CHAPTER TWELVE

A New Pentecost? (November–December 1962)

On November 6, the Holy Father stepped in to the proceedings to change the rules allowing the discussion to be cut off by the president, effectively enforcing the ten-minute speaking limit. A week later, in another instance of his guidance, he inserted the name of Saint Joseph into the liturgy, to the protestation of the Orthodox and Protestants in attendance, who felt Joseph had already been sufficiently honored.

Although John refrained from attending the council meetings in Saint Peter’s Basilica, the bishops and cardinals who were engaged in their historic debate felt his presence strongly. He met almost daily with groups of bishops from different countries, having what one prelate called “intimate and familiar discussions.” He did not downplay the battles raging within the council sessions: “Yes, there’s an argument going on,” he told a group of French bishops. “That’s all right. It must happen. But it should be done in a brotherly spirit. It will all work out. Moi, je suis optimiste.” (I, for one, am optimistic.)

Aside from these meetings, the pope spread the word about his true feelings through his close supporters. Cardinal Montini was one; he argued on behalf of John in one session that liturgical changes were necessary—and within Church tradition—because they would more effectively serve the needs of the laity. “It is,” he said, quoting Saint Augustine, “better that we should be blamed by literary critics than that we should not be understood by the people.”

It was in fact a clever tactic on the part of the progressive faction within the council to use the words and actions of revered Church Fathers against the traditionalists. One of the things that had so enraged Ottaviani was that the reformers often brought up the example of Pius XII when justifying their desire to make changes in the liturgy. (Pius had allowed Saturday evening masses to fulfill the Sunday mass obligation. He also changed the strict fasting for receiving Holy Communion.) “If you want to use the authority of Pius XII, use it not just when it agrees with you,” he scolded liberal factions, pointing out that Pius was firmly against changing the Latin Mass.

But the progressives persisted in stealing the conservatives’ own sacred cows and milking them for all they were worth. Cardinal Ernesto Ruffini, a staunch conservative and ally of Ottaviani, told the council that communion should not be offered under both species because the Council of Trent in 1551 had forbidden it. (Grasping at straws, he also claimed that it was unhygienic as well as inconvenient for busy priests.) But Cardinal Bea, John’s inspired pick for the Secretariat for Promoting Christian Unity, turned the tables on Ruffini through an adroit use of historical research. True, the bishops at Trent had voted against communion with both bread and wine, but the vote had been close, eighty-seven to seventy-nine, which, he pointed out, would not meet the current council standards, in which a two-thirds majority was needed for approval.

And, he added, Pius IV’s own representatives at Trent had approved allowing laypeople to receive the cup. In fact, two years after Trent, Pius IV himself had allowed the change in certain German dioceses.

Dogma, Bea and the others maintained, was immutable, but its expression was not.

On Sunday, November 4, the feast of his beloved Saint Charles Borromeo and the fourth anniversary of his coronation, John attended Mass at Saint Peter’s. Cardinal Montini celebrated, but John gave the homily. The pope spoke fondly of Charles Borromeo, praising his contributions “to the renewal of Church life through the celebration of provincial councils and diocesan synods.” After beginning his homily in Latin, he delivered the majority of it in Italian, a language, he said, “better understood by the greater part of this assembly; better understood by the crowds of faithful who have come to celebrate the anniversary of their Pastor and Father.”

He finished with a gentle reminder to the Church fathers present:

 

It is perfectly natural that new times and new circumstances should suggest different forms and methods for transmitting externally the one and same doctrine, and of clothing it in a new dress. Yet in the living substance is always the purity of the evangelical and apostolic truth, in perfect conformity with the teaching of the holy Church, who often applies to herself the maxim: “Only one art, but a thousand forms.”

 

That is, ars una, species mille. Although couched indirectly, the meaning of the pope’s homily was not lost on the Vatican Curia, who saw that they were steadily losing ground. An air of confusion and excitement grew at the council; change was in the air, but no one knew, not quite yet, what was going to happen.

During some of the longer and more boring speeches at council sessions, the bishops would retreat to a little coffee shop, one of two that the pope had ordered set up in the external corridors leading from Saint Peter’s side entrances. Knowing his men, John had said that if there was no place to smoke, “the bishops will be puffing under their miters.” There they chatted with all types of council observers, non-Catholics included. With conversation at times far more scintillating than the speeches ringing out in council sessions, the prelates often had to be urgently summoned two or three times to return to work.

