Reluctant Revolutionary

On the opening day of the Vatican Council's fourth session last week, more than 1,500 Roman Catholic prelates assembled for a march of penance from the Church of the Holy Cross to the Basilica of St. John Lateran, half a mile away. As the chill autumnal dusk darkened the Roman sky, a priest began to chant the ancient litany; from the throats of thousands of cardinals, bishops, priests and laymen came back the droning, prayerful response: "Pardon us, O Lord." At the rear of the procession, beneath a scarlet and gold baldacchino, walked Pope Paul VI dressed in red cope and carrying a crucifix in which were inlaid three tiny relics of the cross on which Christ died.

There was a certain ecclesiastical aptness to the occasion: the calendar feast day on which the council convened is the Exaltation of the Holy Cross Yet many observers at the march saw a disparity between the symbolism and the reality-- and in that disparity a measure of how much the council has accomplished, how much still has to be done.

Half-Mile Walk. The unprecedented act of penitence, undertaken by representatives of every corner of Roman Catholicism, implied a corporate acknowledgment of the church's sins -- an admission of humility for "the spotless bride of Christ" that would have been unthink able a decade ago. Yet, instead of sackcloth and ashes, the prel ates wore vestments of red and purple, and the venerable fathers for whom the half-mile walk would have been the slightest physical ordeal were discreetly excused from the ceremony. The place of honor in the procession, as always, was given to the Pope; but this time, instead of lording above them on the sedia gestatoria, he marched on foot with his brother bishops.

A blend of baroque Romanita and Christ-inspired simplicity, of tradition and innovation, the procession symbolized in microcosm what the Second Vatican Council has become. Protestant Theologian Albert Outler, an observer at Vatican II for the World Methodist Council, sums it up as a "Reformation, Roman-style " Unlike Luther's drastic break with the medieval past, it is a reformation in which change is often so subtle that it sometimes does not seem like change at all. It is a reformation in which radical ideas blossom in traditional Latin garb, in which continuity receives as much emphasis as novelty, in which new ways are inevitably coupled with warnings against imprudent excess. It is a reformation not of acts but of attitudes whose distant goal is the ultimate reconciliation of the church with other faiths and with the modern world It is, in fact, the kind of reformation precisely suited to the temper of the lonely, sensitive, cautious and puzzling man who guides it.

Balance & Consensus. Protege of the austere Pius XII, close friend of the jovial John XXIII, Giovanni Battista Montim in the third year of his pontificate has slowly emerged from the shadow of his great predecessors with a style and program all his own. John was an intuitive, charismatic prophet who threw open the windows and doors of the church to let in fresh air without worrying about--or even fully understanding--the consequences. By contrast, Paul is a detached and painstakingly analytical technician who has left the windows open--but who keeps checking the thermometer lest any cold drafts seep in. Pius was one of Catholicism's great teachers, whose irrepressible flow of decisive allocutions ranged learnedly from astronomy to midwifery. Paul, who sees more than 1,000,000 visitors a year and delivers as many as eight speeches a day has matched Pius' rapid pace. Yet he also shares something of the modern world's aversion to certainty and pontification: the nuggets of assertion and advice in his own writings often seem like spiritual rafts bobbing half-hidden in a holy sea of howevers. Nonetheless, the Pauline manner is unmistakable by now. In style, it can be summed up as a search for balance and order--a goal that runs the risk of ambiguity, of settling for surface rather than substance. His program for the church is renewal, to be achieved, much like L.B.J.'s dream of the Great Society, by consensus--a goal that can easily thwarted by compromise or by inaction where no reconciliation is possible A man genuinely humble in person, he is eager to preserve the prestige of his office--an aim that sometimes leads urn to empty or overly ambitious gestures. Within the past two weeks, the Pauline manner has been dramatically visible in three major acts of his pontificate: the announcement of his trip to the U.N.; the issuance, just prior to the opening of the council, of his encyclical on the Eucharist; and the creation of a new synod of bishops.

Act One. Paul was the first Pope since Peter to set foot on the Holy Land, the first in history to land on the shores of India. Next month, when he flies to New York to address the U.N. General Assembly on the subject of peace, he will be the first to cross the Atlantic and to see the U.S. These precedent-shattering voyages--which probably will be followed by another next year, perhaps to Poland--have forever ended the tradition that the Pope is a prisoner of the Vatican They have clearly established, moreover, that he, like his namesake, the Apostle is a missionary at heart, eager to convey the Christian truth to the world at large.

