CHAPTER NINE

A Unique Pontificate (January–December 1960)

The papacy then, a half-century ago, was different in significant ways than today’s office, though the underlying theology and outward emblems of the institution have remained more or less constant for more than a millennium. John XXIII was, to a great degree, responsible for the reforms that took place during the decades since his pontificate: within just a few years Paul VI began to streamline the organization of the Vatican agencies and to expand the membership in the College of Cardinals; and John Paul II and Benedict XVI continued the process of reform. For example, the latter eliminated the title Patriarch of the West from the list of pontifical epithets that the pope had carried on his head (like the triple tiara that Paul put aside) for many hundreds of years.

In John’s time, the 108.7-acre Vatican City State, the smallest country in the world with a population less than the total membership in the U.S. Congress, was run by men of Italian origin, exclusively, and its official language was Latin. It remains a closed system of government today, though some moves toward more relative transparency have been instituted in the twenty-first century.

The head of the Vatican City State, the pope, is the country’s chief executive, the chief legislator, and the chief judge all in one. The nation has its own postage stamps and issues its own coins, yet it uses the euro (formerly the Italian lira) as legal tender and depends upon the government of Italy to transport its airmail. There are no street addresses in Vatican City, but postal delivery personnel know where everyone lives and works. In John’s day, Vatican coins, which were the same size as Italian coins, had the pontiff’s head engraved on them and usually bore a motto such as “This is the root of all evil” or “It is better to give than to receive.”

The Vatican flag, then and now, consists of two equal vertical stripes of gold and white with the papal tiara above two crossed keys on the white stripe. John had ten or so private cars that were parked in the Apostolic Stable, which was once used for papal horses. In his time there were six gasoline pumps in the Vatican, all of them carrying the same brand name, prominent in its time: Esso.

Many of the citizens of Vatican City, none of whom was subject to Italian income taxes (only an annual Vatican tax of 300 lire, about 50 cents), lived in Italy rather than on Vatican ground. Vatican gates closed at 11:30 P.M. A resident who wished to go out to dinner or the opera was required to get special permission and make special arrangements to return to the city (country) after the closing of the gates. An “alien” (non-Vatican citizen) who was a guest for dinner at a Vatican apartment had to leave the tiny nation before the frontier shut down.

Although most prices within the Vatican were comparable with those of the neighboring country of Italy—and in sync with Rome’s accelerated cost of living—general expenses were much lower. Vatican housekeepers (at least half of whom were males) did most of their shopping on the grounds, but it was necessary to go into Rome for such items as clothing, electrical appliances, and other durable goods. Rome supplied the Vatican with its water and its electric power, and the Vatican’s own sanitation system emptied into the Roman sewers.

Citizens, who lived in assigned quarters, were not charged for electricity or telephone service, and rents were extremely low. Economic pressures and problems of a highly industrialized society did not exist within Vatican City, though salaries were rock bottom at the time: some cardinals might receive as much as $800 per month, while a monsignor might be paid a salary of $300; the commanding officer of the Swiss Guard earned about $340; and the editor of the Vatican daily paper, L’Osservatore Romano, got about the same amount, around $340.

There were at the time about 3,000 jobs inside the Vatican. A visitor once asked John, “Holy Father, how many people actually work in the Vatican?”

He replied jauntily, “Oh, about half of them.”

The pope and members of his official “family” lived in the Apostolic Palace, a conglomeration of buildings constructed, for the most part, during the Renaissance, with some 990 flights of stairs and more than 1,400 rooms, some of which overlooked the Vatican’s twenty courtyards. The palace of the Vatican was one of the world’s largest, surpassed in those days only by the palace of the exiled Dalai Lama in Tibet.

The Holy Father’s nineteen-room apartment on the top floor faced Saint Peter’s Square. His private office, with three great recessed windows overlooking the piazza, was commodious and impressive: draped in gold damask, the windows were seldom covered by curtains; instead, whenever the sunlight beat in, the white slats on the inside shutters were closed. The papal work chamber measured 60 by 40 feet. The floor was carpeted and the walls paneled in blond wood. There were tables and satin-covered chairs spaced around the room, and books filled every inch of space in the two six-foot-high, glass-enclosed cabinets.