In the middle weeks of November, the council began to examine a number of issues relating to the reading of the Divine Office, the Church calendar (the liturgical year), sacred ornaments and vestments, Church music, and Church art. Some of the discussions became long-winded, forcing wholesale retreats to the coffee bar. One bishop made a tiresome speech on the Virgin Mary and was cut off by Cardinal Ruffini, presiding for the day, who said, “One does not preach to preachers.”

Bishop Petar Cule of Yugoslavia did just that, however, in a nervous, stuttering voice, pleading for Saint Joseph to be included in the list of saints recited in the canon of the Mass, at which point an impatient Ruffini interrupted, “Complete your holy and eloquent speech. We all love Saint Joseph and we hope there are many saints in Yugoslavia.” After watching this on closed-circuit television, John stepped in to defend Cule, since he knew something most of the other prelates did not—that Cule’s halting manner came from being tortured and nearly killed by communists in Yugoslavia.

There were, however, lighter moments too. When Cardinal Spellman and Cardinal McIntyre, the two most prominent American Church leaders opposed to the use of English in the Mass, voted in favor of allowing priests to read their breviary (the Liturgy of the Hours, or book of daily prayers) in English, an Italian archbishop slapped his brow in mock horror. “These Americans,” he said. “Now they want the priest to pray in English and the people to pray in Latin!”

Since the Council of Trent in the sixteenth century, the Catholic Church had placed more emphasis on tradition—on the body of religious truths as passed down by the apostles. The Bible and tradition had been seen as two separate, independent sources of revelations, with the scriptures being given lesser emphasis, not the least because of the Protestant emphasis on them.

In the years leading up to Vatican II, however, many theologians felt that the Bible and tradition must properly be viewed as whole (as indeed they were in the early Church)—two roads stemming from the same source and leading to the same place. As the influential theologian Father Yves Conger put it, “There is not a single dogma which the Church holds by Scripture alone, nor a single dogma which it holds by tradition alone.” This was far closer to the Protestant view and one held by many Catholic scholars. The Theological Commission, however, ignored this topic when it wrote its presentation to the council.

The council reached another crisis on November 14 when it began to debate the next schema, De fontibus (On the Sources of Revelation), which had been prepared by the Theological Commission chaired by Cardinal Ottaviani. If the liturgy was an expression of Catholic belief, revelation—how God spoke the truth to humankind, through tradition and scripture—was the very essence of it. Protestant churches believed that God revealed himself through the Bible alone.

An American Protestant observer wrote, “The dam broke.” During the opening discussion on De fontibus, there were a couple of interventions, with Maximos IV Saigh and Joseph De Smedt of the Secretariat of Christian Unity asking for a new type of discourse.

As the session began on November 14, Ottaviani—finally back after leaving angrily two weeks before—announced the schema (which those present had already read) and was followed by Monsignor Salvatore Garofalo, a biblical scholar who summarized its contents and expressed the opinion, held by Ottaviani and the conservative faction, that the Church needed to condemn error by its own theologians in order to keep its doctrine pure.

Then Cardinal Ruffini declared that, if nothing else, the schema should be approved by the council simply because there was no other document available to take its place: “It would be as though a calamitous storm suddenly swept away the foundations of a great building.” This was absurd—there were numerous theological documents already circulating, unofficial ones to be sure, that promulgated the opposing view, so many that Ottaviani felt forced to inveigh against them as “unauthorized documents that were against the rules and only caused trouble.”

There were a number of problems that the progressive faction had with the schema as written by the Theological Commission. One common one, as Cardinal Achille Liénart of France rose to announce, was that it was “a cold and scholarly formulation, while Revelation is a supreme gift of God—God speaking directly to us.” The schema as presented dealt not with the “gift” of God, but with what most people would consider technicalities.

Too, it was dogmatic in tone, lacking a certain generosity of spirit, which ran counter to John’s wish for a pastoral council as expressed in his opening remarks. Liénart was followed by Cardinal Frings, who attacked the document’s lack of ecumenism: “What is said here about inspiration and inerrancy [of the scriptures] is at once offensive to our separated brothers and harmful to the proper liberty required in any scientific theory.”

Despite the best efforts of conservatives like Ruffini and Siri, liberals continued to speak against the document. Cardinal Joseph Ritter of Saint Louis walked to the microphone and announced, “Rejiciendum est!” (It must be rejected.) He went on to attack the conservative draft in harsh terms: “What a tedious and unrealistic attitude it betrays toward the Word of God which we call the Scriptures.”

Later, the eloquent Cardinal Bea capped all the progressive discussions with this cogent point: “What our times demand is a pastoral approach, demonstrating the love and kindness that flow from religion.” The schema, he continued, “represents the work of a theological school, not what the better theologians think.”

