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THE THIRD SESSION
September 14 to November 21, 1964
THE CHURCH IN THE MODERN WORLD
No schema was more talked about at the Council than that on the Church in the modem world. The inspiration for it came from Pope John XXIII, who unwittingly outlined it in a radio-television address on September 11, 1962, exactly one month before the opening of die Council. The Pope’s mind and heart were filled with the great things which he wished the Council to accomplish. The theme of his address was that Christ had illuminated the Church, and that it was the Church’s mission to illumine the nations.
In his practical and down-to-earth manner, he used a globe, four feet in diameter, as a stage property, to show that he was talking about a very real world. And to make sure that no one would miss his point, he had the Vatican photographer take his picture with the globe at his side, and on the picture he wrote four words, in Latin, summarizing his address, Ecclesia Christi lumen gentium (“Christ’s Church is the light of the nations”).
The Council’s task, Pope John said, was to concern itself with the twofold vitality of the Church. There was first the Church’s vitality ad intra, relating to the internal structure of the Church and, principally, to “the treasures of illuminating faith and sanctifying grace.” Very little of his address, however, was devoted to this aspect of the Church’s vitality. Secondly, there was the Church’s vitality ad extra, relating to situations outside itself, such as the wants and needs of Christians and non-Christians “in the modern world.” The Church, he asserted, had responsibilities and obligations bearing on .every phase of modern life: man’s need for daily bread; the administration and distribution of the world’s goods; underdeveloped nations; civil society and a new political order; war—which was to be detested; peace—which was to be sought after; private property; a more profound application of the principles of brotherhood and love among men and nations; killing; adultery and fornication; the sacred nature of matrimony; the religious and moral aspects of procreation; indifferentism in religion; the use of science and technology to raise the economic and spiritual standards of nations; etc.
This was virtually a complete outline of a schema on the Church in the modern world. What Pope John had done in effect was to touch upon a number of suggestions submitted by Council Fathers during the preparatory stages of the Council.
On December 4, 1962, near the end of the first session, Leo Jozef Cardinal Suenens of Mechelen, Belgium, used many of Pope John’s ideas and some of the same words in proposing to the general assembly that the Church should consider its relations with the world at large— ad extra —“since this Council should aim to make the Church the real light of the nations.” On the following day, Pope John created the Coordinating Commission and appointed Cardinal Suenens to it, giving him the task of drawing up a new schema containing those teachings of the Church that touched directly on the problems of the modern world.
At its first meeting in January, 1963, the Coordinating Commission ruled that the new schema should be called “The effective presence of the Church in the world today,” and that it should have six chapters: on the admirable vocation of man; on the human person in society; on marriage and the family; on the proper promotion of cultural development; on economics and social order; and on the community of nations and peace. It was also decided that some elements for the new schema should be taken from three of the dogmatic constitutions prepared by the Theological Preparatory Commission and rejected during the first session. These dealt with the Christian order; with chastity, matrimony, family and virginity; and with the preservation of the deposit of faith.
Cardinal Suenens, as the promoter of the schema, proposed that the task of drawing it up should be entrusted to a special joint commission composed of all the members of the Theological Commission and the Commission on the Apostolate of the Laity, with Cardinals Ottaviani and Fernando Cento of the Roman Curia as co-presidents. The proposal was adopted. It was further suggested that other elements for the new schema should be drawn from the schema “on social action in the lay apostolate” prepared by the Commission on the Apostolate of the Laity, and from two doctrinal schemas of the Theological Preparatory Commission, “on social order” and “on the community of nations.”
Work on the new schema began in February 1963. Between April 24 and 26, a special session was held to which twenty-three highly qualified laymen were invited, only fifteen of whom were able to attend. The schema was ready before the end of May for presentation at the next meeting of the Coordinating Commission, scheduled for June 4. However, owing to Pope John’s death on June 3, the meeting was postponed for one month.
On July 4, after Cardinal Suenens had pointed out both the positive and the negative aspects of the schema in the Coordinating Commission, the Commission decided that the schema was unsatisfactory. The Cardinal was given another mandate to produce a new text which would elaborate on the doctrinal points contained in Chapter 1. The remaining five chapters were to form a supplement. This, of course, would greatly reduce the authority of the teaching contained in those chapters.
Cardinal Suenens proceeded to call some periti to Belgium to prepare a new draft. Strangely enough, during the second session no action was taken by the joint commission responsible for the schema until November 29, 1963, the day on which eight liberal candidates proposed by the world alliance were added to the commission, making the liberals eight votes stronger. The new draft and the original draft were discussed at length on this day, but inconclusively. Finally, Bishop Pelletier of Trois-Rivieres, Canada, suggested that a central subcommission should be created to coordinate the work of five other subcommissions, which were to prepare further revisions of the five chapters of the supplement. This proposal was unanimously adopted.
The joint commission then elected the following six members for the central subcommission by secret ballot: Bishops SchrofTer and Hengsbach of Eichstatt and Essen in Germany, Bishops Jacques Menager and Ancel of Meaux and Lyons in France, Auxiliary Bishop Mark McGrath of Panama City and Bishop Emilio Guano of Livorno, Italy. These six members were then authorized to add two others, and they chose Bishop Wright of Pittsburgh and Bishop Blomjous of Mwanza, Tanzania. Of these eight, all but Bishop McGrath had originally been elected to Commission seats as European alliance candidates; he had been associated with the alliance, however, from the very first days of the Council.
As a result of this meeting, the new schema was now completely in the hands of the European alliance policy-makers. And since the central subcommission wanted as little resistance as possible from conservative members of the Italian and Spanish hierarchies, it elected Italian-born Bishop Guano to serve as chairman and later to introduce the schema in the Council hall. The eight bishops then indicated the general lines of the new draft. A few days later, the session closed, and the bishops returned to their dioceses.
The bishops had chosen the liberal moral theologian, Father Bernard Haring, C.SS.R., as secretary. Under the chairmanship of Bishop Guano, Father Haring, Monsignor Achille Glorieux, Father Raymond Sigmond, O.P., and Father Roberto Tucci, S.J., met several times during the month of December and in the first part of January, 1964. They determined more exactly the spirit of the schema, the general fines which it should follow, its content, its purpose and the persons to whom it was to be directed. They decided that the first draft should be written in French by Father Sigmond.
In February, the central subcommission met for three days in Zurich, Switzerland. Further changes were suggested. On March 4 and 9, two plenary meetings took place of the joint commission, but the schema and supplement were not approved, and the central subcommission had to start work on them again. The joint commission met again between June 4 and 6, and still further corrections and changes were suggested. It began to look as though the schema and supplement would not be ready by the third session. Finally, it was decided to print the schema despite its imperfections, and circulate it to the Council Fathers. Pope Paul gave his approval on July 3. Because of its position on the official fist, it came to be called “the thirteenth schema.” The supplement was still not ready. The liberal element was not yet strong enough to insert in the schema the teachings contained in the supplement, so it planned to have them inserted through speeches from the Council floor. Meanwhile, the periti began to work overtime on the supplement.
They worked so fast and so well that the 57-page supplement to the 29-page schema was ready for distribution to the Council Fathers on September 30, 1964, two weeks after the opening of the third session.
Queries were at once directed to Council authorities on the significance of the supplement and its origin. Since the front cover bore the official heading of Vatican II documents, and since inside was the statement that “the supplement is not to be discussed in the Council hall,” some explanation was called for. The Secretary General, upon instructions from the Council Presidency or the Moderators, announced that the supplement had been drawn up by the joint commission and “sent to the Secretariat for distribution as a purely private document, having no official status whatsoever.” It had been drawn up “to make known the mind of the commission.” In response to further queries, the Secretary General made a second announcement shortly after, which showed that the supplement had more authority than his initial announcement had indicated. “The supplement was drawn up by the joint commission,” he said, “at the request of the Coordinating Commission . . . However, it is not a Council document and therefore will not be discussed in the hall ”
When the press accused tire Secretary General of conservative “intrigue” and “maneuvering” in making the first announcement, and stated that he had been obliged by the Cardinal Moderators to make the second one, he issued a communique calling these reports “inexact and tendentious.” As Secretary General he never spoke in his own name, he said, “but always in the name of the Moderators or of the Presidency.” In fact, the second announcement had been made on his initiative, after he had received the necessary “authorization of the Moderators.”
Three weeks later, on October 20, the schema finally came up for discussion. By that time, five weeks of the session had passed. The Moderators had postponed the discussion until that date, announcing on October 12 and again on October 13 that the “introductory reports” were not yet ready. The fourth speaker on that first day of discussion was Cardinal Lercaro of Bologna, one of the Moderators. “It seems difficult or well-nigh impossible,” he said, “for a new revision of this schema and its final approval to take place during this session.” Large numbers of Council Fathers had given notice of their wish to speak, he said, and it was also most important and necessary that this schema, on the Church in the modern world, should be discussed in detail on the Council floor. “It is even doubtful that there will be sufficient time for the task if the fourth session takes place next year,” he said.
The enthusiastic applause which greeted this statement must have been most pleasing to Cardinal Suenens, to the eight bishops of the central subcommission and to their periti, for it meant that the Council Fathers were prepared to postpone final deliberation on the schema until the fourth session, an absolute necessity if the teachings contained in the supplement were to be incorporated in the schema itself.
Cardinal Dopfner of Munich spoke next on behalf of eighty-three German-speaking and Scandinavian Council Fathers, expressing wholehearted agreement with Cardinal Lercaro. The Council Fathers, he said, should have all the time they needed to study the text with calm, “so that they might truly make it the crowning achievement of the Council.” These words sounded strange coming from a man who up till this point had been driving the Council Fathers at breakneck speed..
A third Moderator, Cardinal Suenens, spoke on the following day. The schema in general was satisfactory, he said, “for the reasons stated yesterday by the two Moderators.” He then went on to say that it would be fitting “to include in the schema various topics contained in the supplement,” such as the section on matrimony and the family.
Archbishop Heenan of Westminster, England, who by this time had founded the opposition group known as St. Paul’s Conference, called the schema “unworthy of an Ecumenical Council of the Church.” He proposed that it should be taken away from the commission which was now handling it and referred to another commission, to be set up forthwith. “Then, after three or four years, let the fourth and final session of the Council be convened to discuss all the social problems,” he said. The Council, he predicted, which had spent so much time on “theological niceties,” would become “a laughingstock in the eyes of the world if it now rushed breathlessly through a debate on world hunger, nuclear war and family life.”
He also pointed out that, according to instructions, the schema was to be debated, while the supplement was to be passed over without comment in the Council hall. “But if we fail to scrutinize both documents with great care,” he said, “the mind of the Council will have to be interpreted to the world by the periti who helped the Fathers of the commission to draw up the documents. God forbid that this should happen! I fear periti when they are left to explain what the bishops meant ... It is of no avail to talk about a College of Bishops if periti in articles, books and speeches contradict and pour scorn on what a body of bishops teaches.” He warned that “the theories of one or two theologians must not be mistaken for a general agreement among theologians . . Only this “general agreement” enjoyed special authority, he said.
