Vatican Revolutionary

(See Cover)

It was before dawn on Pentecost, the great Christian feast that celebrates the descent of the Holy Spirit upon Jesus' Apostles. In the cool June night, 5,000 people stood watch in the moonlit piazza of St. Peter's. Some prayed; some chatted; some--Rome being what it is--eyed their neighbors for the bulge of a wallet, the unguarded clasp of a handbag. Most of those at the vigil looked often to the lighted windows on the top floor of the Vatican Palace. There the life of Pope John XXIII was slowly, inevitably, ebbing away.

In John's white-painted bedroom, keeping watch with his doctors over the coma-stricken body on the simple brass bed, were the Pope's brothers and sister from Bergamo, and Monsignor Loris Capovilla, his secretary and confidant. And as Angelo Giuseppe Roncalli clung to the edge of life at the age of 81, men were already attempting to measure the greatness of this 261st successor of St. Peter as Bishop of Rome.

In spite of his farm-bred love of land and custom. John XXIII was, in the best possible sense, a revolutionary--a Pope of modernization who kept in continuity with the church's past, yet made even the most enlightened of his 20th century predecessors seem like voices of another age.

New "Problematic." Elevated to the papacy when he was nearly 77, John XXIII was "servant of the servants of God" less than five years--the shortest reign since the obscure Pius VIII, who ruled for 20 ailing months after his election in 1829. But far from being the caretaker that the church expected, John created an atmosphere in which, says Jesuit Theologian John Courtney Murray, "a lot of things came unstuck --old patterns of thought, behavior, feeling. They were not challenged or refuted, but just sort of dropped."

In place of the dogmatic answer, John asked questions, and encouraged others to join him in finding out whether old forms were still right forms, customary methods were effective methods. Says Father Murray: "He gave rise to a whole new 'problematic': What is the problem? How do we somehow alter the state of the problem? These questions are his heritage."

Breeze of Change. And of course, merely asking questions was often to answer them--or at least to indicate how tinny and irrelevant conventional responses of the past were now. Should the church shun the secular world, clinging to the City of God in fear of contamination from the City of Man? That learned teacher Pius XII, as his encyclicals and allocutions make clear, firmly answered no. But Pius, for all his good will, remained a prisoner of the church's past. It was left to John XXIII --neither intellectual nor theologian--to throw open the windows and doors of Catholicism to the breeze of change.

To John, it was more than just a catechism statement that heaven was open to Protestants--it was a fact that called out for man to work for Christian unity. The compatibility of theology with science was not for him merely the complacent conclusion of a Thomistic scholar; it was a challenge for the church to understand a world in turmoil. Christ's injunctions to his Apostles were not memories but living commands that had political consequences --such as that a wholly defensive and intransigent "church of silence" was no true witness for human beings back of the Iron Curtain.

Thanks to his charismatic warmth and pliancy, the Roman Catholic Church seemed to change from wariness of new trends in the secular world to acceptance of them. It is not odd, considering the scope and influence of a Pope, that one man seemed to be responsible for it all. What is extraordinary is that the change was visible in the space of one year: 1962. Before that, John had been a puzzling Pope--openly warm and friendly to people, but curiously disappointing and conservative in many of his acts. His apostolic constitution, Veterum Sapientfi, was a brusque warning to those who would remove Latin from its place of primacy in the church. The 1960 Synod of Rome, a highly publicized effort to bring new spiritual vitality to the clergy of the city, produced only a series of restrictive and uninteresting rules.

Vatican II. One event swept doubts away and put John's true intentions clearly in focus: Vatican Council II.

For the council gave voice to 2,500 bishops from all over the world, and it turned out that their voice, heard in the great debate of St. Peter's nave, spoke for John's instincts and not for the conservative Italians who govern the church in the name of the Pope.