Ottaviani and Ruffini were so upset at the objections raised by the liberal faction that they complained directly to the pope. John, however, was unmoved, perhaps even a little amused at the debate. He went on to tell them that things had been worse at the Council of Trent, where an enraged Latin bishop tore at the beard of a Greek prelate. Their protests were for naught, however. On November 20, the bishops voted to strike down the schema, 1,368 to 822, just short of the two-thirds majority required for motion. Both liberals and conservatives were discouraged. Not until the third session of the council would the debate be resolved. Scripture, tradition, and the magesterium (the Church’s teaching authority) would be defined and reaffirmed as the sources of divine revelation for all—and for all time—in Dei verbum, the Dogmatic Constitution on Divine Revelation.

The first session of the council was due to end December 8, and what had they accomplished but a good deal of bickering? In terms of the Theological Commission’s schema, they were now required to go back to Section One and begin debating all over again. How were they to break this logjam?

Later that night, Cardinal Paul-Emile Léger of Montreal, a former close friend of John from his days as Paris nuncio, visited the pope. The fighting going on in session disturbed Léger, and he told the pope, as he later recalled, that “piercing thorns were tormenting my soul.” John told him that he should “go forward. Do what your heart tells you.”

The influential Léger returned to the council for the discussion of the upcoming schema on the Church’s relationship to mass media, movies, and television and forcefully made his feelings known.

In the meantime, unbeknownst to members of the council, John—fully aware that if discussion of Church issues stalled at this stage, his council would most likely stall as well—set up a special committee to deal with the failed schema on Revelation. In a moment of inspiration, he paired the conservative Ottaviani and the liberal Bea to co-chair the committee, making a strong point, in his role as Holy Father, that it was time for the squabbling prelates to get along. He directed Ottaviani and Bea to rewrite the schema, giving the liberal faction a symbolic victory. As John W. O’Malley, S.J., explains in What Happened at Vatican II, the committee “dealt a heavy blow to the control the Doctrinal Commission was trying to exert” on the Vatican Council.

On November 21, as bishops assembled to vote to suspend debate on De fontibus, word spread about the new committee, to the relief of those in favor of and opposed to the schema alike.

This would be the only time during the Second Vatican Council that John would enter directly into the proceedings, but his intervention arrived at a critical time. By stepping in when he did, John changed the course of the entire Second Vatican Council. The importance of his action can hardly be exaggerated.

 

At the very end of November, the official Vatican paper, L’Osservatore Romano, admitted for the first time what almost everyone had divined—that Pope John was ill. The paper wrote that he had been forced to cancel papal audiences because “the symptoms of gastric disturbance were getting worse; for some time, the Holy Father has been on a diet and undergoing medical treatment that have led to rather severe anemia.” Nowhere was the word cancer mentioned. In fact, the pope’s doctor had been giving him cobalt-ray treatment for his stomach cancer, which in turn had caused the anemia. Treatments had failed; John now understood that he had less than a year to live, according to his doctor’s estimate.

The Holy Father was struggling—he had to be helped to appear at his window for Angelus on December 2—yet he was determined to write the encyclical that would become Pacem in terris, which had come to him in a moment of inspiration during the Cuban missile crisis.

Despite his poor health, he continued to avidly follow the doings of the council as it reached its final days. The schema up for discussion as November ended was one on the Unity of the Church, which had been prepared by the Commission for the Oriental Churches. As the name of the commission implied, it was concerned with the ways in which union might be achieved with the Eastern Orthodox faith.

There were two other schemata on unity presented as well: one from the Theological Commission concerning itself with closing the gap between Catholics and Protestants, and one from Bea’s Secretariat for Christian Unity, which was concerned with ecumenism generally. Many questioned why all three of these efforts did not stem from the Secretariat for Christian Unity, under whose purview they might naturally fall; the answer was that a rivalry existed between commissions, especially that of Ottaviani’s Theological Commission, which considered itself first among equals.

But John, who was the true first among equals, had planted the seed of ecumenism, and it would not be dislodged or uprooted. It would bear fruit in the third session of the council, two years later.

It was, of course, ironic that there was such disunity apparent in a discussion of unity. Naturally, given the tenor of the council, Ottaviani’s schemata were overwhelmingly defeated as being too authoritative and not ecumenical enough. Seeing that there was little he could salvage, Ottaviani introduced his next schema, ominously titled “On the Nature of the Church Militant.” A seemingly upbeat Ottaviani told the assembled:

 

I expect to hear the usual litanies from you all: it’s not ecumenical and it’s too scholastic, it’s not pastoral and it’s too negative, and similar charges. This time I will make a confession to you: those who are accustomed to say “Take it away and replace it” are already poised for battle. . . . All that remains for me is to fall silent for, as Scripture says, where no one is listening, there is no point in speaking.