Father Benedict Reetz, Superior General of the Benedictines of Beuron, Germany, answered Archbishop Heenan the next day and defended the periti, saying that they had “labored and sweated over the schema,” and that they “need not be feared but rather loved and praised, especially for the supplement, from which very much should be taken and added to the schema itself.” His only criticism was of the Latin, which he called “disgraceful.”
Bishop Charue of Namur, Belgium, said that the world was waiting for this schema, and that therefore “we cannot wait four years.” It should be published the following year, even if the supplement had to be completed later.
Cardinal Meyer of Chicago and Cardinal Bea of the Curia both had general praise for the schema, but said that it was too naturalistic and needed a more profound theological and scriptural basis. Cardinal Leger of Montreal and Cardinal Lienart of Lille said much the same.
Maronite Patriarch Paul Meouchi of Lebanon felt that the structure of the schema was not logical, its style uncertain and its content repetitive. It gave the impression, he said, that the Church had been founded to conduct charitable works and busy itself with social, economic and political affairs. And it seemed to presuppose a conception of history in which Providence played no part. He insisted on a radical revision of the text.
Archbishop Raymond-Marie Tchidimbo of Conakry, Guinea, considered the schema “mediocre” and “directed exclusively to the peoples of Europe and the Americas.” It contained no reference at all to the problems of Africa, such as those resulting from colonialism and racial discrimination.
Archbishop William Conway of Armagh, Ireland, said that the schema contained “only a fraction of what the Church has to say to the modern world.” This fact, he said, should be clearly stated at the very beginning of the schema, for otherwise people would ask, “Do you have nothing else to tell us? Is this all?” He expressed great surprise that the schema should have “so little to say about conditions in areas where the Church lies in chains and lives in silence.” He was also surprised that the document should say nothing about the commercialization of sex and the desecration of human love in so many of the communications media.
Archbishop Morcillo Gonzales of Madrid wondered why the schema was silent on problems such as those of “human labor, the elevation of the whole man to his natural and supernatural perfection, the right of migration, the flood of sensuality and sexuality, atheism . . ., the progress of new nations toward liberty . . ., the extreme poverty and famine which now afflict great multitudes of men.” The schema “either says nothing about them, or speaks of them only in a whisper, as if they were far removed from the modern world.” He, too, called for a complete revision of the schema.
Archbishop Patrick O’Boyle of Washington, D.C., speaking on behalf of the United States bishops, said that it was necessary to devote a paragraph to the problem of racial discrimination. He wanted precise theological reasons given, constituting an open condemnation of racial discrimination, which he called “one of die most deplorable and repugnant crimes of mankind today.”
Discussion of the schema ended on November 10, eleven days before the end of the session. When the assembly was asked whether the schema was suitable as a basis for further discussion, the vote was 1579 to 296 in favor. On December 30, the Coordinating Commission ruled that the supplement, at least in substance, should be included in the schema. This decision was formally conveyed to Cardinals Ottaviani and Cento, co-presidents of the joint commission, by a letter dated January 2, 1965, and signed by Cardinal Cicognani, president of the Coordinating Commission.
When the Council Fathers received the latest revision of the schema during the summer, it consisted of 79 pages instead of 29, as previously. Explaining the great difference in size, the central subcommission stated that the new draft consisted basically of three elements. First there was the original draft. Then there were the oral and written interventions, totalling 830 pages, which had been very carefully examined. And finally, “in accordance with the wishes expressed by many Council Fathers, the supplement accompanying the previous text has been inserted in the new text, at least in substance.”
It had been a long, hard battle, but once again the liberals, aided by the Moderators, had succeeded in getting their way.
"So let us be confident, let us not be unprepared, let us not be outflanked, let us be wise, vigilant, fighting against those who are trying to tear the faith out of our souls and morality out of our hearts, so that we may remain Catholics, remain united to the Blessed Virgin Mary, remain united to the Roman Catholic Church, remain faithful children of the Church."- Abp. Lefebvre
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THE THIRD SESSION
September 14 to November 21, 1964
DEFEAT FOR THE MODERATORS
In the past decades, a startling phenomenon has been taking place in the United States and Europe: the percentage of young men choosing to become secular, or diocesan, priests has been decreasing, while the percentage of those choosing to become priests as members of religious orders has been increasing. In the United States, the percentage of secular priests dropped from 73 per cent of the national total in 1925 to 61 per cent in 1965. The percentage of religious order priests rose in the same period from 27 to 39 per cent. In some areas, priests who are members of religious orders outnumber secular priests. In the archdiocese of Chicago, for example, the percentage of secular priests dropped from 59 per cent in 1925 to 46 per cent in 1965, while that of religious order priests rose from 41 to 54 per cent in the same period.
In Germany, similarly, the percentage of secular priests dropped from 92 per cent in 1915 to 78 per cent in i960, while during the same period the percentage of priests belonging to religious orders rose from 8 to 22 per cent.
Bishop Karl Leiprecht of Rottenburg, Germany, a member of the Council’s Commission on Religious, called attention to this trend at the Fulda conference in August, 1963, observing that it would oblige bishops to make greater demands than ever before on religious orders for pastoral work.
The problem, however, was how to obtain greater control over the members of religious orders. The solution proposed by adherents of the European alliance was to stress the importance of apostolic work, calling it a necessity for all religious orders of men and women, even for contemplative orders. The alliance also insisted on basic changes in the structure of religious orders, calling this an “adaptation to modern times.” But the emphasis on apostolic work was such that, in the eyes of the religious orders, the goal in view appeared almost purely utilitarian, without regard for the spiritual life of the individual. And some of the changes suggested made it appear that the aim was to standardize the religious orders, that is, recast them in the same or similar molds. Superiors general naturally considered this as the death knell to their institutes, and so began a struggle for survival.
A severe blow came on January 30, 1963, when the Coordinating Commission delivered instructions to the Commission on Religious drastically to reduce its schema and to make certain changes. The instructions had been prepared by Cardinal Dopfner, who was responsible to the Coordinating Commission for the schema on the religious life, as Cardinal Suenens was responsible to it for the schema on the Church in the modern world. The original schema had been drafted by the Preparatory Commission on Religious and contained thirty-two chapters, including 201 articles and covering no pages. It was very thorough and detailed, dealing with all questions pertaining to the religious life. The Commission on Religious in plenary session reduced this schema to nine chapters within two months of receiving the aforesaid instructions, and referred it back to the Coordinating Commission for approval.
On March 27, 1963, Cardinal Dopfner in his report to the Coordinating Commission said that he was satisfied with the great reduction in size, but not with the title “On Religious,” or with the frequent use of the term “states of perfection.” He suggested three points that should be taken into consideration in improving the text:
1. The text as it stood was lacking in scriptural and theological depth in its presentation o£ the religious life and the evangelical counsels. Nor was sufficient stress laid on appropriate renewal. Too little consideration was given to the Christological and ecclesiological aspects of the religious life.
2. The text did not constitute an adequate response to the wish expressed by all Council Fathers for clear and practical directives for the adaptation of religious orders to modern needs. Too little space was given to this topic.
3. Even though withdrawal from the world was a necessary characteristic of religious orders and must be especially stressed today, there should not be so many warnings against the world and the spirit of the world.
An effective apostolate was possible only if those engaged in the apostolate knew the modern world and could reach modern man. There was much complaint about the lack of knowledge of the world among members of religious orders, especially the women’s orders. Here there was need for change.
The Coordinating Commission, however, approved the revised schema in substance; whereupon Valerio Cardinal Valeri, president of the Commission on Religious, and a member of the Roman Curia, appointed a committee of five to make the additional changes and additions suggested by Cardinal Dopfner. He cancelled the plenary session of his Commission, originally scheduled for May 1963, considering it unnecessary, and on April 23 presented the revised text to the Secretary General.
Cardinal Dopfner heard of this at once, and was very much annoyed. He again submitted the suggestions that he had originally made, and some new ones besides. This time, however, he and his periti worked them out in detail, with exactly the wording which they wished to have incorporated in the schema. Cardinal Dopfner wrote to Cardinal Valeri that he was enclosing, “by way of example,” some proposals “which could easily be inserted in the existing schema at the places indicated.” His letter arrived after the revised schema had been submitted to the Secretary General, and Cardinal Valeri had to get it back again. The same committee of five was put to work on it, and finally, on May 8, the text was returned to the Secretary General for printing.
Strangely enough, when the printed version appeared, it carried a note to the effect that it had been approved by Pope John XXIII on April 22, 1963. But it had not been in the hands even of the Secretary General by that date, let alone in those of the Pope. This raises the question whether the Pope ever saw the document.
At the time Cardinal Dopfner sent his proposals to Cardinal Valeri, Bishop Gerard Huyghe of Arras, France, also protested and sent proposals of his own. He was a member of the Commission on Religious and was greatly displeased that the scheduled plenary session for May had been canceled. About half of the proposals submitted by Cardinal Dopfner were incorporated in the text, but none of those submitted by Bishop Huyghe; Cardinal Dopfner’s were used because they were considered as elucidating his original report to the Coordinating Commission. Both sets of proposals, however, were mimeographed and sent to all the members of the Commission on Religious. On seeing that his proposals had been ignored, Bishop Huyghe combined them with the unused proposals made by Cardinal Dopfner, as well as with proposals made by two other Commission members (French and Belgian) which had likewise been ignored. He then asked all the bishops of France and all those who attended the Fulda conference to give their support to his combined list.
Bishop Leiprecht, who had been commissioned by Cardinal Dopfner to prepare a written report on the revised schema dated April 22, 1963, for the Fulda conference, maintained that “the Commission members residing in Rome, and also their periti, who had edited the shortened draft, had too much control.” And he concluded that “the schema in its present form is not yet ready to be taken up by the Council Fathers. It is not sufficiently in step with the needs of modern times and of the Council.” The Fulda conference endorsed this view, labeled the schema unsatisfactory, and informed Rome accordingly. The schema did not come up for discussion during the second session.
Toward the end of the second session, on November 29, the Coordinating Commission instructed Iidebrando Cardinal Antoniutti, the new president of the Commission on Religious (Cardinal Valeri had died in July), to shorten the schema still further, and also to prepare an appendix listing “in great detail those observations made by Council Fathers which were not accepted by the Commission, together with the reasons for their rejection.”
Further instructions were issued by the Coordinating Commission on December 28, 1963, and January 15, 1964, and these were sent to Cardinal Antoniutti on January 23. The Cardinal was informed that the schema must now be reduced to propositions which would be voted on in the Council hall, but without discussion. Cardinal Dopfner sent still more proposals on January 24. As a result of these instructions, the schema was reduced to 118 lines of propositions.