About five feet from the door was the pope’s desk, a table with a single center drawer. On the right side of the desk, the pope kept an ornate desk clock, a high-necked desk lamp with carved statuettes at the base, a roll-blotter, and several reference books, among which were the current Pontifici Annuario (Pontifical Annual) and an indexed Bible. Facing the papal desk were two high-backed chairs that matched the chair on which the pontiff sat. Pope John wrote out letters and drafts of documents by hand, unlike his successor, Paul VI, who was adept with a typewriter.

On the lower floors were the apartments of the secretary of state and the master of pontifical ceremonies. The palace also housed, in one of its extensions, the Vatican museums, which contained what many experts believed to be the world’s finest single collection of ancient and classical art. The museum still possesses the most important single art spectacle anywhere, the Sistine Chapel, in which the enormous Last Judgment of Michelangelo (restored in the early years of the twenty-first century) covers the entire wall behind the altar; the ceiling, depicting Old Testament scenes, has awed viewers for five centuries.

Beside the Apostolic Palace, the Swiss Guard had their own barracks and apartments, as they do today. Vatican City had three comparatively new apartment buildings in the early 1960s, erected to partially correct a housing shortage. There are three cemeteries within the borders of the Vatican, but they have been rarely used—with most of the world’s attention focused on the vaults beneath Saint Peter’s Basilica, reserved for the burial of popes.

The fenced-in Vatican Gardens were manicured year-round by a staff of twenty. There were fruit trees, cauliflower patches, plants rooted in oversize ceramic jars, and fountains of all shapes. To ensure an adequate water supply, Pope Pius XI had 9,300 irrigators installed. Fifty-five miles of pipe were laid and two reservoirs built. Each reservoir held 1.5 million gallons of water, which came directly from Lake Bracciano, outside Rome.

At John’s request, the irrigation system was equipped with trick devices that squirted great jets of water at unwary visitors. When in a playful mood, the pope loved to drench new cardinals whom he inveigled to walk with him through the gardens. (The jets were dismantled by the Holy Father’s successor.)

The Vatican Gardens were one of Pius’s pet projects, and he frequently let the children of Vatican employees play in them. One day, noticing a school of flashy red fish swimming in one of the small ponds, he said to the youngsters who were standing nearby, “So many cardinals—and no pope!”

The next day two boys and a girl went to the pond and emptied the contents of a small pail into it. Later, when Pius went out to the garden for his stroll, he saw one extra fish in the pond. The fish was all white, like a pope.

Not far from the gardens was the “business district” of Vatican City. Located to the right of Saint Peter’s Square, it could be reached by entering through the Santa Anna Gate, which was supervised by the Swiss Guard. Each visitor to the business district was asked to state the nature of his business to the guardsman on duty before he might be allowed to proceed. The roadway from the Santa Anna Gate led past the tiny parish church to the grocery store, the post office, the car pool and garage, the press office, and the offices of L’Osservatore Romano.

As an independent state, Vatican City had certain prerogatives with respect to Italy. For instance, in time of war, Vatican citizens and personnel were given access across Italian territory. The Vatican was exempt from customs regulations, a privilege it sometimes abused. After the end of World War II, visitors to Vatican City began picking up cartons of American cigarettes there, taking them into Italy, where American cigarettes were hard to find, and then selling them for double what they had paid. As much as this rankled officials of the Italian government (which owned a state monopoly on the sale of tobacco), nothing could be done. The practice continued even through the time of John.

The Vatican had virtually no crime. No instance of a holdup on Vatican grounds was ever recorded. Some years before John’s election, however, there was one case of burglary. Only two murder attempts were recorded up through his pontificate. In one case a Swiss Guardsman, in a moment of temper, wounded his commanding officer. In the other, a demented woman shot down a priest in Saint Peter’s. (Since then, in the late 1990s, there was a notorious double murder-suicide involving the Swiss Guard, a mystery that has not yet been fully resolved.)

