Christianity: The First Three Thousand Years (164 page)

There were three obstacles to this. One was Pope John's recall to Rome of a long-standing Vatican civil servant, Giovanni Battista Montini, who had been close to Pius XII until his broad sympathies brought him disfavour and decorous exile to the Archbishopric of Milan. Montini, now rewarded with the cardinal's hat denied him on his departure from Rome, knew how the Vatican worked, and he had good reason to find the outwitting of former colleagues a congenial task. Second was the arrival in 1962 of more than two thousand bishops in Rome, with Europe contributing less than half of their number. The bishops had been consecrated from within an ecclesiastical system paranoid about Modernism, but they brought with them a myriad of different practical experiences of what it was to be a Catholic in 1962. Third was the glare of publicity in which the council's proceedings took place. At Trent, the Holy Office had not faced the problem of journalists. Now the Vatican was forced to employ a press officer, although, with a disdainful symbolism, he was not actually given anywhere to sit during his attendance at the council's proceedings.
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This unprecedented gathering of Catholic leaders listened with fascination to a pope who in his inaugural address spoke excitedly of the providential guidance of the world's inhabitants to 'a new order of human relationships', and, far from lecturing the world, criticized those 'prophets of misfortune' who viewed it as 'nothing but betrayal and ruination'. It was important actually to have heard the address, since the subsequent published Latin version was substantially bowdlerized.
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More remarkable still were invitations to and the palpable presence of Protestant observers, who would have run the risk of being burned at the stake if they had dared to set foot in Rome during the Council of Trent - and, as an afterthought, even some Catholic women, mostly nuns, were asked to attend. None of these invitees could vote, but their presence was a symbol that the Church was going to reach out beyond its traditional fortifications. All the defensive draft documents so carefully prepared by the Curia were rejected and replaced with completely different texts. Two crucial agreed documents have remained central to the council's legacy - they have provided a springboard for action to some Catholics, an obstacle course to others.

The first,
Lumen Gentium
('The Light of Peoples'), was a decree on the nature of the Church. This document was one of those which had been transformed from the first draft prepared under the direction of Cardinal Ottaviani, the original being openly criticized for its lack of coherence by Cardinal Montini, while a Belgian cardinal dramatically expressed his scorn for its 'triumphalism', 'clericalism' and 'juridicism'.
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The utterly different document which emerged, complete with that new title suggested by the great Belgian ecumenist Cardinal Leo Jozef Suenens, represented a significant break with previous Roman Catholic statements in its careful choice of a verb: instead of a simple identification between the Church of Christ and the Church presided over by the pope, it stated that the Church 'subsisted in' the Roman Catholic Church. What did that say about other Churches - indeed, how does 'subsist in' differ from 'is'? The decree also made a fresh attempt to tackle that question of authority which had nearly destroyed Trent, and to which Vatican I had given a partial (and partisan ultramontane) answer. Its second chapter was entitled 'The People of God', all of whom, according to the Book of Revelation, Christ the High Priest had made 'a kingdom, priests, to his God and Father' (Revelation 1.6). The ordained priesthood 'forms and rules the priestly people', but the royal priesthood of the people was exercised in a whole variety of aspects of the Church's life, both liturgical and everyday in the world. What were the implications of this for episcopacy? The decree added the concept of 'collegiality' to papal primacy: a reaffirmation of the authority of other bishops alongside that of the Bishop of Rome - or a replacement for his authority? The decree's reaffirmation of papal infallibility did not suggest the latter interpretation.
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Cardinal Ottaviani observed with graveyard humour that the only 'collegial' act recorded in the Gospels was the flight of Jesus's disciples from the Garden of Gethsemane before his Passion.
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Then came
Gaudium et Spes
('Joy and Hope'), an attempt to place the Church in the context of the modern world:

[T]his Second Vatican Council, having probed more profoundly into the mystery of the Church, now addresses itself without hesitation, not only to the sons of the Church and to all who invoke the name of Christ, but to the whole of humanity. For the council yearns to explain to everyone how it conceives of the presence and activity of the Church in the world of today . . .