Nonetheless, many people have nagging doubts about the trip. Almost certainly, his New York visit will draw the largest crowd to any motorcade in the city's history, and will do much to help shore up the sagging prestige of the U.N.--although that may or may not be an appropriate papal function. And if, as the Holy See hopes, many heads of state show up to hear him, it would be an impressive reminder of the papacy's ancient role as would-be peacemaker among nations. Moreover, he will have a chance to talk with President Johnson, who will fly up to New York to greet the Pontiff. But questions remain: Will the Pope be able to live up to his opportunity to speak meaningfully in the corridors of world power? Will his words of peace have any more impact than those he has uttered in Rome during the past two years?

Act Two. A few days after announcement of the papal trip, Paul issued his third encyclical, Mysterium Fidei (Mystery of the Faith), a 6,500-word defense of the church's traditional teaching on the Eucharist. It seemed to be an implied criticism of a group of Dutch theologians who have been arguing that when the bread and wine at Mass mysteriously 'become Christ's body and blood, the essential change is in the significance of the elements rather than in their substance (TIME, July 2). Mysterium Fidei at first struck progressives as a grim omen; its orthodox tone would presumably incline the bishops toward conservatism, warn theologians to stay away from far-out speculation on other doctrinal issues.

On second glance, however, the Pope's purpose appeared more subtle than that. Privately, Paul assured one Curia official that he was not singling out the Dutch for condemnation. Then, at a Rome press conference, Dominican Theologian Edward Schillebeeckx, with Bernard Jan Cardinal Alfrink of The Netherlands at his side, argued that the speculations of Dutch dogmatists on the Eucharist fell "within the bounds" outlined by the encyclical. Students of the Vatican thus concluded that Mysterium Fidei was designed primarily to placate Roman conservatives; unconvinced by the Dutch theories and unhappy with public debate over them, Paul was saying simply that he is content to let further speculation go on, so long as it is done without publicity.

Act Three. The most far-reaching decision of Paul's pontificate was tucked into the final paragraphs of his opening address to the fourth session. After the council has ended, he plans to create a synod of bishops, the majority of them to be elected from the membership of national hierarchies, who will be summoned periodically to advise him on the governing of the church.

Paul's decision gives living form to the principle of collegiality that was approved by the council last fall--namely, that the bishops, as descendants of the Apostles, collectively share ruling power over the church with the Pope. At first, the bishops and their theologians were delighted with the announcement. Then they began to wonder. Would Paul give the synod a share of the policy making powers that are now tightly clutched by the conservative, Italian dominated Roman Curia? Or would the synod become the church's equivalent of the subservient Soviet parliament --an assembly summoned only to approve, not to decide? The answer is solely in Paul's hands, for he characteristically specified that he alone would determine when the synod may meet and what it may discuss.

Above the Clouds. Such, then, is the Pauline manner: to blunt the edge of an innovation with traditional safeguards; to give an answer that raises as many questions as it resolves. It is this seeming uncertainty that baffles and angers at least as many people as it pleases.

For millions of Catholics, the very fact that Paul is Christ's Vicar on earth puts him beyond criticism. "The prince of teachers is an exalted person, kumo no ue--above the clouds," says one elderly Japanese Catholic lady, sweetly. Many priests and prelates share the enthusiastic view of Archbishop Dino Staffa, secretary of Rome's Congregation of Seminaries, who says that "we are only at the beginning of a pontificate that promises to be truly great." Others agree with Atlanta's Archbishop Paul Hallinan that the Pope's cautious approach to progress is precisely what is needed for the church today. "We need some kind of brake for safety's sake," he says. "If we move too fast, we may not have time to communicate properly with our clergy and our laymen."

