Saints and Sinners: A History of the Popes; Fourth Edition (61 page)

Recent studies of the origins of the Council have made clear just how opposed to it the Vatican old guard were. The whole drift of Pacelli’s pontificate had been to subordinate the local churches and their bishops to the papal central administration, the Curia. The thought of assembling the world’s three thousand bishops and letting them talk to each other, and maybe even have new ideas, was horrifying. It was suggested, apparently seriously, that there was no need for the bishops to gather in Rome at all, but that copies of papally approved ‘Conciliar’ documents should be posted to them for assent. Another Vatican adviser even suggested that no one but the pope should be allowed to speak during the Council. Even Cardinal Montini, exiled in Milan, was alarmed: he told a friend that ‘this holy old boy doesn’t realize what a hornet’s nest he’s stirring up’.
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Vatican officials did what they could to block the preparations, and when it became clear that they could not prevent the Council going ahead, tried to hi-jack its proceedings, to stack the preparatory committees, determine the agenda, and draft the Conciliar documents. At the Holy Office, Cardinal Ottaviani refused all cooperation with other bodies, insisting that doctrine was his department’s sole responsibility, and ‘we are going to remain masters in our own house.’ Lists of doctrines to be condemned mounted up, and seventy-two draft
schema
were prepared, all of them destined to be rejected by the Council. Theologically they were firmly rooted in the integralism of the last hundred years. The draft declaration of faith drawn up for the Council contained no scriptural citations whatever, reiterated the condemnations contained in
Pascendi
and
Humani Generis
, and quoted no theological text earlier than
the Council of Trent.

John’s determination that this should be a pastoral Council devoted to opening up the Church, not to barricading it in, was absolutely vital, strengthening bishops to reject the prepared texts and to demand a real voice in the deliberations of the Council. Without his encouragement, the Council would have become a rubber stamp for the most negative aspects of Pius XII’s regime. It was his personal insistence that the Council was not to be a Council against the modern world. There were to be no condemnations or excommunications. Yet he himself had no clear agenda, and there was a desperate danger that lack of clear guidance from the pope would either lead to a demoralising lack of achievement, or allow the direction of the Council to fall into the hands of curial officials opposed to the very notion of a Council.

For guidance John turned to Cardinal Montini, and the Belgian Cardinal Suenens. They saw that the Council must centre on the nature and role of the Church, that it must be ecumenical in character, must present a pastoral not a bureaucratic vision, that it must renew the liturgy and restore the notion of Collegiality in the Church, that is, the shared responsibility of the bishops with the pope, no longer an isolated papal monarchy. It must also engage with the relationship of the Church to society at every level, freedom of conscience, peace and war, the relationship of Church and State, the world of work and industrial society, questions of justice and economics. All these issues had preoccupied popes since the mid-nineteenth century, but always in a spirit of confrontation and suspicion. The time had come for the Church to consider all these issues afresh, in the confidence of faith and with a discerning eye for what Pope John called ‘the signs of the times’.

The pope’s inaugural address at the Council,
Gaudet Mater Ecclesia
, contrasted strikingly with most papal utterances since the 1830s. For over a century the popes had confronted the modern world in the spirit of Jeremiah, as a place of mourning and lamentation and woe. John urged a different spirit, and challenged the ‘prophets of misfortune’ who saw the world as ‘nothing but betrayal and ruination’. The Church had indeed to keep the faith, but not to ‘hoard this precious treasure’. The Church could and should to adapt itself to the needs of the world. There was to be no more clinging to old ways and old words simply out of fear: it was time for ‘a leap forward’ which would hold on to the ancient faith, but re-clothe it in words and ways which would speak afresh to a world hungry for the gospel: ‘for the substance of the ancient deposit of faith
is one thing, and the way in which it is presented is another’.
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From the perspective of the twenty-first century, there seems about John’s rhetoric a note of over-optimism, a confidence in progress which was a characteristic of the 1960s. He spoke confidently and perhaps naively of Providence guiding humanity towards ‘a new order of human relationships,’ which the years since have not delivered. It was his language about the possibility of the recasting the substance of Catholic teaching in new forms, however, that alarmed conservative forces in the Church. This was the language of Modernism, and there were many who believed that they now had a Modernist pope. When the Latin text of his speech was published, it had been heavily censored to remove any hint that the teaching of the Church might change, and recast in words borrowed from the anti-modernist oath.

John lived to inaugurate his Council, but not to guide or conclude it. While battles raged between the forces of conservatism and reform within the Council, his life ebbed away in cancer. He had reigned for only five years, the shortest pontificate for two centuries, yet he had transformed the Catholic Church, and with it the world’s perception of the papacy. When he died on 3 June 1963 the progress of his last illness was followed by millions of anxious people across the world, and throughout his last hours St Peter’s square was thronged with mourners for this, the most beloved pope in human history.

The Council he had called, with no very clear notion of what it might do, proved to be the most revolutionary Christian event since the Reformation. Despite the divided state of Christendom, it was, geographically at least, the most catholic Council in the history of the Church: 2,800 bishops attended, fewer than half of them from Europe. Orthodox and Protestant observers attended the sessions, and substantially influenced the proceedings. The monolithic intransigence which had been the public face of the Catholic Church since 1870 proved astonishingly fragile, and over the four sessions of the Council, between 11 October 1962 and 8 December 1965, every aspect of the Church’s life was scrutinized and transformed. As at Vatican I, the Council rapidly polarized (with the help of sensational media coverage), but this time the intransigent group with curial backing were in a minority, and one by one, often with considerable bitterness, the curial draft documents were swept aside, and replaced with radically different texts, more open to the needs of the modern world, and more responsive to pastoral realities. By a supreme irony, the most influential theologians
at the Council were men like Yves Congar and Karl Rahner who had been silenced or condemned under Pius XII, and their ideas shaped many of the crucial Conciliar decrees.

