CHAPTER ELEVEN

Aggiornamento, Si! (October 1962)

On July 15, 1962, the Vatican sent out 2,850 invitations to those who would deliberate at the council, which was set to open on October 11 at Saint Peter’s Basilica. These invitees included eighty-five cardinals and 2,131 bishops, as well as abbots and the superior-generals of religious orders of men. They came from all over the world. Also invited were periti, or theological experts, there to help the bishops.

Pope John XXIII made sure to invite observers-delegates from other religions. A representative from almost every non-Catholic religion attended the council, and each one was given a good seat. And, because the business of the council was conducted in Latin, the Vatican also provided translation services. Each observer-delegate was also invited to a smaller, more private meeting as honored guests “in the house of their father,” as John said.

As October approached, Rome buzzed with the excitement of visitors—council attendees, tourists, and, because of the magnitude of the event, the world’s press. About 1,200 reporters from around the world covered the opening of the council, including one young unaccredited American journalist who disguised himself in a cassock and managed to sneak through three levels of security, including Swiss Guardsmen and Vatican plainclothes detectives.

Saint Peter’s itself was spruced up with new bathrooms, two coffee bars, thirty-seven microphones—one observer said that “a whispered note can be heard in the remotest part” of the Church—and 2,900 seats. This alone cost the Vatican $1,000,000 (about $7,000,000 in today’s dollars). This did not include transportation and lodgings for those bishops who could not afford to pay their own way, all of which would severely tax Vatican coffers during the next four years.

This extraordinary council would be public, for all the world to see. There was the feeling that, unlike previous councils—which were directed mainly to clergymen—decisions made here would affect Catholics as they went about their everyday worship. In a sense, the still-unstated aims of the council—unstated in part because John had deliberately not done so—indicated that the council itself would be one of broad focus and scope. Anything could happen.

On October 4, 1962, just one week before the council opened, John traveled by train to the tomb of Saint Francis of Assisi for his feast day and then on to Loreto, to the shrine of the Holy Virgin. The distance was only a couple of hundred miles, but it was the first time that a pope had traveled by train in a century, since all popes during that time were more or less “prisoners of the Vatican.” People flocked to stations along the way, waving and cheering. Fifty thousand gathered at Loreto, where John prayed at the shrine of the Blessed Virgin for the success of the council. “This date in my life should be written in gold,” he told the well-wishers.

Only a few people knew that John was seriously ill. In the week leading up to September 23, he had undergone a battery of tests, which determined that certain intestinal pains he was experiencing indicated stomach cancer, probably of the same type that had afflicted others in his family. There was no cure, and his secretary, Monsignor Loris Capovilla, wrote of the “unexpected and disconcerting news of the illness that threatened the life of the pope.” It was decided that for the time being this startling news should be kept private, so as not to influence the outcome of the council, but it was apparent that John, about to turn eighty-one, would not have long to live. The council would be his first, and last, grand project.

Thursday, October 11, 1962, dawned gray and drizzly, but the sun would soon arrive to reveal a spectacle quite literally medieval in its splendor. At 8:30, the bronze doors of the papal palace on the side of Saint Peter’s Square swung open, and row upon row of bishops wearing white copes and miters made their way through the square toward Saint Peter’s Basilica. Following this mass of white came a moving square of red: the College of Cardinals. And, finally, carried high in his papal sedan, came Pope John. He had never much liked riding in the chair, and to some observers he appeared uncharacteristically stiff and uncomfortable. As he was carried through the massed crowd of thousands, however, he began to wave and smile, then joyfully wept, as he blessed those in the square.

Once inside the basilica, under the bright glare of television lights, the bishops, cardinals, periti, and observers filled their tiered seats. Then, John—who had since departed from his sedan—walked the length of the broad aisle of Saint Peter’s and took his place before the high altar on his throne. Pointedly, he had refused the usual grand papal throne, with red damask canopy, and ordered a less pretentious one. Mass was then said, in Greek and Latin, and the Sistine Choir sang hymns. After the Mass, the pope read, in accordance with canon law, a profession of faith dating from 1564: “I confess and hold the Catholic faith, outside of which no one can be saved.”

The very pomp of the ceremony combined with such an unecumenical oath smacked of the old, ornate, and rigid Catholic Church, but this was far from the case with the pope’s thirty-seven-minute address, delivered in Latin, which was one of the most extraordinary public statements ever made by a pontiff.