"But, But, But." Yet many of these same clergy and laymen describe Paul as a puzzle, an enigma, a Hamlet. "He has such a blah personality," complains one New York suburban housewife. A baffled Jesuit philosopher says: "I feel like a bull in a ring. Sometimes he goes one way, and I try to follow him, and then he goes the other way. Cagey, amorphous personalities make me unhappy." Many Catholic progressives are now convinced that Paul has deliberately sided all along with the conservative Curia, and they openly resent it. Austrian Historian Friedrich Heer fumes at "this small, narrow-minded, petit bourgeois person." A Catholic layman from Colorado complains: "He makes grand gestures and then does nothing to obtain the goal." Argues Edward Keating, editor of the rambunctiously liberal California monthly Ramparts: "He is a Curialist, and thus part and parcel of archconservatism. He gives with one hand and takes away with the other--and what he takes away is more important than what he gives."

Among bishops and theologians of the church, there is considerably more sympathetic understanding of Paul, but many of them are critical nevertheless. "He is an intellectual perpetually saying 'but, but, but,' " says a veteran of the Curia. "The Curia has left its mark on him," suggests a British theologian. "He has intuition but doesn't trust it. Paul is terrified of his responsibilities, and out of his depth at the council." An Italian priest who worked under Paul at the Vatican's Secretariat of State says: "Before saying that a piece of paper is blue, the Pope has to lift it up to see if it doesn't turn grey." Paul's greatest fault, concludes a veteran of the papal household, is that his will is not as strong as his mind or his heart, and that he wavers when faced with a many-sided problem. "He hears one, two, three, four, five people, and then all must be satisfied. When you are a leader, you cannot do that. When you are before God, you must choose the truth."

Command in Midstream. Justified or not, such criticism of Paul was almost bound to arise. For one thing, nothing nowadays is sacred in the new climate of freedom within the church; unspoken thoughts of yesteryear are headline snarls today. For another, there was the understandable but irrational disappointment that Paul did not turn out to be a second Pope John. Some of the blame for this falls on both the secular and religious press, which too quickly assumed that Paul, with his well-established reputation as an Italian liberal, would be the same kind of progressive Pope that John had been; the principal differences between the men, the press implied, were merely weight and size of smile.

Two relevant facts about Paul make much of the criticism seem unfair and beside the point--and help considerably to dispel the fog of mystery that surrounds him. One is that he took command in the midst of an ecclesiastical revolution that was not of his making. The other is that, despite his progressive reputation, he is strongly predisposed by training, temperament and nationality to conserve rather than to change. The surprise is not that he seems cautious, but that he is as progressive as his record so far shows.

Italian, Italian. Paul VI is father of the entire church. But Giovanni Batista Montini is unmistakably a son of Italy whose ecclesiastical world view has been filtered largely through the prism of experience in his country's church. One Vatican veteran thinks that the real clue to his character is "his hidden, camouflaged nationalism. He is Italian, Italian Italian, Italian." He was born in 1897 in a small town in Lombardy, the son of a lawyer who helped found the precursor Italy's Christian Democratic Party the ill-fated Popular Party of the 1920s' Shy and bookish, young Montini was a seminarian at 20, a priest at 23. Thereafter, unlike John, who served for 28 years as a papal diplomat in Bulgaria Turkey and France, Montini spent all but a few scattered months of his maturing years in Rome. Although he traveled whenever he could, he worked for 32 years in the cloistered confines of the Vatican's Secretariat of State pursuing the kind of career that encourages obedience rather than initiative, self-effacement rather than self-assertion learning by books rather than learning by doing.

As one of Pius' two pro-Secretaries of State, Montini was considered some thing of an innovator. Certainly he was by comparison with the other pro-Secretary-- crusty, conservative Domenico Tardini&151;or with the majority of other curial officers. But an Italian liberal is often a moderate by church standards elsewhere, and Montini's reputation was based partly on a flair for suggesting modest few changes and adventurous for causes. To liven support up the stodgy pages of L'Osservatore Romano, for example, he once proposed to commission articles by Catholic Convert Graham Greene: the editor turned down that idea. Montini was one of the few champions of France's worker-priest project, and he lost some prestige when this experiment in industrial evangelism was curtailed.

400 Years. When he ascended the throne of Peter in 1963, he had Vatican II on his hands-- and a revolution in Catholicism. "Four hundred years of history have been changed in four years " sums up Edward Rice, editor of the Catholic monthly Jubilee. "Everybody is spinning, and it's going to take a long time before they settle down."

