Readiness for Reform

They called him a Hamlet when he was Archbishop of Milan. Lately, Pope Paul VI seems to be displaying the artful sovereignty of a Prospero and the action-now dash of a Henry V. And action now means a notable zeal for carrying out the renewal of Catholicism planned by John XXIII.

This week, as 2,200 bishops gather in St. Peter's to begin the debates of the Vatican Council's second session, they will be working under drastically revised ground rules recently decreed by the Pope. The 73 schemata, or agenda items, presented to them last fall have been boiled down into 16 broader proposals. Decisions on whether to continue discussion of a schema will be made by simple majority vote rather than by two-thirds, and substitute schemata may be brought to the floor of the council by petition of 50 or more bishops. Four cardinals have been given "executive mandate" by the Pope to supervise the debates. One member of the quartet--Gregory Peter Agagianian --is a Curia moderate who favors a measure of church renewal. The other three are among the most vocal "progressive" members of the council--Belgium's Leo Josef Suenens, Julius Dopfner of Munich and Giacomo Ler-caro of Bologna.

Out-of-Tune Instrument. Another and more drastic kind of reform was an nounced by the Pope a week before the council opened. In a speech that blended praise and criticism, irony and soothing words, the Pope announced to the Roman Curia that the time had come to reform and internationalize the vast

Vatican bureaucracy.* Paul defined the Curia as "the instrument" he used to fulfill his "divine mandate," but added that the instrument was now out of tune and subject to much criticism. The Curia, said the Pope, "has become old, less suited to the times. Now it feels the need to simplify itself and decentralize itself." Pope Paul did not specify what reforms he had in mind, but by implication the Curia personnel will be internationalized, and many decisions now made in Rome will be left to individual bishops or national hierarchies.

This organizational change will complement a theological reform that presumably will be enacted by the council in the first item on the session's agenda: De Ecclesia (On the Church). Since the definition of papal infallibility in 1870, bishops have often seemed to be little more than Vatican errand boys. Yet the traditional teaching of the church is that bishops are just as truly descendants of the apostles as the Pope --a doctrine that will be brought out with new clarity in De Ecclesia.

The People of God. Instead of discussing Catholicism in juridical terms --beginning with the Pope first and ending up with the laity--the new schema starts with the concept of the whole church as the people of God. The schema does not reject papal infallibility, but it emphasizes the governing and teaching role of all bishops. It returns to the ancient teaching that the church is a family of dioceses governed by a college of bishops, among whom the Pope is simply one man with a special function.

When the council ends--probably not before 1965--Catholic bishops will have more authority than they now exercise. They may also look less like figures out of a medieval tableau, since many are concerned about the need for the church to accept simplicity and apostolic poverty. Recently, New York's Auxiliary Bishop Fulton J. Sheen suggested that laymen and parish priests should, like monks or nuns, take vows of poverty. And in a letter to his "brothers in the episcopate," Rio's Auxiliary Archbishop Helder Pessoa Camara urged the fathers of the council to drop their titles of "excellency" and "eminence" and much of their ornate garb. Such ostentation, the archbishop warned, "separates us from the workers and the poor. Let us end once and for all the impression of a bishop-prince, residing in a palace, isolated from his clergy." At the closing Mass of the council, Camara suggested, the bishops should pile their gold and silver pectoral crosses at the feet of the Pope and receive plain wooden ones from him in exchange. The archbishop may get at least part of his wish: the schema on the clergy has a chapter dealing with the right use of churchly goods.

* He tempered the shock by also announcing that all Vatican employees, including cardinals, would get a raise in pay.

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