During John’s papacy, the Vatican’s rarely used prison was converted into a warehouse. Most of the policemen who worked in the Vatican were laymen, as were the firemen, lawyers, stenographers, sales personnel, carpenters, bakers, gardeners, bricklayers, painters, mechanics, and other employees who kept the Vatican machinery functioning. To supplement this lay staff, a number of small religious societies provided services of various types. For instance, the Vatican telephone system and local mail deliveries were handled by the friars of the Little Work of Divine Providence. A group of nuns, affectionately known as the Sisters of Tapestry, specialized in the mending and restoration of the thousands of precious tapestries that adorn the walls of the Apostolic Palace. The Do-good Brothers operated the Vatican pharmacy, and on a nearby island in the Tiber River, they administered a hospital, where during the Nazi occupation of Rome they earned a reputation for hiding Jewish refugees and American and British pilots shot down in combat.

Another religious group, the Salesians of Saint John Bosco, provided the Vatican with typesetters and linotype operators. Charged with printing secret and confidential Vatican documents, the members of this group also ran a printing plant, which published documents in 120 different alphabets and languages, including hieroglyphics, Chinese, Braille, Hebrew, Arabic, and Coptic.

Perhaps the most unusual job in the Vatican in that era was performed in a high-ceilinged room in the Apostolic Palace. The room was lined with shelves and drawers containing ashes, slivers of bones, and other remains of early saints and martyrs. Under an electric lamp in one corner of this strange chamber, the world’s most macabre library, a Vatican officer worked, surrounded with tiny boxes and envelopes addressed to all parts of the globe. These were for the purpose of conveying saintly relics. According to canon law in those days, a relic had to be enclosed in every altar of every church. Because new churches were opened all the time, authentic relics were in constant demand. The librarian was kept continually busy.

Most jobs were quite ordinary: the pontifical shoemaker, for example. Since 1939, the task of making papal shoes had belonged to Telesforo Carboni, who referred to John as “a wide 10.” Like many other shoemakers, Carboni was quite a raconteur, particularly on the matter of footwear.

 

I remember the time Pope John, who had a big foot, which could take even a ten and a half, came to me and said, “Signor Carboni, you must make me a pair of shoes that are nice and big and don’t cramp my feet.”

A man with cramped feet, you know, will usually have cramped ideas in his head, and so His Holiness wanted a pair of shoes that wouldn’t cramp him in his work.

The pope didn’t have corns on his feet, but he did have a high instep, and the top of a shoe, if it was a bad fit, could cut his foot when he walked. He showed me the most comfortable pair of shoes he had ever had, made by his nephew, a shoemaker in Bergamo, and they were died purple. I was horrified at the color. Who ever heard of a pope wearing purple shoes?

“Holy Father,” I said, “you can’t wear purple shoes. It is not the pope’s color.”

Pope John thought for a bit, then he said, “But, Signor Carboni, I don’t want to hurt my nephew’s feelings. When I write him, I must tell him I am wearing the shoes he made for me.”

“Ci penso io,” I said. (I’ll take care of it.)

“Benissimo!” (Great!), exclaimed His Holiness. “You have solved my problem. You are a saint. You have made the first miracle of my reign!”

 

In John’s era, as it had been for popes since the fifth century, the office of the papacy held a unique place in the public imagination. Just a listing of his titles boggles the mind: Bishop of Rome, Successor of the Prince of the Apostles, Supreme Pontiff of the Universal Church, Servant of the Servants of God, Patriarch of the West, Primate of Italy, Archbishop and Metropolitan of the Roman Province, and Sovereign of the State of Vatican City. Each title signifies a historical development in the papal office and reflects an element in the fabric of responsibilities in which he is invested.

When elected, the pontiff loses the civil ties that have bound him to the nation of his origin. He finds that his daily life is governed, down to the most minute detail, by long-practiced tradition. In John’s time, the pope’s confessor, an ordinary priest, had to be a Jesuit, and he was required to visit the Vatican once a week at a fixed time—and he alone could absolve the pope of his sin. The master of the Apostolic Palace had to be a Dominican, the sacristan an Augustinian. It would be exceedingly difficult to change any of these protocols, lest the religious congregation in question regard the action as an affront of some kind against their number.