When he first summoned the council, John declared that its purpose would be the renewal of the church, and ultimately, the unity of Christians. John knew that the council could not remove the barriers to the building of one Christian church; yet both by word and deed he made that dream appear closer to hand. As much as Vatican protocol allowed, he was an open-door Pope, and his welcome always seemed warmest for those he called his "separated brethren." An Archbishop of Canterbury came to call for the first time since 1397; so did a Moderator of the Church of Scotland, a president of a Negro Baptist church, the Presiding Bishop of the U.S. Protestant Episcopal Church.

It was John who established the Vatican's Secretariat for Promoting Christian Unity, sent official observers to the World Council of Churches' third assembly in New Delhi, invited more than 40 Protestants and Orthodox Christians to watch the deliberations of Vatican II.

John did nothing to remove the great doctrinal obstacles that bar the way to ecumenical unity; but by his example of love he encouraged church leaders and scholars to join in discovering how much of the Christian faith they shared. Says Dr. Willem Visser 't Hooft, general secretary of the World Council: "He changed the history of church relations."

That Word Liberty. Each Pope, as he receives the triple tiara at his coronation, is reminded: "Thou art the father of princes and of kings, Pontiff of the whole world." Far more than shrewd, blunt Pius XI, or ascetic, aristocratic Pius XII, Pope John did seem like a universal father, and his teaching voice reached not only 558 million Roman Catholics but all men. Two of his encyclicals may rank as classics, and they caught the imagination of many outside John's church. In Mater et Magistra (1961), he brought up to date the tradition of Catholic social teaching first formulated by Leo XIII in Rerum Novarum, defending both man's right to private property and the legitimacy of "socialization" for the common good. Pacem in Terris, the first encyclical addressed not just to the bishops and the faithful but to "all men of good will," was a lucid blueprint for a world of peace based on truth, justice, order and liberty. It was the first time in all history that a Pope had given his approval to constitutional democracy.

Peace was one of John's favorite words; to achieve it, he believed that the church should appear as a witness to the whole world, actively neutral between East and West. Without displacing the church's traditional ideological objections to Communism, he began exploring the possibility of a political concord with the East that would ease Red pressure on the Iron Curtain churches. His was a politic based more on love than on geopolitical realities. When he was editing Pacem in Terris and came to a sentence that noted how both sides in the cold war had entered the nuclear arms race for defensive purposes, John added: "And there is no reason to disbelieve them." Did he mean that? "No," answers Monsignor Pietro Pavan, the Vatican scholar who drafted the encyclical. "This was a strategic statement of the Holy Father. He said, 'Who really knows? And anyway, I cannot posit bad faith on the part of either party. If I did, the dialogue would be over and the doors would be closed.' "

Poor Politician? Not all Catholics appreciated John's problematic. Curia cardinals thought his exploration of Christian unity was a danger to the faith, and openly regarded a free, unmanaged council as a threat to their authority. "They are men of zeal, I am sure," John told a friend recently. "But they are not running the church. I am in charge, and I won't have anyone else trying to stop the momentum of the council's first session." Other Catholics rejected the spirit that led to his teaching encyclicals and the "opening to the East." It was a Roman Catholic editor, William Buckley of the National Review, who dismissed Mater et Magistra as "a venture in triviality." Pacem in Terris was coolly received by Catholics in northern Europe, where one leading statesman last week characterized his Pope as "a very good priest but a bad politician." Right-wing Italian Catholics--shocked by the big Communist vote that followed closely on Pacem in Terris and John's well-publicized visit with Izvestia Editor Aleksei Adzhubei--dubbed John "the Red Pope" and sneered that his failing health was a sign of divine displeasure.

Much as many of his fellow Catholics may have quarreled with his ideas and ambitions, few had anything but genuine love for John as a person. The native kindness of many another saintly Pope --Pius XII, for one--was often heavily muffled by the Byzantine rigidity of Vatican protocol. But not John's. His visits to hospitals, churches, shrines, even to jails, are a Roman legend, symbolized in his old nickname, "Johnnie Walker." An unaffected, humble priest who revered people rather than ideas, he was at his best in audiences with Italian families; there he would ramble from topic to topic, offering homely, platitudinous advice, cracking puns in the Bergamo dialect. What he said was unimportant, and virtually untranslatable; his visitors left glowing.