Peering through clear, gold-rimmed spectacles as he read in a “clear and resonant” voice that belied his age, John told those in the basilica (and, in effect, the world) that he was tired of hearing the words of naysayers within his own Holy Offices:

 

In the daily exercise of our pastoral office, we sometimes have to listen, much to our regret, to voices of persons, who though burning with zeal, are not endowed with much sense of discretion of measure. In these modern times, they can see nothing but prevarication and ruin. They say that our era, in comparison with past eras, is getting worse. And they behave as though they had learned nothing from history, which is nonetheless the great teacher of life. . . .

We feel that we must disagree with those prophets of doom, who are always forecasting disaster as though the end of the world were at hand.

 

At this point in the pope’s speech, bishops stole glances at Curia conservatives like Cardinal Ottaviani, Cardinal Giuseppe Siri, and numerous other cardinals, all of whom were seated close to John. It was rather extraordinary, like an American president scolding his cabinet at a State of the Union address. John did acknowledge the conservative cardinals among him, saying that the Church “must never depart from the sacred patrimony of truth received from the Fathers.” However, he also pointed out that Catholicism had to “ever look to the present, to new conditions and new forms of life, introduced into the modern world, which have opened up new avenues to the Catholic apostolate.”

John went on to say that he hadn’t called the council to “discuss one article or another of the fundamental doctrine of the Church” but to take “a step forward toward doctrinal penetration.” The repository of belief that all Catholics shared, the pope said, “should be studied and expounded according to the methods of research and literary forms of modern thought.” This meant that historical and scientific studies of the Church and the Bible, in particular, were welcome in John’s world; he wasn’t afraid to shed rational light on the mysteries of faith.

He strongly emphasized two points in closing. “Nowadays,” he said, “the bride of Christ prefers to make use of the medicine of mercy rather than severity. She considers that she meets the needs of the present day by demonstrating the validity of her teaching rather than by condemnation.” There would be no thundering anathemas in John’s council, in other words. And, finally, he made a call for unity: “The entire Christian family has not yet fully attained the visible unity of truth.” The key to “the brotherly unity of all” would be love and charity.

This was an extraordinary message, one that let the world know where John stood—and where he wanted his council to go. Aggiornamento was at the heart of the speech, but the updating John had in mind was not merely window dressing or a useful slogan but a profound change in the way Catholics practiced their religion and viewed themselves and their Church.

John would not enter the council hall again until the second-to-last day of the session, in December, although he would watch the proceedings on closed-circuit television. But at the very beginning of the council, John made a point of making himself as visible as possible. On the evening of October 11, half a million people gathered in Saint Peter’s Square. Catholic Action youths formed a huge cross around the obelisk at the center of the square, chanting, hoping the pope would come out on his balcony. He did, and was extraordinarily moved by the sight. Pointing up at the moon that shone down over the massive basilica, he told the multitude, “My voice is an isolated one, but it echoes the voice of the whole world. Here, in effect, the world is represented.” Before he went back inside, he told the crowd, “Now go back home and give your little children a kiss—tell them it is from Pope John.”

The next day, John met with seventy-nine diplomats, also invited to the council, to discuss international brotherhood and his desire for world peace, ironically a few months before the Cuban missile crisis. He also met with some of the 1,200 journalists covering the council, most of whom would leave at the end of the first session. Though he told them that “there are no political machinations here,” few believed him.

Journalists in general grew frustrated with the secrecy surrounding council deliberations. Unless they were Italian reporters who were veterans of the Vatican beat, journalists could not figure out exactly what was happening, especially from the deliberately vague press releases sent out by the Curia-controlled Vatican Press Office, many of which were written, as one London periodical later complained, in “English so peculiarly outrageous that one hardly knows whether to laugh or cry.”

John had made his humanist sentiments known to the world, but the council couldn’t avoid the classic battle between liberals and conservatives (though that is a great simplification). It is surely accurate to say some council fathers wished to preserve the status quo while others advocated change. Some have called the change agents aggiornamentos. Their influence was felt even before the council opened. Swiss theologian Hans Küng was already popular in progressive circles. Published in 1960, his book, Council, Reform, and Reunion, had been translated into eight languages. The American Jesuit John Courtney Murray led the charge for religious liberty, yet noted that “the issue under all issues” was the development of doctrine” (Murray’s emphasis).