In the U.S., much of the spinning centers on birth control. Educated laymen and clerics openly challenge the arguments behind the church's traditional stand that contraception is against the natural law, while millions of married Catholics ignore the prohibition altogether. From Germany, where more than 500,000 Catholics" have married Protestants outside the church, there is strong pressure on Rome to revise the laws on mixed marriages. And some provocative Dutch theologians have gone beyond redefining the Eucharist to ask why Catholics should have to attend Mass every Sunday, or confess their sins privately to a priest, or why Protestants should not be welcomed to Communion at Catholic altars.

Schism from the Riqht. Comes also the counterrevolution. The introduction of a vernacular liturgy and congregational singing stirred many American Catholics to feel that their church was being "Protestantized." In England, conservative Catholics have formed a Latin Mass Society, whose aim is the preservation of the nonvernacular liturgy. In France, the conservative outcry against new ideas spawned by the council led the Archbishop of Rouen to warn against the danger of a schism from the right. Similar warnings have been passed along to the Pope by a number of Italian prelates.

As a disciple of Pope John, Paul had publicly acknowledged that the council of renewal must go on; yet, thanks to his long service in Vatican diplomacy, he has a highly developed distaste for upset applecarts. He could understand the demand for change in Northern Europe, in the U.S., in the new churches of Africa and Asia. But, as Primate of Italy as well as Pope, he had to consider the impact of reform on his own moribund, tradition-bound church. Perhaps more than any other churchmen alive, Paul understood the ponderous, self-serving ways of the conservative Curia and understood, too, why it needed change; yet he knew equally well that he could not govern without its help. He knew the risk of seeing the spirit of renewal die; but he was haunted by the greater fear of the schism that would follow if renewal went too far.

Self-Operation. Seeking to balance such conflicting demands while he struggled to establish his own style as Pope, Paul has created a record that so far shows as many hits as misses, as many half-starts as firm conclusions. He carried on John's interest in ecumenism, notably by his meeting in Jerusalem with Orthodox Patriarch Athenagoras. But he also disturbed Protestants by the "return to Rome" implications of his 1964 encyclical Ecclesiam Suam (His Church). One of his most premising innovations was a new Secretariat for non-Christian religions; but Paul entrusted the project to a Curia professional, Paolo Cardinal Marella, and almost nothing has been heard of it since. Two years ago, Paul announced that he intended to reform the Curia; so far, his only visible step has been to have Francesco Cardinal Roberti, a curial man himself, ask the chiefs of the Roman congregation to suggest some changes. Says one Italian bishop: "You don't ask a man to perform an operation on himself."

Nowhere has Paul's desire for balance and consensus been more apparent than in his dealings with the council, where time and again he has acted as a brake on the progressive majority. Occasionally his brake is well-executed. He took the crucial birth-control problem from council hands--which on the surface displays little faith in collegiality. Now, however, some Catholic thinkers feel that he may be more progressive on the issue than most of the bishops, and that he will gradually introduce a change in the church's stand that will ultimately leave the decision on birth limitation to the consciences of individual couples. During the third session last year, he upheld the right of nearly 200 conservatives to prevent a vote on the declaration on religious liberty, even though more than 1,000 prelates petitioned him "most urgently" for approval. At the time, council progressives were horrified. As things have turned out now, even Jesuit John Courtney Murray, a principal architect of the declaration, agrees that the text before the fathers at the fourth session is stronger than ever (see box). "The losers won a delay," says Bishop Robert E. Tracy of Baton Rouge. "The winners won a document." Last week, in one of the strongest exchanges of views since the council began, three U.S. cardinals--Gushing of Boston, Spellman of New York, Ritter of St. Louis--were among the prelates who defended the declaration, while Alfredo Cardinal Ottaviani, secretary of the Holy Office, headed the ranks of Spanish and Italian prelates who denounced it as "totally unacceptable."

Deicide. Other papal interventions in the daily workings of the council have been less fortunate. Last year, for example, Paul insisted on making 19 changes in the final text of the schema on ecumenism after the bishops had approved it. One statement, highly offensive to non-Catholic observers, now says that Protestants "seek" rather than "find" God through Scripture.