His was a love that broke down barriers. When Communist Editor Adzhubei visited him last March, John began: "You say you are an atheist. But surely you will receive the blessing of an old man for your children?" And if John is ever canonized, his hagiography will contain more wit than that of any saint since Francis of Assisi. His homely good humor stayed with him even in his final illness. "They say I have a tumor," he told one of his doctors. "Ebbene, very well, may God's will be done. But don't worry about me, because my bags are packed and I'm ready to depart."

Onset of Illness. John's departure was long in building. As far back as 1954, he began to suffer from occasional hemorrhages in his stomach, and a year ago he quietly cut down on the number of his public appearances. At the time it was announced that the Pope wished to conserve his strength for the council; last week the Vatican admitted that even then, John's illness had begun to take its toll of his tough body. Worries over his health grew in November, when he canceled a general audience because of what was described as influenza and "a gastric disorder."

Even blase Romani could tell that John was slow to recover from November's attack. He looked pale and drawn at many of his public appearances this spring, and his speeches often contained a prophetic, elegiac touch. "That which happens to all men," he told a group of pilgrims one day last April, "perhaps will happen soon to the Pope who speaks to you today."

On May 21, the Vatican announced that John had canceled all public appearances in order to take a restful, prayerful, nine-day retreat before the feast of Pentecost. In place of his scheduled audience, John twice appeared at a window to pray with the crowds gathered below in St. Peter's Piazza. Onlookers got the impression that the Pope was tired but still able to move about with ease; in fact he had suffered an attack of internal bleeding and was spending most of his time in bed.

Heteroplasia. Gradually, the circumspect Vatican began to reveal the truth of the Pope's illness: he had "gastric heteroplasia"--a tumor, perhaps cancerous (although only surgery could tell), that caused hemorrhages and anemia. Unable to hold down food, the Pope was being fed intravenously. One of Italy's best anesthesiologists, Dr. Piero Mazzoni, moved into the Vatican on 24-hour watch to administer transfusions, coagulants and morphine injections--the only treatments, since surgeons had decided against an operation or radiation treatments.

Rest, and doctors' care, apparently brought the bleeding to a halt; but only for a few days. Early in the morning on May 26, the Pope awoke in agony and called weakly for help; the hemorrhages had begun again. His secretary, Monsignor Capovilla, summoned Dr.

Mazzoni, who quickly gave his patient still another transfusion and called in for consultation Roman Surgeon Pietro Valdoni and the Pope's old friend and personal physician, Dr. Antonio Gasbarrini of Bologna. When on Tuesday of last week the bleeding increased, the quaintly formal Vatican press releases, full of references to "the august patient," for the first time admitted the gravity of the situation.

There was new hope next day, and on Thursday the Vatican press service announced that the hemorrhages had been stemmed. Dr. Gasbarrini returned to Bologna, telling reporters that his patient had "a constitution of iron to go with his will of iron." As if to prove it, the Pope got out of bed, conferred on Vatican business, told one visitor that he hoped to see the end of the council.

Extreme Unction. Around midnight Thursday, the hemorrhage began again, and then the spreading disease caused peritonitis--inflammation of the abdominal lining. In the morning the Pope accepted the last Communion (viaticum) from the hand of his confessor, Monsignor Giuseppe Cavagna. Monsignor Peter van Lierde, Sacristan of the Holy Palaces, performed the rite of extreme unction, anointing John's body with holy oil. Afterward, John called Monsignor Cavagna to his bedside, reported L'Osservatore Romano, and "in a clear, firm voice the august Pontiff confirmed his great love for the church and all souls and again offered his life for the successful conclusion of the Ecumenical Council and for peace among men. Frequently in his speech, the Holy Father repeated in the moved presence of those with him: "Ut unum sint [so that all may be one]."