The first time John received his relatives in a special audience, shortly after his coronation, the visitors approached the new pontiff timidly, and when they saw him vested in his pontifical white robes, they knelt and bowed their heads.

“Lasciate perdere!” (Forget all that!), John said. “Don’t be afraid. It’s only me!”

Pope John was the first among equals of all the bishops in the world, all of whom came under his direct authority. He possessed, in theory, full and absolute power over the Roman Catholic Church. Any decree issued by the Holy See required his signature. He could obey or ignore precedent. He could set aside tradition and write—or completely rewrite—constitutions of the Church, and he could change discipline (such as the requirement of priestly celibacy) without consultation. The pope was empowered to proclaim dogmas on his own authority, though on matters that touched upon the life of the Universal Church it was customary (and still is) for the pontiff to consult with the bishops as the magisterium, or teaching authority, of the institution. In fact, the last time a pope defined a new doctrine of the Church infallibly and ex cathedra (from the chair) was in 1950, when Pius XII proclaimed the dogma of the Assumption of the Blessed Virgin Mary.

John, like most modern popes—perhaps more than most—viewed himself a temporary occupant of an eternal office and maintained a sense of irony and humor about his position in the Church and in the world, something he had learned over his long diplomatic service and the surprises and near-humiliations that he often encountered during those years.

The pope, he knew, could be judged by no man, and there was no appeal from his decisions. In this respect his position was that of a head of state who could not be brought to court. Acting in his executive authority, John had the exclusive power to approve or sanction or suppress religious orders; grant indulgences to sinners; beatify or canonize saints; appoint bishops (perhaps the single most far-reaching power in his arsenal); erect, administer, or suppress dioceses; assign an auxiliary or co-adjutor bishop in a diocese; found and legislate for pontifical universities; publish liturgical and theological books; administer the temporal goods (including cash) of ecclesiastical foundations; and erect and govern overseas missions dependent on the Holy See.

As a legislator, John could convoke and preside over ecumenical councils, regulate holy days and Catholic feasts, introduce new rites and abolish old ones, issue ex cathedra decrees on matters of faith and morals, introduce or suppress Church laws on any subject, defend doctrine against heresies, and define feast days and periods of fasting throughout the whole Church.

Then, as chief judge, the Holy Father was juridically empowered, among other things, to rescind vows and oaths for members of religious congregations who wished to return to secular life, give matrimonial dispensations, act as a court, establish rules of judicial procedure, establish censures or punishments for crimes, organize courts for hearing cases, and organize courts or appoint synodal judges for the Diocese of Rome.

In those years there were no provisions for the possible incapacitation of a pope. He was elected for life and, often a septuagenarian or an octogenarian, would serve until his death. Although a very few popes in the past had abdicated, there was little or no thought during John’s reign that it could ever come to such a decision in the modern age. Even the College of Cardinals was powerless in the face of an ill or incapacitated pope.

As head of the Holy Roman Church, the pope ran a vast business organized as a corporation, directing twelve congregations (also called dicasteries) of cardinals—known as the Roman Curia or “court”—a system that dated from the late sixteenth century, during the reforming period of the Council of Trent.

 

Members of the Roman Curia had warned John that the ecumenical council would take years to prepare, that organizing it by 1963—as he had hoped—would be impossible. To which he replied, “Good, then we’ll have it in 1962.” In May 1959, he established the Pre-Preparatory Commission, headed by Cardinal Tardini, whose original plan was to send a questionnaire to everyone eligible to vote at the council—that is, 2,598 bishops, as well as heads of (male) religious orders and heads of thirty-seven Catholic universities. Instead, however, John and Tardini decided on a letter, which would not lock recipients in to a certain type of answer, the way a questionnaire might. The letter read, in part:

 

The venerable Pontiff wants to know the opinions or views and to obtain the suggestions and wishes of their excellencies, the bishops and prelates who are summoned by law (Canon 223) to take part in the ecumenical council. These [suggestions] will be most useful in preparing the topics to be discussed at the council.