A stormy argument is expected this fall over another Pauline change that was made in the interests of compromise. One of the most significant of all council documents is the declaration on non-Christian religions, which exonerates the Jews of the ancient charge of deicide for their role in the death of Christ. At Paul's suggestion, the deicide clause has now been replaced by a more ambiguous phrasing--apparently to placate Italian conservatives, who insist that it runs counter to the sense of Scripture, and to satisfy anxious Middle Eastern Catholics, who mysteriously see in exoneration the first step toward Vatican recognition of Israel.*

Strange Voices. In his opening address to the bishops, the Pope declined to comment on any of the schemata on the fourth session's agenda. "Our silence has been deliberate," said he. "It is a sign of our unwillingness to compromise your freedom of opinion." Still, some council observers wonder how the bishops could help being influenced by the warnings against imprudence that the Pope has issued this year. In August, for example, he warned against "strange and confused voices" even among the bishops who have been questioning "principles, laws and traditions to which the church is firmly bound."

There are widespread Catholic fears that such gloomy papal warnings against "radical revision" could lead to what Catholic Philosopher Michael Novak calls "a crisis of timidity" among the bishops. Taking their cue from Paul's warnings and from conservative clamor at home, bishops may be content to draw back from the full implications of aggiornamento. Already there are Catholics who complain that the council is a failure for having avoided the real issues facing the church--Christian unity and a radical revision of the church's institutions and forms. England's Canon F. H. Drinkwater, for example, wonders how Pope John would feel about his council "wasting month after precious month over such trivialities as concelebration, or Communion in both kinds, or new definitions about Our Lady."

No Hope? Such criticism--coming mostly from Catholic perfectionists who want an overnight change in the church --appears somewhat overanxious. Paul's penchant for warning against excess seems to be largely an expression of his cautious and gloomy nature. Last week, for example, on a visit to the catacombs of Domitilla, he compared the persecuted Christians of old to those who today live in "nations with atheistic and totalitarian" governments. "I sometimes wonder if Paul isn't lacking in the virtue of hope," says one Jesuit.

The Pope has repeatedly asserted his support of renewal, and there is no question that he is committed to carrying out the Johannine program as he sees it. One problem may be, paradoxically, that Paul fails, as John did, to understand fully the theological thinking that underlies the council's spirit of renewal. Paul's favorite Catholic thinkers are Mantain and Etienne Gilson, who are radical enough by the standards of Italian textbook theology but outdated in comparison with the present-day work of Schillebeeckx. Yves Congar Karl Rahner and Hans Kiing.

There is further evidence for the opinion that Paul's theological touch is a little uncertain. While no theologian questions Paul's defense of the Eucharistic real presence in Mysterium Fidei some argue that the Pope's incidental defense of such practices as adoration t the blessed sacrament and Benediction runs counter to the theology of the council's liturgical constitution, which emphasizes that the central place of the Eucharist is only in the communal meal that is the Mass. Even more questionable to some theologians is the encyclical's assumption that the language in which a church dogma is expressed is as timeless and true as the dogma itself -- an argument that is refuted by the history of Catholic doctrinal development.

Consolidation. If the conclusion of Vatican II does lead to a widespread sense of disappointment and dismay much of the blame will fall on Pope Paul. Some of it, certainly, would be justified: he has demonstrated a willingness to settle for a muffled statement when a clear one would offend, and an unwillingness to surrender too many of the trappings of Romanism for the sake of greater Catholicity. But a disappointing council would be better than none, and there are many who feel that Paul may be doing what John could not do: ending the council without a serious split between the forces of renewal and reaction. John may have been the prophet who called the council, but Paul has the diplomatic and administrative skill to consolidate and institutionalize John's ideas. The task is not a glamorous one, and Paul may well go down in history under the title that was once thought to be John's: the interim Pope.

So far, the evidence is that the "Reformation, Roman-style" that Paul favors differs in degree rather than kind from goals set by John XXIII, and that the Pope wants only to tame the world wide Catholic desire to modernize not to destroy it. Yet even if Paul were to decide ultimately in favor of conservation rather than reformation, it seems unlikely that this would forestall even more radical change for long. Windows opened in a gale are not easily shut and are easily reopened. Paul may or may not choose to be a truly postconciliar Pope. But whatever he chooses, the impetus to complete the reformation is already there in the records of Vatican II, waiting for another council, or another John. Or another Luther.

*Last week a number of Christian communities in Jordan, at the behest of the Moslem mayor of Jerusalem, agreed to toll their church bells for ten minutes in protest over the council's expected endorsement of "the Jewish declaration."

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