As the long day drew on, crowds gathered to pray and watch outside St. Peter's, and a stream of visitors came to the papal bedside. With a group of senior cardinals--among them Eugene Tisserant, Alfredo Ottaviani, and Amleto Cicognani, the Vatican's Secretary of State--John talked about identifying the three cardinals in petto whose names he has kept secret since 1960. The Pope also blessed the cardinals and thanked them for their support. "I'm sorry to be going," the Pope said. "To many," answered Ottaviani, "it appears to be the hand of God."

Giovanni Cardinal Montini, the Archbishop of Milan, whom some French clergymen call Le Dauphin because they favor him to succeed John, escorted the Pope's sister and three brothers to the bedside. At first, the Pope failed to recognize them; later, he embraced them one by one and repeated the words of Christ before the raising of Lazarus: "I am the resurrection and the life." Another visitor, at the Pope's request, was Archbishop Josyf Slipyi, the Ukrainian primate who was recently freed by the Soviet Union.

Toward midnight Friday, the Vatican announced that the Pope had "entered into agony"--the hours before death. "He suffers no more. He is passing away." But John's astonishing heart--"the heart of a horse," said one observer would not give out. He went into and out of comas, in each moment of lucidity blessing those in the room, offering anew his suffering "for the council and for peace." Once, when his doctor bent over him, the Pope whispered: "With death a new life starts--the glorification of Christ." Time and again, he whispered the name of Jesus. To a monsignor who noticed that he seemed revived, John replied: "I have been able to follow my death step by step. Now I am going sweetly toward the end." To Capovilla he said: "When all is finished, don't forget to go see your mother."

The end, unmercifully, was long in coming.

While Pope John suffered through his last illness, the pace of Vatican business perceptibly slowed. After his death, it will grind to a halt. The essential affairs of the church will be in the hands of the

Vatican's Cardinal Camerlengo (Chamberlain), Benedetto Aloisi Masella, and the 53 cardinals who live outside Italy will one by one arrive in the Eternal City for the nine days of mourning in John's honor, the lowering of his triple coffin of oak, lead and cypress into the crypt beneath St. Peter's.

Between 15 and 18 days after his death, the cardinals, each accompanied by two aides, will be walled into a set of rooms that include the Sistine Chapel for one of the rare great secret-but-free elections of the world: a conclave to pick the new Pope. Speculation has long since begun; as one French bishop put it last week, "as far as we're concerned, the Pope has been dead for a month." The conclave will be hard to predict--harder, certainly, than the one which elected John in 1958. Thanks to Pius XII's indifference to Vatican administrative detail, the Sacred College was then sadly depleted; so many cardinals were near death's door that the choice easily narrowed to a handful of prospects. But the conclave that selects the next Pope will be the largest in history: 82 cardinals, more than half of them created by John.

Interim Pope. They will be bitterly divided. Many cardinals of the Curia believe that John's aggiornamento (modernization) moved too far and too fast, and will urge the election of a conservative, such as Genoa's Giuseppe Cardinal Siri. Cardinals from northern Europe will argue for a Pope to carry on John's work; Milan's Montini may well be the "liberal" choice. If the division proves intractable, there could be an interim Pope, willing to carry on but unlikely to prove an innovator--a man such as Carlo Cardinal Confalonieri, secretary of the Sacred Consistorial Congregation.

The new Pope may well have no taste for John XXIII's ecumenical ambitions; the new policies of active neutrality between East and West might revert to the sterner, more committed ways of Pius XII. These could go. But John's major monument will not be torn down. The Vatican Council is automatically suspended with the death of the Pope who called it, and its resumption is at the discretion of his successor. But it is the mood of the church, and probably also of a majority of cardinals, that the council must continue. Under a lesser Pope, the wind of change at the council might well slacken, but it could not die. Of that, at least, John XXIII was certain. "The Holy Father is only planting a seed, you know," Loris Capovilla said recently. "He knows that somebody else will reap the harvest."

Somebody will indeed: the church and the world John loved.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.