Vatican II: 40
years later
Across the Age Spectrum
Council was a radical conversion
process
By GARY MacEOIN
Vatican II was for me a conversion
experience as total as Saul’s on the road to Damascus. My understanding of
what it means to be a Catholic changed radically. My world of fixed essences
and eternal truths, held together by two minutes in the confessional on
Saturday night and a 20-minute passive presence at Sunday Mass,
disappeared.
As a journalist on assignment to cover the council, I found myself
still immersed in that accustomed world -- miters, pomp, protocol, secrecy. As
though ecclesial concerns were none of the business of the people of God, an
expression not yet coined, the press was excluded from the sessions in St.
Peter’s. (Later I would learn that in Rome sub secreto means,
“Tell it only to your friends.” But that was no help to a newcomer
without the right friends.) Curial officials issued a daily news release
remarkable only for lack of content.
Slowly, however, things happened. Reform-minded bishops and
periti, experts in various theological fields, leaked rumors of
dissension in the aula. Next came underground news conferences. The big break
came when a panel of periti, sponsored by U.S. bishops, agreed to give
us a daily English-language briefing. It became for journalists a graduate
course in theology.
One day the rumor flew in the press office that one of the
“council fathers,” as the bishop participants were known, had
questioned the “well-established doctrine” that banned
communicatio in sacris, praying with Protestants. At the
news conference, the usually headline-hunting periti declined to comment
because it was still unclear what the council would decide. Only the fearless
Fr. Bernard Häring took the microphone when it was clear none of
the others would respond. A stretcher-bearer in Hitler’s army, risking his
life by moonlighting as a chaplain, he had offered absolution and Eucharist to
Catholic and Protestant alike. “I was the only Christian minister
available at a moment of extreme need,” he said. In Russia he baptized
babies he knew would be reared as Orthodox.
It was such inspired moments that opened for me the possibility of
a different vision: a way of life in which I was called to participate in the
continuing creation, in which important things still remained to be done and I
had a role in doing them. It would be a more demanding religion, not an easier
one. I would have to use my own judgment, make my mistakes, even challenge
authority. But it would be -- and it is -- a life worth living.
This message of the council undoubtedly reached many, as it
reached me. But in the end it failed to be institutionalized. The Roman
curia’s thousand-year control of church structures survived intact. As the
pope’s civil service, the curia had been assigned the task of preparing
the agenda. And it was determined from the outset to prevent the
aggiornamento, the updating, that was Pope John XXIII’s stated
objective when he told a group of cardinals in 1959 that he intended to call a
general council of the church. What he wanted, he insisted, was a pastoral
council with no anathemas.
The curia ignored him, as it had been ignoring popes for
centuries. When the bishops assembled in October 1962, they were presented with
70 documents in Latin, enough to fill 2,000 folio pages. It was more than twice
the combined volume of all texts issued by previous councils, and it repeated
the anathemas of Trent and Vatican I, as well as the wholesale denunciation of
the contemporary world already found in Pius IX’s “Syllabus of
Errors.”
The 2,500 bishops flown in from all parts of the globe, separated
by a babel of languages, and without training or experience in acting as a
group, might easily have been stampeded into giving a blanket approval to this
curial program. Some wanted the pope to intervene. But John knew this would
defeat his project. He simply repeated in his opening address and in other
talks in the early days of the council what he had said when he first announced
the Second Vatican Council: It was up to the bishops themselves to run the
assembly.
Suspension of meetings for a few days permitted the emergence of
two blocs, a majority who shared the pope’s concept of
aggiornamento and a minority convinced that the pope’s ideas were
mistaken and dangerous, perhaps even heretical. The rest of the first session
was largely consumed in procedural wrangling. But in the end the majority
succeeded in its efforts to reduce the schemas, or draft documents, from 70 to
20 (later 17, and finally 13), and to have the surviving documents completely
rewritten to express the view of the majority.
The curia, however, did not give up. With an ailing pope and the
bishops dispersed, it quickly organized a sabotage strategy. It ignored the
pope’s orders to have revised schemas sent to the bishops by Easter. On
Pope John’s death in June, the work slowed to a halt. When Paul VI was
elected to succeed John, the curia rejoiced. A lifelong member of the curia, he
would provide a modernization of structures, not the reform in depth envisioned
by aggiornamento.
The new pope quickly handed decisive victories to the minority by
his action on two projects promoted by the majority of the council fathers. One
was a proposal to create a council of bishops from all countries to constitute
a legislative or decision-making body for the church, transforming the curia
into a modern civil service. The other was the allied issue of reform of the
curia.
In both cases Paul simply removed the issues from the
council’s agenda and made decisions clearly contrary to the expressed
desires of the majority. The synod of bishops would be a strictly advisory
body, to meet if and when the pope called it, and to offer advice only on
issues specified by the pope. As for curial reform, it was to be carried out by
the curia itself.
Paul would later repeat this overriding of the will of the
majority when he reserved to himself a decision on the contraception issue, on
which it was clear that many sought a major change from the
“traditional” position. It was not until 1968, three years after the
end of the council, that Paul disclosed his decision, reaffirming the
“traditional” condemnation of artificial means of contraception. In
that case, the people of God took the unprecedented step of rejecting the papal
teaching, deciding that the choice of means to regulate family size is a matter
for the consciences of the spouses.
Here, I think, we have an excellent example of where we are as a
church as a result of Vatican II. As the people of God we have embraced the
spirit of the council. We have accepted our responsibility as adults to make
our decisions on the basis of our consciences. We have embraced the
preferential option for the poor, understood as a true commitment to radical
social change.
We lack the machinery, nevertheless, to give substance to our
mission. The minority that controls the institutional structures has a
different vision. Ours is a deeply divided church. We are still trapped in the
dilemma that stultified Vatican II. We need another Good Pope John,
another prophet, to call us to repentance.
Gary MacEoin is author of a history of Vatican II and co-author
(with Francis X. Murphy) of a history of the first Synod of Bishops.
National Catholic Reporter, October 4,
2002
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