Curial horror greeted John XXIII's announcement of ecumenical council
Pope John XXIII
prays in the Basilica of St. Paul Outside the Walls on Jan. 25, 1959, just
before announcing his plans to convoke the Second Vatican Council. The pope
cited a need to update the church and promote Christian unity. (CNS file photo)
VIEWPOINT
This is the first
of an occasional series of articles about the Second Vatican Council that will
appear this year in NCR leading up to 50th
anniversary of the council's opening on Oct. 11, 2012. In October, NCR will publish a
special edition devoted solely to the council's 50th anniversary. Read more
about it here.
Wednesday, the Catholic church
should have celebrated -- but didn't -- an important anniversary, the day 53
years ago when Pope John XXIII invited 18 Curia cardinals to accompany him to a
ceremony at St. Paul Outside the Walls. It was the feast day of St. Paul, who
is believed to have been executed in Rome about 67 A.D. and buried where the
basilica named after him now stands.
It was also the final day of
the Octave for Christian Unity, an objective close to the pope's heart.
Presumably because of the attendance of so many Vatican higher-ups, the
ceremony lasted longer than usual. The result was that the content of the
carefully timed announcement the pope made to the cardinals had been released
to the media before the cardinals were told.
What they heard stunned them.
The new pope -- he had been elected only three months earlier -- told them he
intended to summon an ecumenical council and would they please give him their
views about it.
One would not need to be in
the Vatican very long before knowing what the cardinals would think about an
ecumenical council. If they had been asked to vote on it, they might have
turned their thumbs firmly down.
Instead, they looked at the
pope, first in amazement and then in horror. At any time the Curia has
disfavored ecumenical councils. Councils denote change and to the Curia change
is anathema. It suggests that the existing situation is not perfect, and to the
Curia the church is perfect. A council also suggests the pope needs bishops to
advise him. The Curia view, especially since 1870 when papal infallibility was
promulgated, is that the pope himself can make any necessary decision, so there
is no further need for councils. And any suggestion that people outside the
walls of the Vatican needed to be consulted was a slur on the Curia, which
liked to regard itself as participating in that creeping papal infallibility.
Lionel: Pope
John XXIII was interpreting the baptism of desire and being saved in invincible
ignorance irrationally. He did not correct the mistake in the 1949 Letter of
the Holy Office to the Archbishop of Boston (LOHO). It was issued during the
pontificate of Pope Pius XII.
The same mistake
which Pope John XIII ignored i.e. invisible cases are confused as being
physical exceptions for the dogma extra ecclesiam nulla salus, is repeated at
Vatican Council II, by Pope Paul VI.
The liberalism
in the Catholic Church has come from the mistake in the 1949 LOHO which Pope
Paul VI repeated in 1965. We can now avoid it by interpreting the Council rationally.
___________________________
What mostly astounded the
cardinals was that a pope nobody had expected to produce any surprises should
make such a major decision. Cardinal Angelo Giuseppe Roncalli was far from
being numbered among the papabili, the leading contenders in the conclave of
October 1958 to elect a successor to Pius XII. It was only on the third day of
the conclave, when the voting became deadlocked, that his name was mentioned.
He himself was astonished. He had come to Rome on a return train ticket and
with only an overnight bag, expecting to be back in Venice after two days. He
didn't expect to be pope. And he didn't want to be.
The cardinals who supported
him had voted for a man they considered would be an interim pope, creating no
waves in a church recovering from the frenetic pontificate of Pius XII. In his
19 years on the throne of St. Peter, Pius had not thought it necessary to
summon an ecumenical council. Why then, thought the cardinals in St. Paul that
morning in 1959, did this old man -- he was then 77 -- want to go stirring
things up when all they wanted was a few years of peace to let things settle
down? No wonder they were speechless as the new man dropped his bombshell.
John claimed later that he had
expected that the cardinals, "after hearing our allocution, might have
crowded round to express approval and good wishes." Instead, he added,
"there was a devout and impressive silence. Explanations came on the
following days." This evaluation of the cardinals' reaction is either very
charitable or, more likely, a somewhat rueful remark from an old countryman who
was nobody's fool.
Lionel: The
cardinals had ignored the mistake in the 1949 LOHO. Even Archbishop Marcel
Lefebvre was not aware of the mistake and his irrational interpretation of the
Council in 1965.
____________________
He maintained this attitude to
the end. Nearly three years later, Oct. 11, 1962, when he formally opened the
council, he said the decision to call it "came to us in the first instance
in a sudden flash of inspiration." And recalling the silent reaction of
the cardinals, he added serenely, if implausibly, "The response was
immediate. It was as though some ray of supernatural light had entered the
minds of all present: It was reflected in their faces; it shone from their eyes."
Lionel: ‘The
silent reaction of the cardinals’. Even today they are silent.Even after 60-plus years the cardinals do not see the objective mistake in the 1949 LOHO which was repeated in 1965 by Pope Paul VI.
________________________
The accounts of council
historians do not support such a benevolent portrayal of the Curia's
contribution to the work of the Second Vatican Council. From the start it
worked to preempt the council. It proposed 10 commissions, each with 24
members, to run the council and helpfully nominated Curia people to most of the
positions. It submitted 70 documents for the council's consideration. And it
trusted the council could be completed in one session.
Lionel: The
Council is orthodox and traditional when it is interpreted rationally.
_________________________
The Curia's preemptory bid to
take control of the council in one suave swoop was stopped in its tracks. As
soon as it was made, two European cardinals, Achille Liénart of Lille, France,
and Josef Frings of Munich, Germany, protested. Bishops from the four corners
of the world, 2,500 of them, had come to Rome for the council. They had not had
a chance to get to know each other. How could they decide who would be best for
what commission? They needed a few days to consider the
options.
The council bishops, some of
whom had never before been in the overwhelming surroundings of St. Peter's, and
most of whom were bewildered by the enormity and complexity of what they were
faced with, reacted with delight. The Curia proposals, including the membership
of the commissions and the 70 draft decrees were swept aside. The amendment to
postpone the opening of the council for two days was carried with a massive
majority. The bishops streamed out of St. Peter's to gather outside in the vast
piazza in excited knots to discuss what had happened. The first meeting of
Vatican II, which was to meet in three-month sessions over the next four years,
was finished. It had lasted some 17 minutes.
Lionel: They made
a mistake when they cited LG 8,14,15,16,UR 3, NA 2, GS 22 etc in Vatican
Council II and then made another mistake, when they interpreted LG
8,14,15,16 as being practical exceptions for the dogma extra ecclesiam nulla
salus, when really these are only hypothetical cases. The pope from Paul VI to
Francis have approved this error.They made Vatican Council II a break, instead of continuity with Tradition.-Lionel Andrades
[Desmond Fisher is a former
editor of The Catholic Herald, London, and a former head of current affairs at
Radió Telefís Éireann.]
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