The People of God believes that it is led by the Lord's Spirit, Who fills the earth. Motivated by this faith, it labours to decipher authentic signs of God's presence and purpose in the happenings, needs and desires in which this People has a part along with other men of our age. For faith throws a new light on everything, manifests God's design for man's total vocation, and thus directs the mind to solutions which are fully human.

The whole statement breathed the happy confidence, already expressed in Pope John's opening address, that the Church need not fear opening discussions with those outside its boundaries, rather than lecturing them.

So much else tumbled open in conciliar statements, much of it discovered earlier by the separated Protestant brethren of the Western Church: the value of vernacular liturgy, an adventurous engagement with the previous two centuries of biblical scholarship, an openness to ecumenism, an affirmation of the ministry of laypeople. There was also open apology to the Jewish people for their sufferings at the hands of Christians in
Nostra aetate
('In our age'), which in its final draft bluntly dismissed the traditional Christian idea that the Jewish people had committed deicide - the killing of God. One bishop amidst the crowds who found the whole proceedings thoroughly uncongenial and dismayingly chaotic, and whose vote was consistently in the small minority against such statements as
Gaudium et Spes
, was a Pole who during the council's sessions became Archbishop of Cracow, Karol Wojtyla. Also expressing his private disapproval of what he saw as the facile sunniness of
Gaudium et Spes
was one of the attendant German theologians, Professor Josef Ratzinger.
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By the time these crucial documents were agreed and promulgated by the papacy, John XXIII was dead. Even before the council had opened he had been diagnosed with cancer. He was to live only a few months more as the revolutionary programme unfolded, but the momentum which he had fostered brought a swift election of Cardinal Montini as Pope Paul VI and a resumption of the council's sittings. Pope Paul was determined to maintain the pace of change, but as he pressed on with the reforms, and later conscientiously implemented them, he repeatedly displayed a quality which his impish predecessor had once characterized as '
un po' amletico
' - 'a bit like Hamlet'.
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The man who had seemed so exceptionally open to change in the Vatican of Pius XII now agonized about how far change should go. Perhaps unsurprisingly, the pontiff had doubts about the collegiality of all bishops, and in order to win the consent of a conservative minority to
Lumen Gentium
, he accepted 'Prefatory notes' (
Nota praevia
) added to it, which spelled out in scholastic language the limits which the main text could place on collegiality.

On his own initiative, the Pope in his closing speech to the council proclaimed Mary as Mother of the Church, after pleas from Polish bishops for an even stronger title for Mary,
Mediatrix
. His action contrasted with the fact that the idea of Mary as Mother of the Church had been relegated to some polite murmurs in
Lumen Gentium
. The Pope may have been swayed by the fact that the council's vote on the conservative proposal to consecrate the world to Mary was the most contentious and closely fought of any major decision within it. Nevertheless, the outcome was a reminder that Paul VI was not necessarily going to hold formal constitutional consultations before major public statements, even those made outside the criteria for infallibility set by Vatican I. Among those dismayed by any such Marian proclamation was Augustin Bea, the German cardinal who headed the Vatican's ecumenical Secretariat for Unity; he could easily see that the move was not calculated to win over Protestants or even necessarily the Orthodox.
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Motherhood, fatherhood and the family in a more general sense were to prove the preoccupations most disruptive to the revolutionary programme of Vatican II, because it was above all in matters of sexuality that the Pope drew back from the strong tide of pleas for change in the Church's practice. There was a wide expectation among those present that realities revealed by mission in Africa and provoked by ecumenical contacts elsewhere would lead to a relaxation of the Roman Church's insistence on universal celibacy for the clergy; instead Paul reaffirmed the celibacy rule. It was the beginning of a steady decline in vocations to the priesthood in the northern hemisphere, and a steady loss of priests from ministry to enter marriages. Throughout much of the rest of the world, in cultures where celibacy had never been valued, the papal rulings on this matter were frankly ignored, and in these settings, significantly, vocations continued to flourish. Even more damaging was the Pope's unmodified stand against artificial birth control: this provoked the greatest internal challenge to papal authority in the Western Church's history since Martin Luther's protests over the theology of salvation.