The third session opened 011 September 14, 1964, and on September 29 the Roman Union of Superiors General held a meeting to decide what action to take with regard to the propositions. Some superiors general were present. Father Armand Le Bourgeois, Superior General of the Eudists, read a detailed report on the development of the propositions, with an analysis of each of the articles. His conclusion was that the propositions as they stood were unsatisfactory, but could be improved. The matter was then discussed at length, but no decision was reached.
On October 7, the executive committee of the Roman Union met at the generalate of the Oblates of Mary Immaculate. Present were the superiors general of the Franciscans, Dominicans, Carmelites, Benedictines, Oblates of Mary Immaculate, Marists and Eudists. An animated discussion took place on policy, and it was unanimously agreed not to reject the propositions, but rather to improve them by submitting qualifications with affirmative votes. In their written report to all other superiors general, they stated that “a massive negative vote” might have unfortunate consequences, and pointed to four specific points which, in their judgment, required amendment. At the same time, they assured the other superiors general that they were perfectly free to take whatever stand they chose on the issues. They also began to prepare interventions on these points, and to draw up qualifications to be printed and distributed before the voting.
On October 23, the Secretary General announced that the report on the propositions would be distributed on the same day, as well as “an appendix to the schema, which, however, will not be matter for discussion.” On receiving the printed copy of the report, the Council Fathers were surprised to find enclosed in the same booklet an amended and lengthened version of the propositions. Some of them asked the Bishops’ Secretariat, headed by Archbishop Perantoni, what it thought of the new version.
The Archbishop thereupon called together his central committee, whose members decided unanimously that the propositions were acceptable. They prepared a circular letter explaining their views, and on November 8 had it delivered to more than 1100 Council Fathers. The letter announced the names of five Council Fathers scheduled to make oral interventions on the propositions, and stated that each one, through the efforts of the Bishops’ Secretariat, had obtained several hundred supporting signatures. Attached to the letter were five qualifications recapitulating the five interventions, which the recipients were invited to sign and submit with their affirmative votes.
On November 10, two days after this letter was delivered, the propositions on the religious life came up for discussion. By this time, the propositions on priests and on missions had already been rejected. There was time for only one speaker that morning, Cardinal Spellman of New York, a member of the Coordinating Commission.
Cardinal Spellman expressed general satisfaction with the text. “If some amendments and clarifications on a few fundamental points are introduced in the text,” he said, “this schema can be accepted by the Council as a basis for a genuine renewal of religious life in the Church.” He pointed out that modernization had “in fact been in progress in religious communities for many years.” The issue now was “a secondary and incidental adaptation, not a changing of the very essence of religious life”; much confusion, he said, existed on that point. “Recently,” he added, “certain things have been written and said about the religious life and its adaptation to modern conditions which seem to contribute to this confusion. They seem to neglect and almost to deny the special witness given to Christ by the religious life. In a word, these things . . . tend to destroy religious life.” In his own archdiocese of New York, he said, there were more than 8000 women in the religious life, and not a few of them were “uneasy because of these things which are being said so confusedly, incautiously and imprudently regarding the modernization of religious life in the Church.” Some Council Fathers and periti took these 1 words as intended for Cardinal Suenens, who had published a book on the subject, The Nun in the World, and who had recently lectured in the United States on the religious life.
Seventeen speakers took the floor on the following day. The first was Jaime Cardinal de Barros Camara of Rio de Janeiro, who said on behalf of 103 bishops of Brazil that the schema was on the whole acceptable.
He pointed out that the doctrinal aspect of the religious life had already been dealt with in Chapter 4 of the schema on the Church, and that the duties of members of religious orders in die external apostolate had been discussed in the schema on the pastoral office of bishops in the Church. It was therefore unnecessary to treat of religious in the schema at any ! great length; it was, however, necessary to determine more clearly the competent authority which should promote and guide the desired renewal of the religious life.
The fourth speaker was Cardinal Dopfner, who severely criticized the propositions and asked for a complete revision. They did not adequately touch the central problems of renewal, he said.
Cardinal Suenens also asserted that the schema was unacceptable because it failed to deal adequately with the problems of adaptation and modernization of the religious life. He spoke especially about congregations of i sisters “in the so-called active life.” They should enjoy the genuine freedom required for apostolic action, he said. The apostolate itself should be defined in the sense of “evangelization,” so that there would be a hierarchy of values in the life of the Sister, each one having some time for such apostolic work. On the practical level, he asked that new rules should be elaborated for convents, so that individual Sisters might cooperate actively and as adults for the good of the whole community. This would avoid the concentration of power in a single Mother Superior on the one hand, and an overly passive, infantile obedience on the other. He advocated balanced structures of government, changes in the system of naming superiors, and general chapters which would more faithfully represent the entire congregation. Antiquated customs should be changed, separation from the world should not prevent a religious from engaging in apostolic work, the distinctive but ridiculous garb of many communities must be changed, practices based on “outdated notions of the inferiority of women should be abandoned, and no Sister should have to travel with a companion.
On the same day, four of the five speakers announced in the circular letter of the Bishops’ Secretariat were given the floor. Father Anastasio del SS. Rosario, Superior General of the Carmelites, and president of the Roman Union of Superiors General, spoke first in the name of 185 Council Fathers, and asserted that the propositions deserved a qualified affirmative vote. Appropriate renewal was definitely needed in the religious life, he said, but it was absolutely necessary to have a clear concept of what this entailed. It entailed, he explained, two essential elements: a return by the members of religious communities to the spirit and fervor which had animated those communities at the time of their foundation; and adaptation to the world and to modern times. Only this twofold norm would provide the necessary “solid and supernatural criteria for the various aspects of renewal,” and could prevent “a restless search after novelty which wants to discard everything.”
Archbishop Perantoni spoke in the name of 370 Council Fathers. He said that the schema as it stood was “good and should be retained as a basis for discussion, despite the opinion of those who had asked for its complete rejection.” He spoke out against the standardization of religious orders, saying that the orders should be regarded “as the expression of diverse charisms in the Church.” He requested the Council to state its high esteem for the lay religious fife,” since religious communities of Brothers and Sisters made such a useful contribution to the pastoral work of the Church by educating the young, caring for the sick and discharging other services.
The next speaker was a French Jesuit, the retired Archbishop Victor Sartre of Tananarive, Madagascar, who spoke on behalf of 265 Council Fathers and also expressed the views of 250 superiors general of religious congregations of women. The schema, he said, had many good elements, “and we hope that it will be approved.” Primacy of place, he said, should clearly be given to the interior and spiritual life of the members, and, any program of adaptation, the spirit of the founders must be loyally preserved, as well as all the particular goals and sound traditions of each community.
He was followed by another Jesuit, Bishop Guilly of Georgetown, British Guiana, who spoke for 263 Council Fathers. The propositions, said Bishop Guilly, merited approval in substance, although they had many weaknesses. For instance, it was “truly amazing” that so little should be said about the contemplative orders. The propositions, he maintained, depicted the modern apostolate “in a much too restricted sense, as an external apostolate.” In the theological and technical terminology of the Church, however, the word “apostolate” designated all activities of Christ’s followers which promoted the kingdom of God on earth. He therefore called for the addition of a distinct proposition in which the Council would express its high esteem for the contemplative institutes and declare their life to be “eminently apostolic.”
On the following day, Auxiliary Bishop James Carroll of Sydney, Australia, spoke in the name of 440 Council Fathers. Fie called for a special paragraph on Brothers engaged in teaching work, thus stressing in a practical way the apostolic character of lay religious. It would also be opportune, he said, for the Council to rectify the ideas of numerous priests and laymen “who do not esteem those who embrace the religious life without embracing the priesthood.”
Never in the history of the Council had a series of speakers been given so much backing. A reaction was inevitable.
Bishop Charue, of Belgium, announced his complete agreement with the conclusion of Cardinal Dopfner. Father Joseph Buckley, Superior General of the Marists, speaking on behalf of 130 Council Fathers, said that the schema was “simply not satisfactory,” and would have to be completely rewritten with the aid of periti “of a more modern mentality and broader experience,” in line with the renewal promoted by the Council. Bishop Huyghe of Arras, France, expressed his “whole-hearted” agreement with everything that had been said by Cardinal Dopfner, Cardinal Suenens Bishop Charue and Father Buckley. “The propositions are inadequate, he said, “because they lack spirit, are too juridical, too exclusively Western, and contain very little for a true renewal of the religious life. ... A new schema should be prepared.”
On the third day, the debate was closed on a motion proposed by Cardinal Suenens. Twenty-six oral interventions had been made, and thirty-six interventions had been submitted in writing. The Secretary General now asked the assembly to vote on the following question: “Do the Fathers desire to proceed to the vote on the twenty individual propositions which make up the schema ‘On the appropriate renewal of the religious life,’ now that the discussion has been completed?” If the majority voted “no,” a new draft would have to be prepared. If the majority voted “yes,” the propositions would be retained, and voting on the individual propositions would follow.
Why did the Roman Union of Superiors General and the Bishops’ Secretariat wish to have the propositions retained and amended, while Cardinals Dopfner and Suenens pressed for their rejection? The underlying reason was the vastly different conception, on either side, of the religious life and its function in the Church. The Roman Union and the Bishops’ Secretariat realized that, in a complete revision of the schema, the ideas of Cardinals Dopfner and Suenens would gain more ground.
They also suspected that the Cardinals might have a substitute schema ready, or nearly ready, to impose upon the Commission on Religious. Thus the retention of the unsatisfactory propositions and their improvement through qualifications became in their eyes the preferred solutions.
As a peritus of the Bishops’ Secretariat explained to me, it was widely felt that Cardinal Dopfner’s conception of the religious life was “lacking in theological depth, clarity and precision.” Cardinal Suenens, he said, “who is much less concerned with theological problems, seems to think of religious mainly in so far as they are useful to the external apostolate.”
It was felt, in other words, that Cardinal Suenens did not give its proper place to the interior life of a religious. It had created an odd impression, the peritus added, that Cardinal Dopfner, of all people, should have attacked the propositions so strongly, “after he had himself, in his capacity as official spokesman of the Coordinating Commission, insisted so emphatically that the text be reduced to its present dimensions.” And when I asked why the Bishops’ Secretariat had collected a total of 1523 signatures for only five interventions, he reminded me that its founders had been silenced by the closing of the debate during the discussion of the schema on the Church. They had feared that this might happen again, and believed that the hundreds of signatures would force the Moderators to give them the floor, as had in fact happened.
When the ballots were distributed on Thursday, November 12, Cardinals Dopfner and Suenens were confident of victory. For days they had been privately assuring Council Fathers that the propositions would certainly be rejected. But to their great surprise, when the results were announced, 1155 had voted in favor of retaining them, and only 882 against them. In the face of this defeat, the Moderator for the day, Cardinal Suenens, had no choice but to announce that the voting on the propositions would take place on the following Saturday and Monday.