 

Of the 2,598 letters the Vatican sent out, they received 1,998 letters in return, a 77 percent response rate that would be the envy of any direct marketer. The responses came from around the world, in letters that ranged from six lines written by a bishop in Australia to twenty-seven pages penned by a bishop in Mexico. They were eventually published after the council in eight volumes totaling 5,000 pages. The Curia were invited to add their ideas, which brought in an additional 400 pages.

At the time, however, the material was confidential. It filled 2,000 massive folders. To the relief of certain members of the Curia, the bishops of the world seemed not, at this stage, to have fully grasped the opportunity being provided them. Many of the responses to the pope’s letter dealt with concerns about the spread of communism or a desire on the part of bishops to see more faculties provided for their dioceses. A few people wanted to discuss furthering the role of the laity in the Mass (as well as using the vernacular instead of Latin) and a few more wanted to discuss the controversial question of priestly celibacy. The pope, however, was a firm supporter of celibacy.

Reading and organizing all this material took a good deal of time. In May 1960, Pope John announced the next step toward the council, the formation of ten preparatory commissions, whose job it was to catalogue each letter. The idea was that the bishops would then be able to examine these documents and come to the council prepared to vote and discuss specific issues. Each commission was led by the head of the corresponding congregation within the Curia. Cardinal Gaetano Cicogani, for instance, head of the Congregation of Rites, would be responsible for the council’s document on liturgy. And Cardinal Alfredo Ottaviani, head of the Congregation of the Holy Office, formerly the Office of the Inquisition, would rule over the Theological Commission.

Ottaviani’s influence would extend far beyond that one commission, however. Blind in one eye, Ottaviani could, as the saying went around the Vatican, see more with one eye than most could with two. The motto on his Vatican coat of arms was Semper idem (Always the same), fittingly enough, since he was the leader of the conservatives who inhabited the Curia. On every issue, he argued forcefully that the Church should at all times resist change. Theology, he said, was for the protection of the truths that already existed—not for the promulgation of new ideas.

It was understandable that John had organized his preparatory commissions to echo the structure of the Curia in order to take advantage of organizational machinery that already existed. John also may have understood that excluding the Curia from a process that might naturally fall within their purview might alienate them even further from the idea of an ecumenical council. But liberals within and outside the Church were concerned that the Curia controlled so much of the agenda for the council. This concern extended to the 800 theologians who were members of the preparatory commissions and who actually created the documents; most of these men were not viewed as forward thinking, to say the least.

Finally, liberals were dismayed at what later occurred at the Roman Synod in January 1960, which many viewed as a kind of practice run for the upcoming Vatican Council. The synod (a Greek word for “assembly,” used especially in regard to Church meetings) was held to address specific issues in the Diocese of Rome, but it mainly rubber-stamped previous and long-held Curia decisions regarding priests—for instance, that they were forbidden from driving cars unless in cases of emergency, and they could not be alone with a woman, a communist, or a heretic.

Not exactly illuminating ecumenical fodder. But John had a trick left up his sleeve. In addition to creating the preparatory commissions, he created a so-called Secretariat for Promoting Christian Unity and named as its head Augustin Bea, a Jesuit he had promoted to cardinal on December 14, 1959. As Ottaviani was to the conservatives, Bea was to the liberals. Eighty years old, so frail, as one historian has written, “that it seemed a puff of wind would blow him over,” Bea had been around the Curia for a long time. He had been Pius XII’s personal confessor (and so could not be attacked on grounds that he was against the previous Vatican regime) and was tough enough to survive and triumph through the worst curial infighting. A secretariat did not quite have the status of a commission, but John made sure everyone knew how important he considered the position. When he named Bea to the position, he articulated its importance: “In order to show in a special manner our love and good will towards those who bear the name of Christ, but are separated from this Apostolic See.”

This was a signal to Christians of all faiths that the pope was seriously interested in beginning the process of ecumenical reunion. As Bea himself put it, “So we may say . . . that the council should make an indirect contribution to union, breaking the ground in a long-term policy for preparation for unity.” In terms of theology, Bea (along with the pope) felt that while the so-called revealed truth of God was immutable, its formulation—how it was expressed and delivered to the faithful—was not. The key word for both John and Bea was aggiornamento—“updating.” The council would be all about expressing the old in a new way.