The technology of contraception had been transformed in the late nineteenth century. Now it was possible easily and cheaply to separate heterosexual intercourse from pregnancy, and Europeans and North Americans had not been slow to exploit the possibility. How would theologians react? The Anglican Communion was remarkably quick in coming to terms with the new situation: the change can be monitored by rapid shifts in the statements formulated by the bishops attending Lambeth Conferences. In 1908 they called on Christians 'to discountenance the use of all artificial means of restriction as demoralizing to character and hostile to national welfare', as well as being 'repugnant to Christian morality'. In 1920 they still expressed grave concern at the spread of 'theories and practices hostile to the family', and the teaching which 'encourages married people in the deliberate cultivation of sexual union as an end in itself', but they declined to lay down rules to meet every case; in 1930 they declared that 'each couple must decide for themselves, as in the sight of God, after the most careful and conscientious thought, and, if perplexed in mind, after taking competent advice, both medical and spiritual'.
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Much had happened in the world since the Anglican bishops had made their measured recommendations, and the council was meeting amid a cultural revolution in sexual mores in the West of the 1960s which would have astonished them. Would Roman Catholic moral teaching nevertheless follow the same trajectory as the Anglicans? A strong hint to the contrary came from the moment in 1964 when, in another example of his personal initiative, Paul VI announced that he was ending discussion on the subject before the forthcoming Third Session of the council met. Yet in 1968, it looked as if Roman Catholic teaching would indeed change. A commission of experts on natural law - including laypeople, even women - was about to publish a report on birth control after five years of deliberations, concluding that there was no good argument for banning contraceptive devices. Alarmed by the direction that the commission's thoughts had taken, Pope Paul enlarged the commission and changed the criteria for those entitled to vote, with the aim of overturning the finding; instead, it was reinforced. So the Pope finally ignored the work and issued his own statement in 1968: the encyclical
Humanae vitae
('Of Human life'), which gave no place for artificial contraception in Catholic family life.
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To his astonishment and dismay, the case was not closed when Rome had spoken. There were open and angry protests both lay and clerical all over the northern Catholic world, and worse still, demographics soon revealed that millions of Catholic laity paid no attention to the papal ban. They have gone on rejecting it, the first time that the Catholic faithful have ever so consistently scorned a major papal pronouncement intended to structure their lives.

The long-drawn-out battle over contraception cast a permanent shadow over Paul VI's pontificate through the 1970s. There was so much that was positive in this humane and private man's exercise of his leadership: notably generous ecumenical acts, such as the agreement with the Oecumenical Patriarch in 1965 to end the excommunications mutually proclaimed by East and West in 1054 (see p. 374), and a notably warm meeting with the endearingly saintly Archbishop Michael Ramsey of Canterbury in 1966, when the Pope presented the Anglican Primate with his own bishop's ring. Pope Paul travelled the world as no previous pope had done, and he cautiously opened dialogue with the Communist regimes of Eastern Europe, while reducing the temperature of Rome's relations with General Franco's regime to unprecedented iciness - it is reliably reported that Franco during the last year of his life came close to excommunication.
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Around the Pope, often way beyond his control, Catholics seized on the raft of reforms and recommendations made by Vatican II and implemented them in a multitude of different forms.

Apart from the furore on contraception, nothing in the life of the Church was so universally disruptive as the changes made to public worship. These were an expression of the council's wish to stress the priesthood of all people in active participation in worship, and to encourage them to do more in the liturgy than hymn-singing. Laudable in the intention of involving the whole body of the faithful in liturgical action, the implementation of this principle represented Rome at its most woodenly centralizing. Overnight, the Tridentine rite of the Mass was virtually banned (with carefully hedged-around exceptions), and its Latin replacement was used almost universally in vernacular translations. The service of Benediction of the Blessed Sacrament, which had sustained and comforted so many for so long (see pp. 414-15), was widely discountenanced by the clergy in an effort to concentrate the minds of the laity on the Mass, and in large sections of the Catholic world it disappeared. The altar furniture that had grown with such exuberance in churches in the wake of the Council of Trent was rendered redundant by the decision to reposition the celebrant at Mass facing the people: the priest therefore stood behind the altar, which had previously been affixed to a wall of sculpture and painting and thus had been designed for celebration in the other direction. A multitude of tables often cheap in appearance if not in cost camped out in historic church buildings, while the emphasis on celebrating congregational Masses at a single main altar left the greater galaxy of side altars dusty and neglected.