The German and Belgian periti, whose job it was to devise strategy for the two Cardinals, had been caught off guard. Impulsively they suggested that all those who shared the Cardinals’ views should now be asked to cast a negative vote on each of the nine proposed ballots, thus in effect rejecting the propositions. But this was only a temporary reaction, for they soon realized that they would never be able to muster sufficient votes to reject the propositions outright. Such tactics would give the Roman Union and the Bishops’ Secretariat a free hand.
The periti of the two Cardinals then decided to draw up and print a series of qualifications of their own, imitating the action taken four days earlier by the periti of the Bishops’ Secretariat. They also prepared a
covering letter, asking their supporters to cast qualified affirmative votes and submit the qualifications prepared by them. Ihe covering letter was , signed by ten Council Fathers, including Cardinal Dopfner, Cardinal Suenens and Bishop Huyghe.
The Bishops’ Secretariat was quite pleased with many of the qualifications prepared by the periti of Cardinals Dopfner and Suenens; it opposed the two Cardinals not so much for what they wanted included in the schema, but rather for what they wanted excluded from it.
The periti of the Bishops’ Secretariat, meanwhile, had not been idle. As they explained in a new letter, dated November 13, “many excellent points came up during the discussion in the Council hall, which most certainly can help make the schema more complete.” They enclosed in their letter a new set of thirteen qualifications, including the five which they had I distributed on November 8. One of the new qualifications called for the 1 preservation of the “authentic concept of religious obedience,” described as “that sublime holocaust whereby a person, for the sake of the kingdom of heaven, completely subjects himself and all that he has to the will of Christ, whose place is taken by the superior.” In answer to the great emphasis placed by some speakers on dialogue between subjects and superiors, this qualification pointed out that nothing would remain of I religious obedience “if it is conceived only as a dialogue in which the I superior keeps trying to persuade a subject by explaining to him all the reasons for a given order.”
The periti of the Bishops’ Secretariat distributed their qualifications to more than 1100 Council Fathers in the afternoon of November 13.
Voting was to begin the next day. They had purposely waited until the last minute so that the two Cardinals’ periti would have no time to prepare counter qualifications.
In the voting on each of the first five ballots, there was an average of 930 affirmative votes, 952 qualified affirmative votes, and 68 negative votes. On the very first ballot, 1005 qualified affirmative votes were cast, the largest number on any ballot in the history of the Council. From the voting returns it was impossible, of course, to tell whether the qualifications submitted were mainly those of the Bishops’ Secretariat or of Cardinals Dopfner and Suenens.
Previously, the rule had always been that qualifications must be submitted at the time of voting. But on this particular day, Saturday, Novem¬ber 14, the Moderators decided that such qualifications might be submitted as late as the following Tuesday, provided that the Council Fathers indicated on their ballots that they were casting qualified affirmative votes.
The reason for this sudden change in Council procedure was—to all appearances—a breakdown in Cardinal Dopfner’s and Cardinal Suenens’ distribution plan. Many of the Council Fathers who were supposed to have received qualifications had heard of them, but did not have them by the time the voting began that Saturday morning.
An examination of the qualifications showed that the five which received the largest backing had all been prepared by the periti of the Bishops’ Secretariat. For the rest, it was almost a tie, with qualifications from both sides winning extensive support. Most were incorporated in the schema.
The revised and expanded text, now called a decree, returned to the Council floor on October n, 1965, during the fourth session. The supporters of the views both of the Bishops’ Secretariat and of Cardinals Dopner and Suenens showed their satisfaction with the new text by voting 2126 to 13 in its favor. In the final vote at the public session on October 28, 1965, the Decree on the Appropriate Renewal of the Religious Life received 2321 affirmative votes and only 4 negative votes. It was then promulgated by Pope Paul VI.
"So let us be confident, let us not be unprepared, let us not be outflanked, let us be wise, vigilant, fighting against those who are trying to tear the faith out of our souls and morality out of our hearts, so that we may remain Catholics, remain united to the Blessed Virgin Mary, remain united to the Roman Catholic Church, remain faithful children of the Church."- Abp. Lefebvre
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THE THIRD SESSION
September 14 to November 21, 1964
SEMINARIES AND SCHOOLS
The schema on priestly formation was reduced to propositions by the Coordinating Commission shortly after the end of the second session. By letters of May n and July 7, 1964, the Secretary General informed the Council Fathers of the procedure prescribed for the propositions: no proposals were to be submitted for amending the text, but a vote would be taken upon it after the reading of an introductory report.
Nevertheless, the German-speaking and Scandinavian Council Fathers, meeting at Innsbruck in May, 1964, prepared fifteen long pages of commentary. For all practical purposes, this was a substitute schema, since it contained numerous proposals for rearranging the text of the propositions and inserting lengthy additions. The degree of control exercised by this small group of bishops over the Council became evident on the following October 14, during the third session, when each Council Father received a revised edition of the propositions. They were twice as long as before, many had been changed, and lengthy additions had been made.
A careful comparison of these revised propositions made it perfectly clear that some 90 per cent of the changes and additions had come from the fifteen-page commentary prepared by the Innsbruck conference. This was proof enough that one of the purposes of reducing schemas to short propositions had been to render possible the introduction of more of the ideas of the bishops and periti of the European alliance.
The revised propositions came up for discussion on November 12, 1964. Auxiliary Bishop Jozef Drzazga of Gniezno, Poland, speaking on behalf of the bishops of Poland, praised the text, but observed that its principles on priestly formation were too vaguely stated. “It is not enough to say that priestly training may be adapted to local circumstances by the competent territorial authority,” he said, “because such authorities expect to receive from the Council norms which are valid for the entire world.”
Archbishop Giovanni Colombo of Milan, Italy, who had been rector of the archdiocesan major seminary of Milan from 1954 to 1963, said that a great defect in seminary training was the lack of organic unity. It was due, he said, to the fact that the “programs of spiritual, intellectual, pastoral and disciplinary formation were independent of one another, so that each went its own way without a common meeting point, without any unifying and dynamic idea.” This fault was remedied in the schema, he said, because it set up Jesus Christ as the unifying, focal point. “And because it is so excellently stated in these propositions that the renovation of seminaries depends more on qualified men than on good precepts,” he added, “we should brook no delay and spare no sacrifice in securing such men, who are truly specialists and animated with the spirit of this Council.” He also called for new textbooks for seminaries. “Without qualified teachers and suitable books, there is a danger that the wisest prescriptions of this Holy Synod may remain a dead letter”
Cardinal Leger wanted the text to cite St. Thomas Aquinas as a master and model for all those studying theology. “In this way,” he said, “the doctrine of St. Thomas will not be imposed, but rather the scientific and spiritual approach will be extolled whereby he creatively utilized the knowledge of his day in the service of the Gospel.”
Cardinal Dopfner expressed great satisfaction with the amended propositions, which, he said, followed a middle road in the very difficult question of priestly formation “by retaining rules proved by the experience of centuries and introducing new ones more appropriate in changed circumstances.”
Cardinal Suenens called the schema “generally satisfactory,” but suggested the addition of a new proposition providing for the establishment of a special commission to study the question of seminary renewal. A published text was not sufficient to bring about the renewal intended by the Council, he maintained.
Bishop Sani of Den Pasar, Bah, said that the Council should not place too much emphasis on the negative aspect of separation from the world.
“It has the positive effect of freeing the student from distractions in his studies,” he said. Sufficient pastoral and practical experience could be gained during vacation time, he suggested, and this could be supplemented in the seminary itself through frequent conferences by clerical and lay experts.
Archbishop Denis Hurley of Durban, South Africa, said that the apostolic character of seminary formation should in no way detract from the importance of study or the value of scholasticism. He agreed with Cardinal Suenens that existing methods of teaching philosophy should be re-examined, but felt that scholastic teachings should not be brushed aside. Some of its themes were essential to a Catholic philosophical approach, he said; without them, philosophy and theology might come to be regarded as incompatible. If philosophy demanded unlimited freedom of inquiry, then “we concede that Catholics cannot be philosophers.”
Only in the light of divine faith and scholastic principles, he said, was the Catholic free to embark on a philosophic investigation of God, man and the universe.
Archbishop Jean Weber of Strasbourg, France, speaking from twenty-five years’ experience in a Paris seminary, called the propositions fair and full of wisdom, even though short. He hoped, however, that two extremes would be avoided: on the one hand the “determination to tear down everything that has been set up by holy men since the Council of Trent,” and, on the other, “opposition to any change whatsoever, even when this is demanded by changing times and attitudes.” He hedged somewhat in his comments on the principle in the schema that episcopal conferences and diocesan bishops should be the competent authorities in regulating seminary training. “For Italy or France this is good today,” he said, “but it may not be good elsewhere, and it is not something eternal.” Seminary authorities, he said, should form among themselves a true “college,” since the greatest difficulties in seminaries arose from disagreement among the authorities and from the absence of dialogue between them and students.
One of the last speakers was Archbishop Garrone of Toulouse, France, who praised the schema highly and called Article i most opportune for stating that programs of priestly formation should be drawn up in each country by the episcopal conferences concerned, to be revised at stated intervals and approved by the Apostolic See. This would ensure the adaptation of universal laws to special circumstances of time and place, so that priestly formation would always answer the pastoral needs of the area where the ministry was to be exercised. Such decentralization, the Archbishop said, would alter and increase the duties of the Sacred Congregation of Seminaries, which would now have to acquaint itself with the needs and problems of the different countries, and to take note of progress and change in the disciplines pertaining to seminary training.
To achieve the first goal, the Sacred Congregation must no longer remain behind the times, or be negative in its approach. “It would also be necessary that this Congregation have as members men from all over the world, so that it might better know the conditions of priestly life.” The second goal could be achieved if the Sacred Congregation were to use men who were true experts in the sacred and social sciences, and who likewise represented all regions of the world.
Probably unwittingly, Archbishop Garrone was outlining a task which he himself would be asked to carry out. Less than two months after the end of the Council, Pope Paul named him pro-prefect of the Sacred Congregation of Seminaries and Universities. This meant that he would automatically head the Sacred Congregation on the retirement of Giuseppe Cardinal Pizzardo, the existing incumbent, who was eighty-eight years old when the appointment was announced.
The discussion was concluded on November 17, 1964. In the voting, only 41 called for the rejection of the propositions, but numerous qualifications were submitted on each of the seven ballots. These, together with ninety-nine oral and written interventions, were used to revise and lengthen the text, which was officially designated as the Decree on Priestly Formation. The new text was formally adopted by a vote of 2318 to 3 on October 28, 1965, and immediately promulgated by Pope Paul VI.
The Commission responsible for the schema on priestly formation was also responsible for the schema on Christian education, and discussion on the latter text began on the day on which discussion of the former ended.
