked, a veritable ‘theological event’, both in terms of its methodology and its overturning of post-Tridentine theology on eucharistic sacrifice. De la Taille's work has been long overlooked in the history of theology in the early twentieth century. The paper demonstrates that de la Taille's work on the Eucharist proves an early example of nouvelle théologie and a catalyst for the the liturgical movement. Conciliar and pre-Conciliar documents presuppose his Mysterium Fidei. Through the retrieval of a patristic and medieval teaching about sacrificial oblation, de la Taille disperses the web of immolationist theories about the sacrifice of the Mass that had dominated baroque and early modern theology.

A sacramental ontology, informed by a ressourcement of the Church Fathers, informs the theology of the mid-twentieth-century Catholic movement of nouvelle théologie. Rejecting the neo-Thomist separation between nature and the supernatural, the nouvelle theologians focused on the sacramental presence of supernatural grace in natural realities. To be sure, differences among these ressourcement theologians cannot be denied: de Lubac and Bouillard emphasized the a-scending character of human participation in divine grace, while Balthasar and Chenu stressed the de-scent of the Incarnation into the created realities of time and space. Nonetheless, the four theologians shared a deep appreciation for the Greek Fathers, which enabled them to counter the neo-scholastic separation between nature and the supernatural with a sacramental ontology.

The crucial role of the French Jesuit theologate in exile at Ore Place, Hastings (1906–26) in the development of la nouvelle théologie has been greatly overlooked in favour of Lyons and Fourvière. In fact, Ore Place played a key early role in the ressourcement of twentieth century French Catholic theology through constituting a unified and sympathetic scholarly community during an era of theological and political turmoil. One of the theologate's best-known students was Pierre Teilhard de Chardin (1908–12), while other teachers and students included Pierre Charles, Joseph Huby, Henri de Lubac, Ferdinand Prat, Pierre Rousselot, and Auguste Valensin. Within this congenial scholarly community, Teilhard developed some key theological foundations of his thought on topics including grace and nature (miracles, anthropology, and evolution) and christology, and was ordained. The full importance of theological formation at Ore Place for the thought of Teilhard and other French Jesuits of his generation has rarely been recognized.