The central document of the Council was the Decree on the Church,
Lumen Gentium.
It moved far beyond the teaching of
Mystici Corporis
, abandoning the defensive juridical understanding of the Church which had dominated Catholic thought since the Conciliar movement, and placing at the centre of its teaching the notion of the People of God, embracing both clergy and laity. This concept moved understanding of the nature of the Church out of rigidly hierarchic categories, and enabled a radical and far more positive reassessment of the role of lay people in the life of the Church. The decree also moved beyond
Mystici Corporis
and all previous Roman Catholic teaching by refusing to identify the Roman Catholic Church with the Church of Christ, stating instead that the Church of Christ ‘subsisted in’ the Roman Catholic Church, and not that it simply ‘was’ the Roman Catholic Church. This apparently fine distinction opened the way to the recognition of the spiritual reality of other churches and their sacraments and ministries. The decree’s use of the image of the ‘pilgrim people of God’ also opened the way to a new recognition of the imperfections and reformability of the Church and its structures. In one of its most crucial and contested chapters, the Decree sought to correct – or at any rate complete – the teaching of Vatican I on papal primacy and the episcopate, by emphasizing the doctrine of Collegiality, and placing the pope’s primacy in the context of the shared responsibility of all the bishops for the Church.
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But
Lumen Gentium
was not the only revolutionary document produced by the Council.
Gaudium et Spes
, the ‘Pastoral Constitution on the Church in the Modern World’ (the Latin actually says ‘in this world of time’), represented a complete overturning of the conciliar and papal denunciations of the ‘modern world’ which had been so regular a feature of the Ultramontane era. Setting out to ‘discern the signs of the times,’ the Constitution embraced the journey of humanity in time as a place of encounter with the Divine. It emphasized the need of the Church ‘in the events, needs and the longings it shares with other people of our time’ to discern in faith ‘what may be genuine signs of the presence or the purpose of God’. Faith is thereby presented as something which completes and seeks to understand our common humanity, not a matter of exclusive concern with a supernatural realm set over against a hostile world. The religious pilgrimage towards the ‘heavenly city’ is
claimed to involve ‘a greater commitment to working with all men towards the establishment of a world that is more human’. In the wake of the Council, this emphasis would provide the charter for the development of theologies of social and political engagement, like Liberation Theology. It was one of the Council’s most profound acts of theological reorientation, and one which transcended the somewhat glib optimism of the
Gaudium et Spes
itself, which, it must be admitted, in its concern to affirm the worth of human culture, shows little sense of the tragedy and brokenness of human history.
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Its central emphasis, nevertheless, lay at the heart of the Council’s rethinking of Catholic theology, and was worlds away from the aggressive, hard certainties of the age of Vatican I. Then Catholics had felt that they, and they alone, knew exactly what both Church and world were. By contrast, six months before his own election as Pope Paul VI, Cardinal Montini told the young priests of his diocese that in the Council:

Lumen Gentium
and
Gaudium et Spes
were great acts of theological reorientation, reshaping the parameters of Catholic theology. The Council’s work on specific issues was hardly less revolutionary. The decree on the Liturgy established a series of principles which would transform the worship of Roman Catholics, introducing the vernacular in place of Latin, encouraging greater simplicity and lay participation. The Decree on Revelation abandoned the sterile opposition between Scripture and Tradition which had dogged both Catholic and Protestant theology since the Reformation, and presented both as complementary expressions of the fundamental Word of God, which underlies them both. The decree on Ecumenism broke decisively with the attitude of supercilious rejection of the ecumenical movement which Pius XI had established in
Mortalium Annos
, and placed the search for unity among Christians at the centre of the Church’s life. The decree on other religions rejected once and for all the notion that the Jewish people could be held responsible for the death of Christ, the root of the age-old Christian tradition of
anti-Semitism. Perhaps most revolutionary of all, the decree on Religious Liberty declared unequivocally that ‘the human person has a right to religious liberty’, and that this religious freedom, a fundamental part of the dignity of human beings, must be enshrined in the constitution of society as a civil right.
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This was truly revolutionary teaching, for the persecution of heresy and enforcement of Catholicism had been a reality since the days of Constantine, and since the French Revolution pope after pope had repeatedly and explicitly denounced the notion that non-Catholics had a right to religious freedom. On the older view, error had no rights, and the Church was bound to proclaim the truth, and wherever it could to see that society enforced the truth by secular sanctions. Heretics and unbelievers might in certain circumstances be granted
toleration
, but not
liberty.
The Decree was opposed tooth and nail, especially by the Italian and Spanish bishops (the decree flew in the face of the Concordat which regulated the life of the Spanish church, and which discriminated against Protestants). Another opponent was Archbishop Marcel Lefebvre, who, after the Council, would eventually form his own breakaway movement committed not only to the pre-Conciliar liturgy but to the intransigent integralism and rejection of religious liberty which had flourished under Pius X and the last years of Pius XII.

The decree on Religious Liberty was largely drafted by the American theologian John Courtney Murray, another of those under a cloud in the pontificate of Pius XII. It was strongly pressed by the American bishops, who felt that a failure to revise the Church’s teaching on this issue would discredit the Council in the eyes of the democratic nations. A lead had been given by the new pope, Paul VI, during a flying visit to the United Nations in October 1963, when he spoke of ‘fundamental human rights and duties, human dignity and freedom – above all religious liberty’, a clear endorsement of the new teaching. Key support for the change also came from the Archbishop of Krakow, Karol Wojtyla, the future Pope John Paul II, who saw in the decree’s assertion of the fundamental human right to freedom of conscience a valuable weapon in the hands of the churches persecuted under Communism.