Once again, the Council Fathers were surprised at the distribution of a revised set of propositions. This time, however, the text had been shortened instead of expanded. The propositions distributed before the opening of the third session had contained seventeen articles and covered 165 lines. The revised version contained 11 articles and covered 106 lines. This extremely brief text was the seventh revision of the schema.
One of the speakers on the first day of debate was Cardinal Spellman of New York, who directed his attention to Article 4, on the rights of children and parents. He said that parents should be free to choose the schools they wished for their children. They should not, therefore, be subject to unjust economic burdens which infringed upon this freedom of choice. Since it was the function of the State to promote civil liberties, justice and equity demanded that a due measure of public aid be available to parents in support of the schools they selected for their children. Moreover, if those schools served the public purpose of popular education, the fact that they might be religious in their orientation should not exclude them from a rightful measure of public support.
Coadjutor Bishop Elchinger of Strasbourg, France, said that it was unfortunate that the schema should have been drafted before account could be taken of the other important schemas discussed during the third session. The existing text, he said, needed complete revision. The purpose behind Christian education should be the development of what he called a missionary spirit, so that young persons thus educated would not hide their faith, but would base their personal and social lives in the modern pluralistic and ecumenically minded society in which they lived on their Christian faith.
Cardinal Leger suggested that the schema should be referred back to the Commission together with the comments of the Council Fathers, so that it might undergo a thorough revision, prior to presentation at the fourth session. “At the present time,” he said, “we do not seem to have sufficient time, or sufficient strength, for a fitting examination of this schema and the preparation of adequate amendments.” He asked the Council Fathers not to approve too hastily what would become a Magna Carta of Christian education and higher studies for years to come. He found fault with the schema for not giving sufficient attention to scientific investigation and for its lack of inspiration. He asked specifically for practical proposals on coordination and cooperation among Catholic universities, especially with regard to theological, scriptural, philosophical and sociological studies. The promotion of such coordination and cooperation by modern means should be the chief task of the Sacred Congregation for Seminaries and Universities.
Auxiliary Bishop Luiz Henriquez Jimenez of Caracas, Venezuela, criticized the schema for placing too much stress on Catholic schools, which he called “lovely and enclosed gardens cultivated with much love, but whose fruits for the evangelization of the world seem to diminish with each passing day.” In the Middle Ages, when the State was helpless in educational matters, the Church had assumed the whole field of education as a supplementary role. But now that the State had taken up this task, with technical and financial resources far beyond the Church’s means, it was high time for the Church to determine whether its schools really served the cause of evangelizing modern youth as a whole, especially the poor, who were often unable to attend Catholic schools because they could not pay the tuition.
The bishop pointed out that the Catholic Church was virtually absent from the public school. “We have lacked the interest to train Catholic teachers who might transform those schools from within,” he said. “Those who already work in public schools have been, as it were, abandoned by us and sometimes have been made to feel like traitors to Catholic education.” In the name of 120 Council Fathers, he then asked that the schema be thoroughly revised, and Catholic education subjected to critical analysis, so that it might become an efficacious instrument for preaching the Gospel. He also suggested that youth should be fully prepared to assume teaching positions in public schools and universities, and that, if necessary, special institutes should be established for their training.
Bishop Simon Nguyen-van Hien of Dalat, Vietnam, said that in mission lands the Catholic schools served as a most efficacious means of the apostolate. Many non-Christian parents in Asia, where Christian morals were respected, preferred to send their children to Catholic schools, especially when these were directed by priests and religious.
The discussion of the text on Christian education ended on November 19. The vote was 1457 to 419 to proceed to a vote on the text, without referring it back for revision. Nevertheless, there was still much dissatisfaction with the text, since on each of the four ballots an average of 161 negative votes and 168 qualified affirmative votes were cast.
After the close of the third session, the text was revised, and presented during the fourth session for further voting. On the last ballot before it was sent to the Pope, there were 183 negative votes—an extraordinarily large number. At the final vote, however, on October 28, 1965, in the presence of the Pope, the vote on the Declaration on Christian Education was 2290 to 35; those Council Fathers who were dissatisfied with it felt that they had sufficiently indicated their displeasure at the previous vote.
The document was then promulgated.
"So let us be confident, let us not be unprepared, let us not be outflanked, let us be wise, vigilant, fighting against those who are trying to tear the faith out of our souls and morality out of our hearts, so that we may remain Catholics, remain united to the Blessed Virgin Mary, remain united to the Roman Catholic Church, remain faithful children of the Church."- Abp. Lefebvre
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THE THIRD SESSION
September 14 to November 21, 1964
THE PRELIMINARY EXPLANATORY NOTE
The most important and dramatic battle which took place at the Second Vatican Council was not the widely publicized controversy over religious liberty, but the one over collegiality, which happened mostly behind the scenes. The drama was caused by controversy over the true and proper way in which collegiality was to be understood in Chapter 3 of the Dogmatic Constitution on the Church. There were three interpretations of collegiality:
According to the first, the college of bishops did not exercise supreme power by divine right, but only by human right. That meant that it rested with the Pope to make the episcopal college the subject of supreme power, for example by convening an ecumenical council. According to this explanation, the Pope alone enjoyed supreme power, by divine right. That was the conservative stand.
According to the second, or extreme, interpretation, which was defended and promoted by some liberals, the only subject of supreme power was the college of bishops together with its head, the Pope. The Pope could exercise supreme power; but in so doing, he would be acting only as head of the college, or, in other words, only in so far as he represented the college. He would be bound in conscience to request the opinion of the college of bishops before making a pronouncement because, as representative of the college, he was obliged to express the thinking of the college.
According to the third, or moderate, interpretation, which was held by Pope Paul and other liberal Council Fathers, the Pope personally was the subject of supreme power in the Church, and also the college of bishops when united to its head, the Pope. In this hypothesis, the consent of the Pope was necessary as an essential constituent element of the supreme power of the college. In other words, the Pope possessed supreme power by divine right and was always free to use it; while the episcopal college possessed supreme power by divine right but was not always free to use it. Since the college was obliged to act with and under its head, the Pope, it was dependent upon the Pope in using its supreme power. In this way, the unity of the supreme authority in the Church was not impaired.
Pope Paul, first as a priest and later as Cardinal-Archbishop of Milan, had thoroughly studied the hierarchical structure of the Church and also the problem of collegiality. As Pope, he kept abreast of the latest theological literature and developments in this field. In the official archives for the preparatory period of the Council, his name can be found on documents requesting a determination of the powers and charisms proper to bishops in the government of the Church, according to the will of Christ. After he became Pope, he informed the Theological Commission of his views and got the impression that it shared them.
Collegiality was discussed in the Council hall at great length during the second session, in 1963. The Theological Commission established a sub-commission on collegiality which worked so rapidly that, by March 6, 1964, the revised text on collegiality was ready. It was later submitted to Pope Paul, but he was not satisfied with it, and, on May 19, 1964, had the Secretary General forward some suggestions which he wished the Theological Commission to take into consideration, stating that it was free to adopt them or not at its next plenary session, scheduled for June 5.
On May 27, the Secretary General wrote to Father Benjamin Wambacq, Secretary of the Pontifical Commission on Biblical Studies, on behalf of Pope Paul, asking for urgent replies to two questions. The first was whether, according to the Pontifical Commission, the following text in the schema could be proved from Scripture: “Just as, by the Lord’s will, St. Peter and the other apostles constituted one apostolic college, so in a similar way the Roman Pontiff, as the successor of Peter, and the bishops, as the successors of the apostles, are joined together.”
In reply, the Pontifical Commission ruled, at a meeting of May 31, that, whereas the first part of the statement (up to the word “college”) could be proved from Scripture, the rest could not be proved from Scripture alone.
The second was whether it could be said, from the Scriptural passages indicated in the following statement, that the office of binding and loosing, granted to Peter alone, belonged also to the college of apostles, in the sense defined in the schema: “The power of binding and loosing, which was given to Peter (Mt. 16:19), was granted also to the college of apostles, joined with their head (Mt. 18:18).” The Pontifical Commission replied that the power of binding and loosing referred to in both passages seemed to be the same, but that it did not follow that this power was “supreme and full over the entire Church” as the schema indicated.
These replies were referred to the Theological Commission for consideration at its meeting on June 5. The Commission also discussed Pope Paul’s eleven suggestions, seven of which referred to collegiality. The Commission incorporated eight of the suggestions and a part of another in its text. With regard to the decisions of the Pontifical Commission on Biblical Studies, the Theological Commission ruled that they did not necessitate any alteration in the two passages of the schema concerned. The revised text was approved by Pope Paul on July 3 as a basis for further discussion, and mailed to the Council Fathers.
, By July 28, Archbishop Staffa, of the Curia, had ready a lengthy study on the two newly revised schemas on the Church and on bishops, which he circulated to the Council Fathers. Referring to the sections on collegiality in both schemas, he expressed the deep conviction “that these propositions are opposed to the more common teaching of the saintly Fathers, of the Roman Pontiffs, of provincial synods, of the holy Doctors of the Universal Church, of theologians and of canonists. They are also contrary to century-old norms of ecclesiastical discipline.” The Archbishop quoted from the theological works of an Italian Jesuit, Father Giovanni Bolgeni (1733-1811) and commented that “the fundamental positions of Bolgeni and those of the schema on the Church are substantially identical.”
He considered it extraordinary that, after 140 years, Bolgeni’s principles, which theologians and canonists had long been “unanimous in rejecting as unacceptable and foreign to the sound tradition of the Church,” should now suddenly be accepted as the foundations of a Council schema. He maintained that the schema deprived the Pope of his personal supreme power, and limited his primacy to serving as moderator for the bishops, in whom, according to the schema, the supreme power was vested.
The day after the opening of the third session, Archbishop Staffa had a list of more than seventy names which he submitted to the Cardinal Moderators with the request to be allowed to address the general assembly before the voting began on the important Chapter 3, on collegiality. He appealed to Article 57, Section 6, of the Rules of Procedure, under which, even after discussion had ended on a specific topic, the minority view was entitled to “designate three speakers . . . who would also be given the privilege of exceeding ten minutes,” provided the request was made in the name of at least seventy other Council Fathers. Archbishop Staffa’s petition was not granted.
The voting on the third chapter took place from September 21 to 29. Eight of the ballots concerned Article 22, on collegiality, and 0£ three separate ballots over 300 negative votes were cast. In an over-all vote on collegiality, the result was 1624 affirmative votes, 572 qualified affirmative votes and 42 negative votes. Many of the qualifications submitted on this ballot had been prepared by the International Group of Fathers, which numbered Archbishop Staffa among its collaborators.
The subcommission on collegiality of the Theological Commission worked hard comparing these qualifications with one another and with the text of the schema. The work was completed in about a month because of the very large number of periti. The membership was as follows: Archbishop Parente of the Curia, Archbishop Florit of Florence, Bishop Schroffer of Eichstatt, Bishop Hermann Volk of Mainz, Auxiliary Bishop Heuschen of Liege and Auxiliary Bishop Henriquez Jimenez of Caracas. The periti were Fathers Rahner, Ratzinger, Salaverri, Schauf, Smulders, Thils, Betti, Dhanis, D’Ercole, Gagnebet, Lambruschini, Maccarrone and Moeller.