One progressive theologian, Father Jean Danielou, initially excluded by Alfredo Ottaviani from the council’s preparatory commission, was later added to the council roster as a peritus—and a hugely influential one at that. John agreed to Danielou’s exclusion from the preparatory commission but insisted on him for the council. Ottaviani also reluctantly accepted the liberals Yves Congar and Henri de Lubac. Other so-called progressives included Johannes Willebrands, a future cardinal, member of the Secretariat of Christian Unity and a leader in ecumenism and admirer of John Henry Newman; Karl Rahner; Gerard Phillips of Belgium; and the Belgian Edward Schillebeeckx.

Among the cardinals considered progressives were Augustin Bea; Achille Lienart, bishop of Lille; Julius Dopfner, archbishop of Munich and Freising; Josef Frings, archbishop of Cologne; and Franz Koenig, who had taught theology at Vienna and Salzburg and who brought Karl Rahner (whose writing had already been suppressed) as an adviser. Also, Bernhard Alfrink, archbishop of Utrecht; Paul-Emile Léger, archbishop of Montreal; Leon-Joseph Suenens, archbishop of Malines-Brussels—“northerners” in opposition to the southern European bloc.

Patriarch Maximos IV, who led the Melkite group, was a colorful sort of renegade. (One of his allies was Elias Zoghby, Melkite partriarchal vicar for Egypt.) Maximos spoke French, not Latin, did not wear the Western bishop’s miter, spoke to Eastern patriarchs first, before he spoke to his Western counterparts, and as early as May 23, 1959, suggested John establish the position of Secretariat for Christian Unity.

The conservative bloc included Cardinals Ottaviani; Ernesto Ruffini; Giuseppe Siri; Irishman Michael Browne, former master general of the Dominicans; Archbishop Dino Staffa, secretary of the Congregations for Seminaries and Universities; Arcadio Larrona, a Spaniard who was dubbed the soul of the opposition; Cardinal Rufino Santos of Manila; and Marcel-Francois Lefebvre, archbishop (not cardinal) of Dakar and recently elected head of the Holy Ghost Fathers. (Lefebvre, the most conservative of the lot, would later lead a major schismatic movement in the 1970s and beyond.) These members of the minority formed the international group of fathers, which included Geraldo de Proenca Sigaud of Brazil and Luigi Carli of Segni, Italy.

The sign that the council would not be a rubber stamp for the Curia, the pope, or anyone else came on Saturday, October 13, 1962, the council’s first working-day session. The council was broken down into ten separate commissions. Each commission, formed in advance of the council by the ten preparatory commissions, considered a specific issue—such as potential changes in the liturgy—and would then present draft proposals for decrees (known as schemata), which the bishops at large would later deliberate and, eventually, make final. The council’s first order of business was to elect sixteen bishops to run each commission, a total of 160 in all, although John appointed an additional eight members to each commission. The Curia approved in advance of the council the candidates for these highly important positions, expecting the assembled prelates to approve their choices.

But Cardinal Achille Lienart, bishop of Lille, France, offered a motion to delay voting for three days to learn more about the candidates. His motion was met with applause. This initial maneuver cannot be overestimated.

Much to the dismay of Cardinals Ottaviani and Tisserant, who presided over the day-to-day workings of the council, the bishops refused to vote for their approved list of candidates. Tisserant was forced to adjourn the meeting after only fifteen minutes, and when the session resumed on October 16, the bishops returned with their own list of candidates. “We found we were a council,” an American bishop present said, “called here not as schoolboys, but rather to give a considered opinion.”

The newspapers called it “The Revolt of the Bishops.” With great glee, parodying the response of hand-wringing Italian cardinals like Ottaviani, one English archbishop wrote in his diary, “Scandalous! What a sight before the whole world!”

Both sides spent the next week jockeying for position. It soon became clear that the Council of Presidents, the body empowered to structure the sessions and provide the agenda, was in reality ineffectual and even detrimental. For instance, Cardinal Tisserant and the Council of Presidents had scheduled the liturgy as the first topic up for debate—a subject that would be sure to seriously divide the conservatives and liberals—rather than something less controversial that might allow them a chance to see that they could cooperate.

