Council of Renewal

(See Cover)

A fortnight hence in the Vatican, 2,600 bishops of the Roman Catholic Church will meet in a gathering so rare that only 20 others like it have been convened in the 20 centuries of Christian history. The purpose of the Second Vatican Council is what His Holiness Pope John XXIII, who has the Catholic prelate's traditional wariness of words that suggest drastic change, calls an aggiornamento--a modernization. This self-reform will affect the life, the worship and the discipline of every Catholic; just as importantly, it will affect the way the church looks to other Christians, and to the world at large. It is the hope of Pope John, and of many of his bishops, that the Protestant and Orthodox churches will be favorably impressed, and that Catholicism may be pointed toward the far-distant goal of nearly all Christians: their ultimate unity in one church.

Almost everything in Catholic life could come up for reexamination. In matters of discipline, the council fathers could modify the church's laws on clerical celibacy, hierarchic pomp, fish on Friday, priestly dress, the use of Latin in the Mass, and the Index of Forbidden Books. The church at the council cannot repeal dogmas pronounced by past Popes or past councils. But the fathers may well formally note that the last word has not been said about the church's revealed truths, and they may attempt to give new dimension to such doctrines as papal infallibility, the "real presence" of Christ in the Eucharist, the nature of original sin.

In the Vatican Council, the Catholic Church will also be measuring itself against what is new in the world: science's burst of knowledge, morality's blurred standards, secularism's indifference to religion, industrialism's urban crowding and automation, politics' wars and swift reapportionments of power. In trying to grapple with such problems, the council may disappointingly settle for a series of revised clubhouse rules, more cautious than venturesome. But millions of the church's faithful--and others, too --are praying that good men will be guided to a larger effort, a renewal of spirit rather than law.

Veni Creator Spiritus. The council will open with a splendor to match its high goal. From his throne in the Hall of Benedictions of the Vatican's Apostolic Palace, Pope John XXIII will intone the first notes of the 9th century hymn Veni Creator Spiritus (Come, Holy Ghost). Then the cardinals, patriarchs, metropolitans, archbishops, bishops, abbots and superiors of religious orders, representing more than 90% of the church's hierarchic leaders--some auxiliary bishops and many Iron Curtain prelates will not attend--will begin their solemn procession across Bernini's piazza toward the great Basilica of St. Peter's. Inside the church, after Pope John and the council fathers have been seated, France's red-robed Eugene Cardinal Tisserant, 78, bearded dean of the Sacred College of Cardinals, will celebrate a solemn pontifical Mass in honor of the Holy Spirit.

Rome last week bustled with preparations for this opening ceremony. In a hall on the Via della Conciliazione, the 41 priests and seminarians selected as stenographers for the council struggled to master a special Latin shorthand devised by Professor Aloys Kennerknecht of Mainz University. Inside the nave of St. Peter's, carpenters fastened the 2,800 plastic-covered airline-like seats that have been as signed to the council fathers on facing rows of tiered bleachers, each 330 ft. long. On the right and left walls of the basilica, plumbers put the finishing touch to brand-new bathrooms that will be preserved, for the benefit of tourists, as a humble memento of the council.

Divine Intercession. From his Vatican office, Monsignor Luigi Sposito, chairman of the council's Technical Organizing Committee, was busy lining up hotel and pensione accommodations for the bishops--as a concession to the council, Rome innkeepers have refrained from raising prices--and negotiating with city police to have motorcycle escorts for the 100 rented buses that will shuttle the clergy from their residences to the council.* "If the police can get the bishops through Rome's traffic jams," says one Roman observer, "it will be a real demonstration of divine intercession."

Canceling all audiences, Pope John retreated to his recently restored summer apartments in the Vatican's 9th century Tower of San Giovanni for a week of prayer. On three days last week, every employee, cleric and layman alike, in the Vatican and diocesan chancery of Rome attended special services to offer prayers for the council's success. In dioceses around the world, Catholics joined in special novenas, asking the blessing of God upon the deliberations of the fathers. Uncounted millions of Protestants, asked by their leaders to pray for the council, prayed that it become a landmark in the Ecumenical Century equal in significance to the World Council of Churches Assembly in New Delhi last year.