Before the work was completed, Archbishop Staffa and the leaders of the International Group of Fathers heard that their qualifications were being ignored by the subcommission on collegiality, whereas others, which were believed to be “less important,” were being incorporated in the text. Whereupon Archbishop Staffa composed a lengthy letter to Pope Paul, dated November 7, 1964, copies of which were given to twelve active members of his group, each of whom passed the text on to twelve other Council Fathers, inviting them to read and sign it. This project became known as “Operation Staffa ”
Because it was rumored that the Theological Commission’s report on the revision of the schema was already in the press, the canvassing of signatures had to be cut short. The letter informed the Pope that all who had signed it were convinced that an extreme form of collegiality was contained in the schema, and that they would feel bound in conscience to vote against it. Archbishop Staffa charged that he had been illegally refused permission to speak on the subject by the Moderators.
On receiving the letter, Pope Paul called for an official investigation of this and other alleged violations of Council procedure, and he passed on the theological views stated in the letter to the Theological Commission, for its consideration.
Meanwhile, thirty-five cardinals and the superiors general of five very large religious orders had written to the Pope stating that, while the text on collegiality in the schema had the appearance of presenting the moderate liberal view, it was in fact ambiguous, and might, after the close of the Council, be interpreted according to the extreme liberal view.
The Pope found it difficult to believe this, and sent a reply to the cardinal whose name headed the list, attacking the arguments given in the letter. Whereupon the Cardinal went to see the Pope, on behalf of the others in his group, and explained the grounds for their suspicions. But the Pope took no action.
The Cardinal then suggested that the theologians of his group be allowed to debate the issue in the Holy Father’s presence with his theologians, but the Holy Father did not agree to this plan. He asked the Cardinal, however, to name the theologians of his group, and when he named three, the Pope at once became visibly disturbed, since they were well known and he esteemed them highly. Again he took no action, recalling that the text on collegiality had been accepted by far more than the required majority. Before casting their votes, he said, the Council Fathers had certainly given the matter deep study and devoted much prayer to it. The Cardinal excused himself for remarking that he could not wholeheartedly share these sentiments. But the Pope still took no action because of his great faith in the Theological Commission.
Then one of the extreme liberals made the mistake of referring, in writing, to some of these ambiguous passages, and indicating how they would be interpreted after the Council. This paper fell into the hands of the aforesaid group of cardinals and superiors general, whose representative took it to the Pope. Pope Paul, realizing finally that he had been deceived, broke down and wept.
, What was the remedy? Since the text of the schema did not positively make any false assertion, but merely used ambiguous terms, the ambiguity could be clarified by joining to the text a carefully phrased explanation. This was the origin of the Preliminary Explanatory Note appended to the schema.
On November io, 1964, Pope Paul without delay instructed his Secretary of State to write to Cardinal Ottaviani, stating that there were still some points in the schema which ought to be more precisely phrased. In particular, he wished it to be expressly stated that a necessary and essential constituent of the collegial authority of the bishops was the consent of the Roman Pontiff. Enclosed in the letter were further specific proposals for changes which would make the text clearer and which, the Pope insisted, must be incorporated in the text before he could give it his support and promulgate it. And in order to make absolutely sure that, after the Council, no one could possibly place the extreme liberal interpretation upon the concept of collegiality, the Theological Commission must prepare a Preliminary Explanatory Note to precede this particular chapter. The note and the suggested changes, the letter said, would reassure many Council Fathers and make possible a more extensive acceptance of the text. A special study on collegiality by Father Wilhelm Bertrams, S.J., was also enclosed in the letter.
The amendments called for by the Pope had already been requested by large numbers of Council Fathers who had submitted qualifications with their affirmative votes. Previously, however, the Theological Commission had always overruled them, stating that the qualifications were contrary to the wishes of the majority. Now, at the insistence of Pope Paul, some of the suggested changes were incorporated in the body of the schema. The Theological Commission also drafted the prescribed note, and sent it to the Pope, who made some revisions in it before giving it his approval.
On Saturday, November 14, the booklet containing the qualifications submitted by Council Fathers on Chapter 3, together with the replies of the Theological Commission, as well as the Explanatory Note, was distributed in the Council hall. The note was believed to be an addition spontaneously made by the Commission, since it began, “The Commission decrees that the following general observations should precede the evaluation of the qualifications.”
In the forty-eight hours that followed, there was much discussion among Council Fathers and periti as to the significance of this note. Some maintained that it changed the teaching contained in the schema. Others maintained that, because the explanations were contained in a note and not in the text, they did not change the schema.
On Monday, November 16, the Secretary General made three important announcements addressed to all the Council Fathers, including the Council Presidency and the Cardinal Moderators. The first two—although this was not stated—referred to the letter of November 7 prepared by Archbishop Staffa. The third referred to the Explanatory Note. The Secretary General, using Curial terminology, referred to the Pope as the “Superior
Authority.”
In the first announcement, he said that some Fathers had complained to the Superior Authority that, in the discussion and voting on Chapter 3 of the schema on the Church, the regulations governing procedure had not been observed; the same Fathers were filled with anxiety and had raised certain doubts about the doctrine expounded in that chapter. The matter had been carefully examined, he said, and the Council Fathers concerned might rest assured that there had been no violation of the Rules of Procedure. As for doubts concerning the doctrine contained in Chapter 3, these had been referred to the Theological Commission, and duly examined.
The second announcement concerned the assent which all members of the Church were expected to give to the teaching contained in this chapter: The teaching, according to this announcement, was not to be considered an infallible definition or dogma, but to be accepted on the supreme teaching authority of the Church.
The third announcement was as follows: “Finally, the Fathers are hereby informed by the Superior Authority of a Preliminary Explanatory Note j to the qualifications on Chapter 3 of the schema on the Church. The doctrine contained in this chapter must be explained and understood according to the meaning and tenor of this note.” He then read the complete text as it had appeared in the booklet containing the qualifications to Chapter 3 which had been distributed on Saturday, but with one major difference: this time, the note was called to the Council Fathers’ attention by the Pope, rather than by the Theological Commission itself. The Pope also explicitly extended the interpretation of the note to the whole of Chapter 3, and not only to the qualifications.
The precise theological terminology of the Explanatory Note made it clear beyond all doubt that the interpretation to be placed on the concept of collegiality as taught by the schema was the moderate liberal one. (The ambiguity, now removed, had been recognized by Cardinal Ottaviani as early as the second session, when he so strenuously objected to the phraseology of the four points presented for the vote by the Cardinal Moderators on October 30, 1963.)
On Tuesday, November 17, each Council Father received a personal printed copy of the Preliminary Explanatory Note, and afterwards the Council voted 2099 to 46 in favor of the manner in which the Theological Commission had handled the qualifications for Chapter 3.
On November 19, in announcing that the vote on the schema as a whole would take place that morning, the Secretary General explained that this vote, as well as the vote which was to take place two days later at a public session, must be understood in accordance with the announcements which he had previously made upon instructions from the Superior Authority. Those announcements, he added, would be inserted in the official record of the Council.
The result of the vote that morning was 2134 to 10 in favor of the schema. It was greeted with enthusiastic applause.
"So let us be confident, let us not be unprepared, let us not be outflanked, let us be wise, vigilant, fighting against those who are trying to tear the faith out of our souls and morality out of our hearts, so that we may remain Catholics, remain united to the Blessed Virgin Mary, remain united to the Roman Catholic Church, remain faithful children of the Church."- Abp. Lefebvre
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THE THIRD SESSION
September 14 to November 21, 1964
BLACK WEEK
The liberals had four major reasons for dissatisfaction with Pope Paul VI during the final week of the third session. First, there was his insistence on a Preliminary Explanatory Note on collegiality, which was officially communicated to the general assembly on Monday, November 16, 1964.
Then there was his decision regarding the vote on religious liberty, scheduled for the Thursday of that week. A third reason was his last-minute action on the schema on ecumenism. And finally there was his unexpected announcement on Saturday, November 21, the closing day of the third session, on the application of the title “Mother of the Church to the Virgin Mary. The Dutch quickly invented a graphic term for this period of the Council’s history: “Black Week.” ]
The story of the Explanatory Note has already been told. To understand the conflict about the schema on religious liberty it is necessary to go back to September 23,1964, when discussion on the topic began. The discussion continued for three full meetings and part of a fourth, and then the Secretariat for Promoting Christian Unity set to work revising the text.
It completed its work by the end of October, and then passed the text on to the Theological Commission, which examined and approved it on November 9. The conservative elements on the Theological Commission were accused of having deliberately dragged their feet, so that there would be no time left for a vote before the end of the third session. The text was printed and distributed to the Council Fathers on Tuesday, November 17. The vote was announced for Thursday.
The revised schema was contained in a booklet together with a report by Bishop De Smedt of Bruges, scheduled to be read on Thursday, which began, “The text which we present for your vote today differs greatly from the text which was discussed in the hall.” The International Group of Fathers, gathered for their regular weekly meeting, studied the revised schema and came to a number of startling conclusions:
First, that the former text of 271 lines had been expanded to cover 556 lines. Secondly, that only 75 of the 556 lines had been taken from the former text. Thirdly, that the structure of the argumentation was different; the presentation of the question was different; the basic principles had been altered; and major paragraphs in Articles 2, 3, 8, 12 and 14 were completely new.
For these reasons, the International Group considered the text equivalent to a new schema, and believed that the procedure to be followed was that contained in Article 30, Section 2, of the Council’s Rules of Procedure, .which provided that schemas “must be distributed in such a way that Council Fathers have a suitable period of time to take counsel, to come to a mature judgment and to determine how they will vote.” Since there was to be another General Congregation on Wednesday morning and the voting was to take place on Thursday, there was not really sufficient time available for a responsible and thorough examination of a schema which was practically new. Moreover, the Council Fathers were already overloaded during this particular week, since they were discussing schemas on seminary training, Christian education and matrimony, and had to cast ten important ballots on schemas on the Church, the Eastern Catholic Churches and ecumenism.
The group therefore decided to draw up a letter to the Council Presidency, calling attention to Article 30, Section 2, of the Rules of Procedure, and asking for a delay in the vote. Over one hundred signatures were collected. The letter was dated Wednesday, November 18, and was delivered to the Council Presidency early that morning. Similar petitions were submitted by other groups. Cardinal Tisserant, Dean of the Cardinal Presidents, took up the matter with the Cardinal Moderators, who requested the Secretary General to read out one of the appeals and to announce that the matter would be settled by a vote of the general assembly. The Secretary General said that a preliminary vote would be taken the following day to decide whether to proceed to a vote on the schema. “This has been decided by the Dean of the Cardinal Presidents and by the Cardinal Moderators,” he explained.