Cardinal Giovanni Montini, the future Pope Paul VI, wrote a letter to John in which he complained, “The choice of the liturgy as the first topic for discussion, although it was not placed first in the volumes distributed to us and although there was no need for it to come first, confirms the fear that there is no pre-established plan.” Montini offered to the pope a structure for the council that would address all-important issues in at least three two-month sessions, spread out over a three-year period. This was bad news both for John, whose poor health naturally made him hope for a brief council, and for Cardinal Ottaviani, who also wanted a short council, with a Curia-approved agenda quickly decided upon, but Montini was prescient (it actually took four sessions and four years).

While the council worked, John went about his daily business, making appointments and visiting various parishes within the diocese of Rome. Word of his illness eventually leaked out; much of Rome gossiped that he was to have an operation on December 10, which was not true. On October 23—the day discussion of the liturgy began—John was involved in a geopolitical drama of great importance. Unhappy with the presence of American nuclear warheads in Turkey, Soviet Union Premier Nikita Khrushchev had secretly installed Soviet missiles within Cuba; these missiles were discovered by American reconnaissance flights. President John F. Kennedy announced a blockade on all Soviet ships heading for Cuba, and the world waited tensely for a nuclear war to begin.

As one of a number of backdoor options open to him, Kennedy reached out to Saturday Review editor Norman Cousins, who was known to have connections with both the Russians and the Vatican. Kennedy asked him if he would be willing to make contact with the Vatican, and Cousins, through an intermediary, was able to get a message through to Pope John, asking him to do anything in his power to help persuade Khrushchev to stand down from the brink. John did two things. In his weekly radio address on October 24, he urged both countries to show restraint: “The pope always speaks well of those statesmen, on whatever side, who strive to come together to avoid war and bring peace to humanity.” Later, in a private note to the Soviet embassy in Rome, he delivered a more pointed message: “To promote, encourage, and accept negotiations, always and on every level, is a rule of wisdom that draws down heavenly and earthly blessings.”

Khrushchev was already seeking a way out of the situation; the pope’s message allowed him to present himself to the world as a peacemaker.

Ironically, however, war was also on the verge of breaking out at the Vatican Council as deliberations on potential changes in the liturgy began. It kicked off with an examination of the eight-chapter-long schema written by more progressive bishops and theologians. It argued that changing Church liturgy to keep abreast of modern times would bring more people into the fold, not fewer, as the conservatives, worried about losing the purity of traditional approaches, argued.

Jesuit Father John W. O’Malley, in his authoritative study, What Happened at Vatican II, puts the issue succinctly:

 

The first issue protractedly debated, however, was the place of Latin in the liturgy, which intermittently occupied the council for several weeks. The issue, important in its own right, also had deeper ramifications. It was a first, awkward wrestling with the question of the larger direction that the council should take—confirm the status quo or move notably beyond it. The council resolved the question of Latin by taking a moderate, somewhat ambiguous, position. After the council that position got trumped by the most basic principle Vatican II adopted on the liturgy—encouragement of the full participation of the whole assembly in the liturgical action. This is a good illustration of a wider phenomenon of the council. Sometimes the inner logic or dynamism of a document carried it beyond its original delimitations.

 

Some cardinals—Montini and Josef Frings of Germany, for instance—argued that changes in the liturgy embodied exactly what the pope had wished for in his council, an updating while keeping the sacred message of the Church the same. Two other cardinals indicated their frustration that the document as originally prepared had been altered before it was transmitted to the council session. Inserted by unknown hands had been a warning that this schema only dealt generally and theoretically with changing the liturgy and did not address the issue of local language versus Latin—that the practical application was ultimately up to the Holy See. Another section dealing with how the liturgy was in some ways biblically inspired was excised.

The bishops insisted that the original text be restored. They then indicated that what the majority desired was national and regional conferences of bishops who propose what liturgy changes might work in their own countries. Naturally, the pope would have to approve these suggested changes, as a way to safeguard the Church against false practices. The bishops knew—as did the cardinals of the Curia—that this might result in a certain decentralization of power within the Church hierarchy, since currently all changes to the liturgy had to go through the Sacred Congregation of Rites. This made the debate all the more fraught with tension.