State of the Church. Ecumenical councils of the past were summoned when the church was faced with clear and present danger--heresy, schism, internal corruption, or the violent enmity of civic powers. Vatican II comes at a time when the Roman Catholic Church has never seemed so strong or so durable. Its membership--550 million--is at an alltime high; it has no fewer than 418,000 priests and 946,000 nuns.

Yet the council will convene at a time when the church is in the midst of transition, attempting to plot a true and vigorous course through intellectual and social turbulence. Archbishop Lorenz Jaeger of Paderborn, one of Germany's most articulate advocates of change in the church, argues that Catholicism has finally come to the "end of the Constantinian era." In a world of permanent revolution, he argues, the church must think in universal terms and abandon a number of concepts that governed its past. Among these are the belief that the alliance of temporal and spiritual powers is "natural," the rigid juridical view of the church derived from Roman law, the unduly abstract understanding of man's nature derived from scholastic thought, the acceptance of Western social and economic forms as practical ideals. But such a long view or such a philosophic stance is hardly needed to sense the winds of change. Items:

>In northern Europe and the U.S., a new generation of theologically educated laymen has begun to grumble at the canned sermons and unsophisticated pieties of an older generation of priests, begun to ask for a proper share in running the affairs of the church. Justifying the new lay movement, scholars in France and Germany--notably Dominican Yves Congar--have started to think out a "theology of the laity," based on the Pauline doctrine of the "priesthood of the faithful." Sensing the temper of the times, such farsighted prelates as Montreal's Paul-Emile Cardinal Leger and Boston's Richard Cardinal Gushing have established diocesan advisory councils of laymen.

>In the rarefied world of theological scholarship, the rigid scholasticism of 19th century Catholicism has given way to a more open form of Thomism, capable of incorporating insights from Freud, Dewey, Sartre and even Marx. During the past 20 years, Catholic Bible scholars have begun to catch up with their Protestant counterparts, now are beginning to work with non-Catholics on new interdenominational translations of Scripture. In the late Jesuit Paleontologist Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, the church possessed a religious figure who attempted--with near success--to bridge the wall between modern science and traditional faith.

> In social doctrine, the Vatican seems to have abandoned the rigid anti-Communist stand of Pius XII. Most notable sign of Rome's new drift was John XXIII's encyclical Mater et Magistra, which gave papal blessing to socialization that did not deny man's basic right to private property. Last February the Pope asked politically conservative Italian bishops to criticize Premier Amintore Fanfani's "opening to the left." Pope John is no friend of Communism, but he hopes somehow to make it possible for the 63 million Catholics behind the Iron Curtain to preserve their freedom of worship. The church, argues one close associate of the Pope's, is not "a dam against Communism. This is an entirely absurd concept. The church should not be against anything. It should be positively for something. When we support only one bloc we alienate half of humanity."

Friendly to Protestants. To other Christians, the most promising sign of change within Catholicism is the church's positive reaction to the ecumenical revolution that is starting to knit together the scattered divisions of Protestantism and Orthodoxy. A generation ago, Protestants were "heretics" to Catholics, and Orthodox churchmen "schismatics";* in Catholic circles now, the U term for non-Catholics is "separated brethren." In 1954, Chicago's late Samuel Cardinal Stritch forbade his priests to attend the World Council of Churches Assembly at Evanston; last November, five Catholic priests were sent by the Vatican to New Delhi as official observers. Under the skilled diplomatic direction of Augustin Cardinal Bea. Rome's new Secretariat for Promoting Christian Unity solicited Protestant suggestions for the agenda of the Vatican Council and arranged for 60 non-Catholic observers, representing more than 225 million Christians, to attend it as Rome's official guests.

Catholicism is far from being a monolith, and the spirit of renewal would move within the church no matter who was Pope. As it happens, many of the new directions within Catholicism are either tolerated or openly encouraged by the smiling old man who patently enjoys his many-titled job of Bishop of Rome, Archbishop and Metropolitan of the Roman Province, Primate of Italy, Patriarch of the West, and, as 260th successor of St. Peter, Vicar of Jesus Christ on Earth.

Up from Diplomacy. There is no ideal background for a Pope any more than there is for a poet, but Angelo Giuseppe Roncalli came to the papacy with a rich blend of diplomatic and pastoral experiences behind him. Son of a Lombardy farmer, he won a scholarship to the topflight Pontifical Seminary in Rome, was ordained at 25, and served as a sergeant in the Italian army's medical corps during World War I.