Bishop Carli, of Segni, Italy, one of those who had signed the International Group’s letter requesting more time for study of the schema, appealed to Francesco Cardinal Roberti, Chairman of the Administrative tribunal, against the decision of Cardinal Tisserant and the four Moderators. That decision, he wrote, “appears illegal to the undersigned because of lack of form and lack of substance. 1. It is lacking in form because the
decision was not taken collegially by the Council Presidency, but only by the Cardinal President together with the Moderators. 2. It is lacking in substance, because the assembly cannot be asked to decide whether or not specific articles in the Rules of Procedure issued by the Supreme Pontiff should or should not be observed. Either the petition of the more than 100 Fathers was unfounded, in which case the Council Presidency should declare it unacceptable, giving its reasons; or it was well founded, in which case no one, except the Supreme Pontiff, is entitled to ignore it.”
In conclusion, Bishop Carli asserted his view that the reasons given in the original petition were still valid, since Council Fathers were entitled not to proceed to a vote on a text which was substantially new without first discussing it in the Council hall and having enough time to determine how to vote. “Therefore the undersigned requests that this Most Excellent Tribunal intervene to ensure observance of the Rules of
Procedure.”
Bishop Carli handed this letter to Cardinal Roberti early on Thursday morning, November 19. A short while later, Cardinal Tisserant rose in his place and read out the following statement on behalf of the Council Presidency. “After giving the matter mature consideration, it appears to the Council Presidency that this matter, which touches the Rules of Procedure of the Council, cannot be decided by a vote of the general assembly. Therefore the same Council Presidency has decided that the report [on the schema] is to be read, but that the votes will not be taken during this session of the Council. Those Fathers who wish to present their views in writing may do so up to January 31,1965.”
Cardinal Meyer, one of the twelve Council Presidents, made no attempt to hide his great surprise and deep displeasure at the announcement. Had he been unaware that it was to be made ? He had been one of the greatest protagonists of the declaration on religious freedom, and had eagerly looked forward to its adoption. Bishop Francis Reh, Rector of the North American College in Rome, and two periti, Monsignor John Quinn of Chicago and Father Frederick McManus of Washington, D.C., hurried over to confer with him. After a brief consultation, they decided upon the wording of a special petition to be circulated immediately. It was the famous “ Instanter, instantius, instantissime” petition to the Holy Father consisting of only one sentence: “Reverently but insistently, more insistently, most insistently, we request that the vote on the declaration on religious freedom be allowed to take place before the end of this Council session, lest the confidence of the Christian and non-Christian world be lost.” Angry bishops meanwhile poured from their stalls and formed excited groups. Copies of the petition passed rapidly from hand to hand. Never had there been such a furious signing of names, such confusion, such agitation. Never had there been such wild and harsh words as in this moment of panic when it seemed that a cherished Council document might be tabled forever.
The signed petitions were quickly collected and given to Cardinal Meyer, who had meanwhile been joined by Cardinals Ritter and Leger. Together they left the Council hall while the meeting was still in progress, and went to see the Pope, begging him to overrule the decision announced by Cardinal Tisserant, so that the long awaited vote might still take place that morning.
Meanwhile, Cardinal Dopfner, the Moderator for the day, followed the directive announced by Cardinal Tisserant and called upon Bishop De Smedt to read his report. The bishop admitted that the structure of the schema had been changed, and that in general it was much different from what it had been before. “All tins, however, has not changed the substance of our exposition,” he said. “Therefore we offer you today the same doctrine but, as we hope, expressed more concisely, clearly, accurately and prudently. He pointed out that the text had been unanimously approved by the members of the Secretariat for Promoting Christian Unity, and that more than two thirds of the Theological Commission had also given their approval.
Bishop De Smedt succeeded in stirring his audience. He was wildly applauded five times during his speech, and for several minutes afterwards.
The thunderous applause at the end rose and fell in three distinct waves. Never had a speaker in the Council hall received such enthusiastic applause. Cardinal Dopfner understandably protracted the meeting beyond the usual time, but when, by 12:44 pm no word had come from the Pope, he brought the meeting to a close.
The press carried stories about a “massive revolt” led by American bishops; and various figures were cited—from 500 to 1500—for the signatures to the petition addressed to the Pope. NCWC News Service, the U.S. Bishops news agency, quoted an unnamed American bishop as stating that perhaps 1000 signatures from bishops from all over the world had been collected.” When an exact count was made for publication after the dose of the session, the number was found to be actually 441.
On Friday, November 20, at the last business meeting of the third session, Cardinal Tisserant once again addressed the general assembly: “Venerable Fathers,” he said, “many Fathers were greatly distressed because the voting on the schema of the declaration on religious freedom did not take place, and they earnestly requested the Supreme Pontiff to provide that the voting might somehow take place before the end of this session.” The Cardinal then explained that the rest of his statement was being made on the Pope’s authority. “Let these Fathers know that the postponement of the vote was granted by the Council Presidency because this was required by the Rules of Procedure governing the Council. An additional reason for the postponement was a certain respect for the liberty of other Council Fathers who have very much at heart a proper, profound and careful examination of a schema of such great importance. Therefore the schema of the declaration on religious freedom will be treated at the next session of the Council and, if possible, before all other schemas.”
Unfortunately Cardinal Meyer, who had championed the schema so ardently, would not be present at the next session; he died from a brain tumor five months before the fourth session began.
Another way in which Pope Paul became unpopular with the liberals during Black Week was through his last-minute action on the schema on ecumenism. Although a total of 421 different qualifications had been submitted by the Council Fathers in the balloting, only 26 of these had been incorporated in the schema by the Secretariat for Promoting Christian Unity. Council Fathers whose qualifications had not been adopted appealed to the Pope, presenting forty further amendments, and stating that they would be unable to support the document unless those amendments were accepted.
Since Pope Paul was particularly interested in having as few negative votes as possible cast in the vote on ecumenism, he asked Cardinal Bea to examine the proposed changes together with other qualified representatives of his Secretariat, and suggested that it would be well if some of those changes were adopted, since that would probably win greater support for the schema.
Among the amendments were many which, if adopted, would nave altered the orientation and even the substance of the schema. These Cardinal Bea and his associates ignored. They adopted only nineteen, which were reproduced and distributed to the Council Fathers on November 19. That day the Secretary General announced that the vote on the schema on ecumenism as a whole would take place the following day. Then he continued: “In addition to the amendments already introduced in the text in accordance with qualifications made by Council Fathers, the following amendments have been introduced to give the text greater clarity. This was done by the Secretariat for Promoting Christian Unity, which in this way adopted the kind suggestions that had been authoritatively presented. He then read the text of the nineteen amendments.
The announcement could not have come at a more inopportune time. The atmosphere in the Council hall was already tense as a result of the postponement of the vote on religious freedom. The new announcement aroused tempers again. The liberals correctly interpreted both measures as victories for the conservatives, and resented the fact that the Pope had apparently become their patron. This attitude was reflected by the press, which blackened the public image of the Pope. Nevertheless, the schema on ecumenism, as amended at the Pope’s request, was approved by a vote of 2054 to 64.
On Saturday morning, November 21, 1964, the closing day of the third session, the Council Fathers took their places in the Council hall in a none too happy frame of mind. “Evidence of the tension and frustration was most dramatically obvious,” wrote Mr. Donald Quinn in a front-page story in the St. Louis Review. “As Pope Paul was carried into St. Peter’s on his s edia gestatoria [portable throne], he passed between the two rows of 2100 stonily silent bishops. No applause from the bishops’ stalls greeted him. Even as the Pope made a simple blessing sign, only one in ten of the bishops crossed themselves. Newsmen witnessing the scene double-checked with each other about what they were seeing.”
A solemn Mass of concelebration was offered by the Pope and twenty-four Council Fathers representing sees with national shrines in honor of the Blessed Virgin Mary. Then the voting took place. The Dogmatic Constitution on the Church, containing the much discussed chapter on collegiality, was adopted by 2151 votes to 5. The Decree on Eastern Catholic Churches was adopted by 2110 votes to 39. And the Decree on Ecumenism, with the last-minute changes referred to above, was adopted by 2I 37 votes to 11. After the results of each ballot were announced, there was sustained applause. And after each document was promulgated by the Pope, there was again enthusiastic applause.
But the enthusiasm was to be chilled for some Council Fathers by an unexpected announcement in the Pope’s closing address.
The year before, at the close of the second session, Pope Paul had told the Council Bathers that he hoped for the “unanimous and loving acknowledgment of the place, privileged above all others, which the Mother of God occupies in the Holy Church... . After Christ, her place in the Church is the most exalted, and also the one closest to us, and so we can honor her with the title Mother of the Church’ to her glory and to our benefit.”
But the bestowal of this title had met with opposition. Some episcopal conferences, such as those from German-speaking and Scandinavian countries, had objected to the title, and Bishop Mendez Arceo of Mexico had spoken out against it on the Council floor. Cardinal Wyszynski of Poland, however, had announced that he and all the bishops of Poland had sent the Pope a special request for this tide. And the International Group of Fathers had collected signatures for a petition to the Pope which read, “At the forthcoming third session, may the Blessed Virgin Mary be proclaimed Mother of the Church by the Council, that is, by Your Holiness, as head,
together with the Fathers, as members.” There had been other petitions to the same effect.
The Theological Commission, however, without ever putting the matter to a vote, on its own authority had removed the title from the chapter on the Blessed Virgin in the schema on the Church. The title had previously been inserted on instructions from the Coordinating Commission. (Those instructions, according to one competent authority. Father Balic, might well have been issued at the desire of Pope John XXIII.)
On Wednesday, November 18, 1964, in the midst of Black Week, Pope Paul made a statement at a public audience which went largely unnoticed. We are happy to announce to you,” he said, “that we shall close this session of the Ecumenical Council ... by joyfully bestowing on Our Lady the title due to her, Mother of the Church.”
At the public meeting on Saturday, November 21, the last day of the session, Pope Paul said in his concluding address that the close relations existing between Mary and the Church, “so clearly established in today’s Conciliar Constitution,” caused him to feel that this was “the most solemn and appropriate moment to fulfill a wish to which we referred at the end of the preceding session. . .. Very many Council Fathers,” continued Pope Paul, “have made this wish their own, pressing for an explicit declaration during this Council of the role as Mother which the Virgin exercises over the Christian people. To achieve this aim, we have considered it opportune to consecrate, at this public meeting itself, a title in honor of the Virgin which has been suggested by various parts of the Catholic world. It is particularly dear to us because it sums up, in an admirable synthesis, the privileged position recognized by this Council for the Virgin in the Holy Church.