Much of the discussion naturally focused on the use of Latin in the Mass. Cardinal Francis Spellman of New York indicated that he thought Latin should be continued, since it created a consistency and unity throughout the worldwide Church. Ironically enough, however, his own Latin was so poor that most of those present could not understand him, and he was forced to use a Latin translator to speak for him. In fact, many of those attending had problems understanding Latin well enough to follow the proceedings, and many eventually sought access to the translation services that Cardinal Bea provided for non-Catholic observers.

Influential Melkite leader Maximos IV Saigh, patriarch of Antioch and of all the Orient of Alexandria and Jerusalem, said, “All languages are liturgical, as the Psalmist says, ‘Praise the Lord, all ye people.’ . . . The Latin language is dead. But the Church is living, and its language . . . must also be living because it is intended for us human beings, not for angels.” The debate, which lasted three weeks, from October 22 to November 13, encompassed fifteen sessions, 328 interventions from the floor, and 297 written interventions from the council fathers.

Cardinal James McIntyre of Los Angeles and other conservative prelates backed Cardinal Spellman. Archbishop Enrico Dante, secretary of the Congregation of Rites, argued forcefully that the Mass should continue to be said in Latin and complained that there was no mention in the schema about the veneration of relics. This brought an angry response from Bishop García Marquez of Columbia, who wondered aloud how much longer the Church would embarrass itself by worshiping relics like the Blessed Virgin’s milk and Saint Joseph’s sandals. These things, he said, “should be reverently buried and heard of no more.” This had its humorous side—the cardinal presiding over the discussion had to cut him off for going on too long—but it showed the difference between the curial feeling in Rome and that of bishops out in the world.

Other prelates weighed in on the side of a vernacular Mass. One of the most influential was Cardinal Maurice Feltin of Paris, who depicted a scene in which a non-Catholic might find himself at a Mass unable to comprehend what was transpiring and thinking that this arcane and mysterious-seeming Latin rite was only for a certain in-group of people. How could this possibly help spread the word to those the Church had not yet reached? Other prelates pointed out that neither Christ nor his followers spoke Latin—indeed, the faithful did not even use Latin for the first 200 years of the Church’s existence. And, of course, Latin was not used in Eastern Catholic churches.

This issue divided the bishops throughout Vatican II. It came to symbolize the vast difference in outlook between the curial prelates and the pastoral ones. Archbishop Pio Parente, secretary of the Holy Office, made an impassioned speech in which he told the assembly, “We are true martyrs at the Holy Office. We know how much patience, how much work, how much prudence is needed to prepare monita (warnings), decrees, etc. It’s very hard work. You have no idea. And all this work is done in Latin, and a good thing, too.”

Generally speaking, it is never a good idea to complain to others about how hard you are working (compared to them), and this little outburst did not go over well with bishops who labored in pastoral work year after year. The session had by this time broadened its liturgical subject to include the concelebration of the Mass—two or more priests celebrating at the same time, which emphasized the communality of the rite. Another important issue under discussion was the reception of the Eucharist by the faithful in the form of wine as well as bread (at that time, only the priest drank from the chalice).

The majority of bishops present spoke in favor of these changes—although some wanted the Precious Blood to be offered to communicants only on special occasions—as well as in favor of saying at least portions of the Mass in the vernacular. Sensing a growing consensus, Cardinal Ottaviani rose on October 30 to head it off. “Are the Fathers planning a revolution?” he asked before coming down firmly on the conservative side of every issue. He said too many changes would confuse the laity. He claimed that concelebration of the Mass would turn it into a kind of theatrical production. Rather insultingly, he said that priests would not support this “new-fangled concelebration” once they learned that they would miss out on the Mass stipends often paid to priests to say Mass for a certain individual or intention.

The rule was that each speaker could only talk for fifteen minutes, but, carried away, Ottaviani continued to excoriate the liberals in the session, at which point Cardinal Bernard Alfrink of the Netherlands, president of that day’s proceedings, interrupted him. “Excuse me, Eminence,” he said, “but you have already spoken for more than fifteen minutes.” The fact that a Dutch cardinal cut off the mighty Ottaviani in mid-speech was at once astonishing and heartening to the liberals in the session, who broke out into applause. Muttering angrily, “Iam finivi, iam finivi!” (I’ve already finished), the furious Ottaviani left in a huff. He would not return for two weeks.