Rome summoned him to do administrative work for a Vatican missionary organization in 1921, and four years later Pope Pius XI started him up the church's diplomatic ladder by naming him Apostolic Visitor to Bulgaria. Roncalli spent ten years at Sofia, ten more as the Vatican's envoy to Turkey and Greece, took over one of the church's toughest jobs--Papal Nuncio to France--in December 1944. By all accounts, he did a remarkable job; in 1953, Pius XII elevated him to the rank of cardinal, and three days later named him Patriarch of Venice, where he quickly earned a reputation as one of the kindliest spiritual leaders the city had seen in decades.

Venice's cheerful patriarch was a hale but hoary 76 when the electoral conclave of cardinals chose him to succeed Pius XII as Pope in 1958. Because of his age, Vaticanologists guessed that he was picked as an interim Pope who would live long enough to rebuild--as John did --the depleted and senescent College of Cardinals, which was down in numbers to 52 and up in average age to 74.

Pius XII, the ascetic, mystical descendant of Roman aristocracy, was an intellectual who applied Catholic teaching to nearly every modern problem, from nuclear war to euthanasia. Although he has often expressed admiration for his predecessor, John XXIII has made the papacy into a different kind of job. "He is not intellectual and only an indifferent theologian," says one close friend. "But he is a man with a great pastoral bent, and overwhelming charity."

Open-Door Policy. As a pastor, John seems to have taken the whole world for his flock. He has received almost 250,000 annually in audiences--about twice the number Pius met in a busy year. Pius set the new papal custom of having formal but friendly chats with non-Catholic churchmen; the new era of good feeling in Catholicism has flowered under John XXIII, who has already met more Anglican and Protestant leaders--ranging from Negro Baptist Leader Joseph H. Jackson of Chicago to the Archbishop of Canterbury--than any Pontiff in history. Some Catholic prelates complain that "it's easier to see the Pope if you're a Methodist," but John has refused to curb the attentions he pays to Protestants. "It's all right," he tells aides. "Let's give them credit for their good intentions--and if they don't have them, why, I've one eye open to see clearly myself."

Occasionally, the Pope's modernizing ambitions have been thwarted by his execution of them. In 1960, he called Rome's 1,250 parish priests to the first diocesan synod in the Eternal City's history. Instead of making the major reforms that many Catholics in Rome believed necessary, John simply imposed a flurry of insignificant rules on clerical behavior and dress that the clergy now largely ignore. John is philosophical about the synod's admitted failure. "Well, at least we tried. Doing something was better than not doing anything at all."

John is best known to the world for the warmth and frequency of his audiences. He makes no rigid effort to bone up on the background of visitors, though he occasionally asks for a fill-in by his thin, intense private secretary, Venetian Monsignor Loris Capovilla, 46 (whom some jealous churchmen call "the Assistant Pope"). Like many other statesmen, the Pope has worked up set speeches appropriate to certain groups. Families are told that he recites a decade of the rosary each night for all children born that day. Journalists are compared to the scribes who took down the words of the child Jesus in the temple, "listening and writing down carefully what they hear, not what they have in their own minds.''

Uncomfortable with interpreters, Pope John speaks most freely to his fellow Italians, rambling along in freewheeling, joke-laden talks. Little of this bubbling humor shows through the heavily edited transcripts that appear in L'Osservatore Romano. "I often change the Holy Father's words," admits one editor of the Vatican daily. "Many times he will say something that would cause raised eyebrows or excitement in some quarters. I have been around here longer than he has, and I know-how to fix his words. Sometimes he is surprised, but I know what I am doing."

"About Everything." The inspiration for another Vatican Council, the Pope once said, "came to us as a flower that blooms in an unexpected springtime." Early in his reign, he was discussing some problems of the cold war with the late Domenico Cardinal Tardini, his first Secretary of State. What, John asked himself, should the church do? "Suddenly," the Pope said, "our soul was illuminated by a great idea which we felt in that instant and received with indescribable trust in our Divine Master. A word, solemn and binding, rose to our lips. Our voice expressed it for the first time: 'A council!' To tell the truth, we feared that we had aroused perplexity if not dismay . . . But a clear expression appeared on the cardinal's face. His assent was im mediate and exultant, the first sure sign of the Lord's will."