 

Presented in a jocular tone of voice, these words caused laughter and applause, and Ottaviani left the microphone smiling, an unusual sight, given his fortunes during the council. However, the Theological Commission’s schema reasserted the mystical body of Christ as associated only with the Catholic Church—all other Christians (and non-Christians) were out of luck. The schema portrayed the Church “militant” (essentially, the faithful of the Church) as a kind of pyramid, a hierarchy with laypeople at its base, followed by priests and pope. In expounding on “states of evangelical perfection,” Ottaviani’s schema went on to say that true holiness could only be achieved by those who had taken vows of poverty, chastity, and obedience, although the laity did have certain rights and responsibilities within the Church—to live according to gospel precepts, to preach and to teach, to raise Christian families, and to be “vicars of Christ” in the secular world—which added up to a kind of vocation over and above their secular calling.

Perhaps the best response to this, most observers agreed, came from Bishop Emile Jozef de Smedt of Brugge, Belgium, who deconstructed the schema into three areas of criticism. One was “triumphalism,” by which he meant priests seemed to have a leg up on getting to heaven compared to the laity. The next was “clericalism”—that big pyramid with the pope and the clergy on top of the laity. Finally, there was “juridicism.” Instead of dealing with the pastoral Church, de Smedt argued, the schema split hairs, inhabited by the petty spirit of legalism. This last, of course, was a criticism of almost every document that came from the Theological Commission. And, as with these other schemata, the one on the Church militant went nowhere.

So, it would seem, after a century or more of conservative ascendancy in the Church, the progressive faction was triumphant.

But was it? What, exactly, did this first session, now rapidly drawing to a close, succeed in doing? Had the notion of aggiornamento been satisfied? Was the Church updated?

Cardinal Giovanni Battista Montini put his finger on the worries felt by prelates on both sides of the aisle when he wrote, “A vast amount of excellent material has been brought together, but it is too disparate and uneven. . . . A central and controlling idea is needed to coordinate this immense material.” Later, in a speech to the assembled Church fathers on December 5, Montini told his peers, “Some are afraid that the conciliar discussion will be endless and that instead of bringing people together it will divide them even more. But that will not happen. The first session has been a running-in period. The second will progress much more swiftly.”

The second session was scheduled to begin in May 1963, but the bishops convinced John to delay it until September so they could spend more time in their home dioceses. Though fairly certain he wouldn’t live long enough to open the next session, he remained hopeful. He told a crowd of onlookers that “good health, which has threatened for a moment to absent itself, is now returning, has actually returned.”

On December 4, he blessed pilgrims to Rome from his window. A vast crowd gathered, not just pilgrims, but the bishops of the council, who played hooky, as it were, to see the pope. When he appeared in the window, he was greeted by a huge roar of approval. He waved a hand for silence, and then told the rapt audience, “My children, Divine Providence is with us. As you see, from one day to the next there is progress, not going down, but in coming up slowly. . . . Sickness, then convalescence. Now we are convalescing.”

Waving an arm in a gesture that encompassed the whole of the square, John alluded to what he thought was so important about the council: “What a spectacle we see before us today—the Church grouped together here in full representation—behold its bishops; behold its priests; behold its Christian people. A whole family here present, the family of Christ!”

Angelo Roncalli had remained close to his large, extended family; Pope John was equally attached to the family of Christ. Despite all the infighting and the politics, it was what he wanted the Church fathers in the council to understand, and the reason his sympathies lay with the more progressive views of Cardinal Bea and others—they wanted to open up the Church, to welcome all with open arms, as Marianna Roncalli once welcomed beggars to her overcrowded table for a bit of polenta.

On December 7, the last plenary meeting of the first session was held, and the pope surprised everyone by slipping in through a side door and walking, unaided, to take his seat. He was greeted by applause, prayed with those present, and then quietly left. On December 8, the final day of the first session of the Second Vatican Council, and the Feast of Immaculate Conception, John addressed the assembly. He was pale but vigorous and seemed to get stronger as he pushed his glasses up on his nose and began to speak in Latin:

 

Now that the bishops of the five continents are returning to their beloved dioceses . . . we should like to dwell a little on what has been done so far, and to map out the future. . . .

The first session was like a slow and solemn introduction to the great work of the council. . . . It was necessary for brothers, gathered together from afar around a common hearth, to make each other’s close acquaintance; it was necessary for them to look at each other squarely in order to understand each other’s hearts. . . .