On Jan. 25, 1959, the Pope sprang his idea on the cardinals, after attending Mass in his favorite Roman church, the patriarchal basilica of St. Paul's Outside the Walls. The response, from Catholics, Protestants and Orthodox Christians alike, was overwhelming approval--although there were a few dissenters. Some German bishops, who felt that many of the questions likely to come up before the council had not yet been sufficiently clarified by the theologians, asked the Pope to postpone Vatican II for at least 15 years. Many Curia professionals made no secret of their dismay, seemed to have no clear idea of what the Pope wanted the council to do. A reporter once asked Cardinal Tardini what the council would be about. "About everything,'' he answered, "and a few things besides.''

But with no choice except to obey the Pope's marching orders, the Curia set out to make Vatican II what John believes is ''the best prepared council in history." Requests for agenda items were sent to every Catholic bishop, to religious orders and theological faculties at Catholic universities. About 75% of the clerics sent in replies. Compiled into twelve volumes of 7,981 pages, the replies proved to be an encyclopedia of churchly selfcriticism, which ten preparatory commissions and two secretariats, set up by the Pope in June 1960, boiled down to a working agenda of 129 proposed subjects. Last month attending prelates received drafts of decrees on the first seven topics scheduled for discussion: the deposit of faith, Scripture and tradition, marriage, the moral order, communications media, church unity, religious liberty.

Compromiser & Cheerleader. John himself, in the council preparations, played the dual role of head cheerleader and supreme referee. He frequently visited the office of Archbishop Pericle Felici, secretary of the Central Preparatory Commission, and benevolently told the workers that he was pleased with their progress and would pray for their work. Occasionally he took a hand in redrafting agenda items that might cause offense to certain prelates. One agenda item suggested by Alfredo Cardinal Ottaviani's theological commission, on the relation of Scripture to church tradition, was so potentially damaging to interfaith relations that Cardinal Bea personally wrote a more liberal statement, got the Pope's assurance that both views would be heard by the council fathers.

Under the rules of order issued last month, the council will meet for formal discussions in Latin each morning at 8; on weekday afternoons the bishops will separate into committees, rewrite proposed legislation in shirtsleeve sessions. When the council fathers have voted approval of a decree, the Pope will convene a public session to announce the news to the world. At one audience this summer, John suggested that the council "could go on for two or maybe three years." Some Roman observers suspect that so long a council would come close to bankrupting the Vatican; the first session alone will cost the church at least $6,400,000. Most council experts believe that Vatican II will convene from Oct. 11 to Dec. 8, return after Easter for a second session of about two months; if a third session is necessary, it will meet in the fall of 1963.

Pope John believes that the council will be "eminently pastoral in character," and has publicly said that he does not expect the fathers to promulgate new dogmas. The most challenging issues that the council has scheduled to discuss, or is likely to bring to the floor, are these:

sb EPISCOPAL INFALLIBILITY. The major achievement of Vatican I was the dogma that the Pope, speaking to the church ex cathedra on matters of faith and morals, is infallible. The council, which broke up at the onset of the Franco-Prussian war, never got around to defining a related issue on its agenda: how other bishops of the church, as descendants of the apostles, share in this infallibility. To put the dogma of papal infallibility in proper perspective, Vatican II may formulate the traditional Catholic belief that when bishops in their dioceses speak out on a matter of faith and morals with unanimity, they also are infallible. Such a statement would add to the prestige of the episcopacy; after Vatican I some non-Catholic theologians charged that the bishops had been reduced to the rank of ecclesiastical errand boys for That Man in Rome. It would sit well with Orthodoxy, which holds that infallibility is a property of the church rather than of the Pope. Even to Protestants it might seem somewhat less arrogant than unmitigated papal infallibility.

sb STRUCTURE OF DIOCESES. Some of the bitterest infighting of the council may well come over the problem of remapping diocesan boundaries. Italy, with 48 million Catholics, has 260 bishops, some with only a handful of priests serving them; West Germany, with 23 million Catholics, has only 21 dioceses. The council is expected to approve in principle procedures for suppressing small sees and gradually dividing up such cumbersome jurisdictions as Mexico City (the world's largest diocese, with 4,800,000 Catholics) and New York, where Francis Cardinal Spellman needs ten auxiliary bishops to help govern his 1,672,000 communicants.

sb PRIESTS & RELIGIOUS. The Council of Trent set up the principle of incardination, which binds most parish priests to serve permanently in the diocese in which they are ordained. Many churchmen feel that the rule is too rigid for the world of today. To equalize the distribution of priests--the U.S. has one for every 800 Catholics, Latin America one for every 10,000--the council may approve procedures that would let the Pope transfer clergy to areas where they are most needed. Thanks to a plethora of papal charters and privileges, most of the church's religious orders are largely exempt from the jurisdiction of bishops. Dominicans and Jesuits, who are proud of their status as the Pope's spiritual elite guard, will object strongly, but the council may give bishops more authority over personnel of religious orders within their dioceses.

sb LITURGY. The council will not abolish Latin as the liturgical language of Western-rite Catholics, but will probably let regional or national councils of bishops make vernacular translations for the parts of the Mass specifically addressed to the congregation--the Epistle and Gospel, for instance. At the request of their priests, some bishops will push for a drastic shortening of the breviary, the collections of psalms, verses and readings that ordained clerics must recite every day. Missionaries may get more authority to incorporate native customs and religious practices into baptism, marriage and funeral rites.

sb THE CHURCH & NON-CATHOLICS. One of the sternest of Catholic beliefs is the old dictum that "outside the church there is no salvation." In practice, this hard-boiled doctrine has been broadly interpreted in recent centuries: the last theologian to teach that non-Catholics cannot be saved --Boston's ex-Jesuit Leonard Feeney--was excommunicated in 1953 for so arguing. The council may make a doctrinal statement on the church as the mystical body of Christ that would emphasize the nonjuridical aspects of Catholicism, and spell out the type of relationship that all Christians, and nonbaptized persons in good faith, have to the visible church of Rome. A related council possibility: generous new ground rules for participation by clergy and laymen in ecumenical dialogues with men of other faiths.

sb MARRIAGE. The council will almost certainly issue a strong denunciation of divorce and of artificial contraception--but may also point out that some Catholic couples may limit the size of their families. German bishops are pressing hard for some modification of the canon law on mixed marriages, which requires non-Catholics to promise that they will raise children in the church.

sb RELIGIOUS LIBERTY. The church teaches that "error has no rights"; it also teaches that erring men, as sons of God, do have inalienable privileges. At the strong urging of U.S. bishops, the council may adopt a formal statement that all men in all countries have an inherent right to worship God as they believe. The declaration will be strongly opposed by many prelates in Spain. Italy and Latin America, who are still reluctant to give full freedom to Protestant missions.

sb THE LAITY. In the past, church leaders have tended to think of the layman simply as someone who was neither a monk nor a cleric; only three items in canon law specifically apply to the ordinary churchgoer. The council is almost certain to upgrade the status of the faithful by defining their place in their church, make suggestions on how the lay apostolate can fulfill the mission of Christ's church in the world. But the council is likely to reject proposals that laymen be allowed to elect their bishops, or that the Pope constitute a lay senate comparable to the College of Cardinals.

sb MARRIED DEACONATE. In the early church, much administrative, clerical and charitable work was handled by deacons rather than priests. Missionary bishops, who are short of clergy, are eager to see the deaconate restored to use. Members of this order of clergy would be allowed to marry and hold down fulltime jobs, could keep the faith alive in priest-poor dioceses by baptizing, teaching catechism, conducting some services, such as benediction. They would have the privilege of distributing Communion, but could not celebrate Mass or hear confessions.

sb DECENTRALIZATION. More than half of the bishops outside of Italy who responded to the request for agenda items asked that the Curia and the Vatican bureaucracy be made more representative of the church at large, rather than remain a private fief for Italians. The council may also provide more freedom for individual bishops, or national councils of bishops, to handle matters that until now have to be bucked on to Rome. Some Catholic radicals have suggested that the church impose a retirement age for all prelates except the Pope, abolish the medieval vestments, titles and privileges (such as rings that Catholics kneel to kiss) that accompany the rank of bishop. Most bishops are unimpressed by the necessity of such sacrifice.

sb DOGMA. Mexican and Canadian bishops are believed to be ready to lobby for a dogma of the church--that Mary the mother of Christ is the mediatrix of all God's grace to man. But a majority of the prelates seem sure that such a doctrine is not "mature" in the mind of the church. Besides, notes one associate of the Pope, "It is not necessary to propose new doctrines which might disturb Protestants and Eastern Christians. We say 'Jesus, Mary and Joseph,' and people think this is some sort of Catholic trinity. This does not presume the right proportion.''