[The second session] will be a new Pentecost indeed, which will cause the church to renew her interior riches and to extend her maternal care in every sphere of human activity. . . . In this light we look forward to your return, we salute all of you “with a holy kiss,” while at the same time we call down upon you the most abundant blessings of the Lord, of which the apostolic blessing is the pledge and the promise.

 

When he finished, John stepped down from the platform and walked out the side door of the basilica. The first session of the council—the only one he would see—was over. While the great burning issues of the Church—the liturgy, the reach of ecumenism, the true role of laity—had yet to be decided, John’s huge accomplishment was to make the far-flung bishops realize that the Church was truly “catholic,” truly universal. When he addressed the crowd on December 8, he told them, “Each man must feel in his heart the beat of his brother’s heart.” And it was not only the bishops who profited by this, but an entire world that had now begun to look at the Catholic Church in a very different light indeed.

The Second Vatican Council, in the long run, under the direction of Paul VI, did not tackle artificial birth control, clerical celibacy, and substantive reform of the Roman Curia (all of which Paul would address himself). But it did address matters such as the liturgy in the vernacular, the lay apostolate, the Church in the modern world, the role of clergy and religious orders, collegiality among bishops, the restoration of a permanent diaconate, Christian unity, and—of maximum consequence—the relation of the Catholic Church with other faiths, including Judaism.

 

After the bishops went home to their dioceses and the seats in Saint Peter’s Basilica were taken down and the crowds disappeared from the piazza (relatively speaking, of course), John settled back into the business of being pope. Despite his poor health, he had a pressing issue to resolve. For seventeen years, the Soviets had held in dire imprisonment Metropolitan Josef Slipyi, the Orthodox archbishop of Lviv, Ukraine. Once again, Norman Cousins, the editor of the popular magazine Saturday Review, was able to effect a breakthrough; attending the council, he informed a few cardinals close to John that he had a meeting fixed with Nikita Khrushchev in mid-December, at which he would press for Slipyi’s release.

John passed a message through Cousins to the Russian premier that he would view releasing the metropolitan as a sign of extraordinary good will. Cousins met with Khrushchev and then passed on a lengthy report of the encounter to John. In it, the Saturday Review editor said that the Soviet leader didn’t know where Slipyi was at present. However, Khrushchev told Cousins, “I will have the case examined and if there are assurances that it will not be turned into a political case, I will not rule out liberation. I’ve had other enemies, and one more at large doesn’t bother me.”

Khrushchev was still thankful for the pope’s intervention during the Cuban missile crisis, and even compared the two of them: “We both come from humble origins and worked the land in our youth.” For Slipyi to be released, however, the Vatican would have to provide something to Khrushchev in return—a private back channel of communication opened up, which would serve the Russians well in case of another global emergency.

On December 19, Cousins had a forty-minute audience with John and delivered a message from Khrushchev wishing him good health. “I get many messages from people who are praying that my illness may be without pain,” he replied. “But pain is not my enemy. I have memories, so many marvelous memories.”

One of these memories was of being apostolic delegate to Bulgaria, of riding through the rugged backwoods to meet the ordinary people of the country. “The Russian people are a wonderful people,” he told Cousins. “We must not condemn them because we don’t like their political system. They have a deep spiritual inheritance which they have not lost. We can talk to them. We must always try to speak to the goodness that is in people.”

In this spirit, on December 22, John personally typed a reply to Khrushchev that began, “Cordial thanks for the courteous message of good wishes. We return them from the heart in words that come from on high: Peace to men of good will.” He also enclosed a copy of his Christmas address, which he delivered later that day, as well as a picture of the Virgin Mary and a copy of a prayer that John had recited ever since his seminary days.

Pope John spent the last days of 1962 working on Pacem in terris and resting as much as possible. TIME magazine had named him its “Man of the Year,” and fulsome compliments came in from around the world, both for the pope himself and for the spirit of unity fostered by his great council. Still hoping for Slipyi’s release, John wrote in his diary:

 

December 26. A calm Saint Stephen’s day. The liturgy made a great impression on me. My spirit continues to be concerned with whatever it is that the Lord is mysteriously doing. Is not this Kroucheff—or Nikita Khrushchev as he signs himself—preparing some surprise for us? After a long meditation last night . . . I got out of bed and then, kneeling before the crucified Lord, I consecrated my life and the final sacrifice of my whole being for my part in this great undertaking, the conversion of Russia to the Catholic Church. At noon during the general audience in the Sala Clementina, still under the same inspiration, I put great fervor of heart and lips into the prayer, Domine, tu scis quia amo te. (Lord, you know that I love you; John 21:17.)