Clash at the Council. World hopes for Vatican II reached their peak right after Pope John announced that he would summon a council whose aims were the renewal of the church and the union of Christianity. Expectations, in Protestant and Orthodox circles, dropped notably after it was made clear that non-Catholics would attend as observers rather than participants. Lately some U.S. archbishops added to the gloom by telling their laymen not to expect too much from Vatican II, and last week the warning was echoed by a veteran of many ecclesiastical gatherings. Speaking at San Francisco's Grace Cathedral, Lord Fisher of Lambeth, the retired Archbishop of Canterbury, noted: "It is always unwise to expect too much from councils."

Whether much or little comes out of the council depends to a large extent upon the numerical strength--and the endurance--of the two opposing forces that will clash at the council. Says Archbishop Denis Hurley of Durban, South Africa: "There will be much disputing in the nave of St. Peter's over how the church must enter the Atomic Age." A number of conservative bishops believe that the church should stand aloof from the pressures of a temporal world, holding fast to its traditions. Led by such impressive figures as Alfredo Cardinal Ottaviani of the Holy Office, Ernesto Cardinal Ruffini of Palermo and Giuseppe Cardinal Siri of Genoa, the "integralists" include nearly every bishop in Italy and Spain, a majority of the prelates from the U.S. and Latin America.

Opposed to them will be the church's "liberals"--bishops who believe that the church should discard nonessentials that harm its mission, seek to make it, without sacrificing doctrine, more accessible as a home for modern man. Apart from unity-minded Cardinal Bea, the liberals have few friends in the Vatican Curia, but they do include such articulate prelates as Tanganyika's Laurean Cardinal Rugambwa, Utrecht's Bernard Jan Cardinal Alfrink, Montreal's Cardinal Leger, Munich's Julius Cardinal Doepfner, a clear majority of the bishops in France, The Netherlands, Germany, Austria, Africa and Asia.

Ultimately, how far the church moves, and in what direction, will be determined by the Pope of transition, John XXIII. So far, his record is puzzling. One of his first major personnel changes was removing the aged, archconservative Giuseppe Cardinal Pizzardo as head of the church's doctrine-guarding ministry, the Holy Office--only to name the equally conservative Cardinal Ottaviani as Pizzardo's successor. As Papal Nuncio to France, John seemed to be sympathetic to the worker-priest movement, despite strong Vatican disapproval; after he became Pope, John issued an order that killed the experiment for good. In talks with audiences, John has sometimes spoken favorably of translating parts of the Mass into the vernacular; yet last winter he issued a strongly worded Apostolic Constitution that forbade priests to write against the use of Latin in the liturgy. "If John is a liberal who is simply making concessions to the Vatican," complains the editor of a Catholic diocesan weekly in the U.S., "give me a conservative who will make a few concessions to the liberals."

Pope John's defenders among Catholic liberals point out that there is still plenty of reason to be optimistic about the outcome of Vatican II. Although he is by disposition no innovator, the Pope himself is keenly aware of the mood of the church --and if the church's mood is to change, then he will help it do so. No one has higher ambitions for the outcome of the council, they add, for John has never stopped talking about Christian unity as the aim of the council. "We must bestir ourselves," he told one group of missionaries, "and not rest until we have over come our old habits of thought, our prejudices and the use of expressions that are anything but courteous, so as to create a climate favorable to the reconciliation we look forward to."

And, of course, it is John himself who is summoning the church to the council of renewal.

*The 242 council fathers from the U.S., the most prosperous of the prelates, have the pick of available rooms. New York's Francis Cardinal Spellman will stay, as he always does, at the Grand; 80 other bishops will stay at the Michelangelo, a sleek, air-conditioned hostelry within walking distance of St. Peter's. *A heretic takes exception to doctrine, a schismatic to discipline.

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