Therefore, for the glory of the Virgin Mary and for our own consolation, we proclaim the Most Holy Mary as Mother of the Church, that is to say, of all the People of God, of the faithful as well as the pastors [bishops], who call her their most loving Mother. And we wish that from now on the Virgin should be still more honored and invoked by the entire Christian people by this most dear title.”
The standing ovation which greeted this announcement signified the warm assent of the Council Fathers. The Pope was interrupted seven times by applause during his address; the applause increased in intensity as the address continued. He announced that he would make use of the long discussed episcopal synod, and that the reorganization of the Roman Curia was undergoing careful study. He also announced his intention of sending a special mission in the near future to Fatima, in Portugal, to carry a golden rose to the shrine of Our Lady of Fatima. “In this manner,” he said, “we intend to entrust to the care of this Heavenly Mother the entire human family, with its problems and worries, with its lawful aspirations and ardent hopes.” This gesture was considered a partial reply to 510 heads of dioceses, archdioceses and patriarchates from seventy-six countries who had petitioned Pope Paul to consecrate the entire world during the Council to the Immaculate Heart of Mary, as requested by Our Lady of Fatima.
The signatures of these prelates had been delivered to the Holy Father on February 3, 1964, by Archbishop Sigaud of Diamantina, Brazil. But the bishops of Germany and France, as well as Cardinal Bea, were known to be opposed to such a consecration, and it did not take place.
While many Council Fathers were reassured by the proceedings of the public meeting, for others the last week of the third session remained Black Week. When the leading peritus of the Dutch hierarchy, Father Schiilebeeckx, returned to Holland after the Council, he was appalled to find the press and the country so antagonistic to the Pope because of the events of Black Week. He immediately published an article in defense of the Pope in De Bazuin, a religious weekly published in Amsterdam. As a result, the antagonism was directed toward him. He retorted with another article in De Bazuin (January 23, 1965), giving the background of the Preliminary Explanatory Note appended to the chapter on collegiality in the schema on the Church.
As early as the second session, wrote Father Schiilebeeckx, he had told a peritus on the Theological Commission that he was sorry to see in the schema what appeared to be the moderate liberal view on collegiality; he personally was in favor of the extreme liberal view. The peritus had replied, “We are stating this in a diplomatic manner, but after the Council we shall draw the conclusions implicit in it.” Father Schiilebeeckx had called such tactics “unfair.” During the last month of the third session, he wrote, bishops and theologians had continued to speak of collegiality “in a sense which was not expressed anywhere in the schema.” He pointed out that the minority had understood well that the vague phraseology of the schema would be interpreted after the Council in the strongest sense. The minority, he explained, had not been against collegiality as literally formulated in the text, but had been opposed “to that orientation full of hope
which the majority of the Theological Commission wished to convey through the text... The majority, he said, had resorted to a deliberately vague and excessively diplomatic parlance, and he recalled that even Father Congar had much earlier objected to a conciliar text’s being deliberately ambiguous.
Father Schiilebeeckx maintained that a conciliar text on collegiality must be unequivocal, expressing clearly either the moderate or the extreme liberal view. Pope Paul had therefore had no alternative but to issue a Preliminary Explanatory Note. Without it, Father Schiilebeeckx insisted, an ambiguous text would have been approved. With this expose, he destroyed the basis for the greatest grievance against the Pope.
Another liberal theologian at the Council, Father John Courtney Murray, S.J., the leading American peritus on religious freedom, told a vast audience at Georgetown University, in Washington, D.C., shortly after the end of the third session, that the postponement of the vote on religious freedom had been a “wise” decision. He also admitted that the action taken by the Council Presidency had been technically correct, since extensive revision had actually turned the document into a “substantially new text.”
Again a liberal had vindicated the Pope of charges leveled against him during Black Week.
As for the nineteen changes introduced in the schema on ecumenism at the Pope’s request, Cardinal Bea wrote later that, on calm consideration, they revealed no grounds for alarm. He pointed out that the original panic
had resulted from an incorrect translation of the Latin text of one of the nineteen amendments. The incorrect translation had read that the separated brethren, in reading the Bible, sought God “as though he were speaking to them in Christ.” Understandably, it caused surprise in Catholic circles and widespread alarm among the separated brethren. But when the matter was clarified by Cardinal Bea, who insisted that the only correct
translation was that the separated brethren “seek God as he speaks to them in Christ,” the grounds for alarm were removed. Once more, Pope Paul was justified.
The St. Louis Review voiced the complaints of certain bishops and periti in telling its readers that “the granting of the title, Mother of the Church, to Mary by the Pope’s words on Saturday was in direct contradiction to the will of the majority of the Fathers.” Cardinal Bea, commenting on charges like this, simply pointed out that the question as to whether Our Lady should be given this title had never been voted on in the Council. “By what right, then,” he asked, “can one pretend to know something about the presumed majority opinion of the Council?” Although some had spoken against this title on the Council floor, he explained, the positions taken in Council interventions, being limited in number, were “not a reliable indication at all for knowing the majority opinion of the Council Fathers.”
In taking this action, the Pope did not even contradict the will of the majority in the Theological Commission. To do so, he would have had to place the title back into the schema after the Theological Commission had removed it. This he did not do. What took place that closing day of the third session was a twofold exercise of supreme authority in the Catholic Church. In the first exercise of this authority, Pope Paul conformed himself to his College of Bishops and promulgated the Dogmatic Constitution on the Church, which included the new tide for Our Lady in an “equivalent” manner. When this action was completed, the Pope used his own supreme personal authority to state in an explicit manner what he, together with his College of Bishops, had a few minutes ear Her stated in an implicit or “equivalent” manner.
So perhaps Black Week had not been so black after all.
"So let us be confident, let us not be unprepared, let us not be outflanked, let us be wise, vigilant, fighting against those who are trying to tear the faith out of our souls and morality out of our hearts, so that we may remain Catholics, remain united to the Blessed Virgin Mary, remain united to the Roman Catholic Church, remain faithful children of the Church."- Abp. Lefebvre
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THE FOURTH SESSION
September 14 to December 8, 1965
ALIGNMENTS ON THE SCHEMA ON RELIGIOUS FREEDOM
The four setbacks which the liberals had suffered during Black Week made them realize that their control over the Council was not so absolute as they had imagined. And the conservatives, for their part, drew fresh courage from the liberals’ perplexity. Bishop Carli of Segni, of the International Group of Fathers, quickly published a lengthy article on Black Week in which he quoted from the article of Father Schillebeeckx and from the remarks made by Father John Courtney Murray, S.J. Had the minority not taken action on the text on religious freedom, he said, that schema, “so full of serious defects, would no doubt have been approved by a very large majority.” Every commission, and even the general assembly itself, he said, should always be prepared to reconsider its stand right up to the very last.
In a letter dated December 18, 1964, the International Group sent fifteen pages of suggested amendments to the schema on religious freedom to all Council Fathers on their mailing list, reminding them that the deadline for submitting amendments was January 31. When a fourth edition of the schema was published in June, 1965, the group circulated another letter with twenty additional pages of amendments. And on August 13, Archbishop Sigaud of Diamantina, Brazil, Archbishop Lefebvre, Superior General of the Holy Ghost Fathers, and Abbot Jean Prou, Superior General of the Benedictines of Solesmes, France, met at Solesmes to prepare additional strategy. They determined topics and selected speakers for five interventions on the schema, and they decided to send the gist of their proposals to the Pope should those proposals not be incorporated in the schema as a result of the discussion and voting.
Certainly no Council Fathers were harder to please than the leaders of the International Group. Bishop Carli alone, for example, had submitted fifty-two amendments on an early draft of the schema on ecumenism. It was difficult, therefore, for those revising the schema on religious freedom to determine what points the Bishop considered of major or of minor importance. The same was true of all other amendments regularly prepared and circularized by the International Group.
The three aforementioned prelates sent Pope Paul a letter dated July 25, 1965. They drew attention to the fact that the Rules of Procedure provided that reports might be read to the general assembly before the vote by Council Fathers representing both the majority view and the minority view in Council commissions. But it was not regular Council practice, they said, for the minority view in commissions to be heard. They requested that this rule be enforced in particular for the schemas on religious freedom, divine revelation, the Church in the modern world and the relationship of the Church to non-Christian religions. They also made the following requests: that such speakers be given sufficient time to prepare their main arguments; that the spokesman for the minority view be selected by the minority; that the names of the majority and minority speakers be published long enough in advance for objections and supporting arguments to be directed to them; that their reports be printed and distributed to the Council Fathers, and that each speaker be given a short time for rebuttal.
Cardinal Cicognani, Vatican Secretary of State, replied to Bishop Carli on August 11, stating that Pope Paul had given careful attention to the proposals. “I must inform Your Excellency, however,” he went on, “that some surprise was occasioned by the fact that the request had been presented on behalf of an ‘International Group of Fathers, with similar views bn theological and pastoral matters,’ that is, by a particular group within the Council. This initiative might be deemed to authorize the official foundation of other ‘alliances,’ to the detriment of the Council assembly.
As Your Excellency can well understand, this would in fact take from Council Fathers that freedom of judgment and of choice which must be ensured over and above every particular interest. It would also lead to the accentuation of tendencies and divisions among the Council Fathers themselves, whereas everything possible should be done to minimize them for the sake of serenity, concord, the happy outcome of the Council and the honor of the Church. The enterprise, therefore, cannot in itself be approved, and it would be well for this ‘Group’ not to function as an organ representing the positions of the Council Fathers belonging to it.”
It should be recalled, in connection with this letter, that the Rules of Procedure of the Council as revised and approved by Pope Paul actually encouraged the formation of groups with similar views on theological and pastoral matters. Thus Article 57, Section 3, provided: “It is most desirable that Council Fathers who intend to present similar arguments should join together and choose one or several of their number to speak on behalf of all.” As far back as August 5, 1964, Archbishop Sigaud had pointed out that the new ruling requiring a speaker to have collected seventy signatures in order to be permitted to speak after closure of debate forced the minority to organize itself, and he had cited Article 57, Section 3, as justifying such action.
Bishop Carli forwarded Cardinal Cicognani’s letter to Archbishop Lefebvre in Paris, who in turn forwarded it to Archbishop Sigaud on August 20 with these comments:
“It seems that the Holy Father or the Cardinal Secretary of State has been frightened by a title which appears to them to designate an association which is highly organized and may easily cause divisions.
“We have never attached any importance to this title, and it makes little difference to us whether we have it or not. What really matters is the desire of a certain number of Council Fathers to give one another mutual support and help in their defense and explanation of the truth. There is nothing about this which is not most legitimate. We can very well eliminate the name. Personally, I see nothing against this. It will not change the reality in any way.
“As far as the freedom of the Council Fathers is concerned, I truly believe that we have never offended against it in the slightest. God knows that we have exerted no moral pressure.” He closed his letter by saying that those who exerted intolerable moral pressure, and who “suffocated” the minority, were rather the national episcopal conferences.
The International Group of Fathers was not the only opposition group under attack. Cardinals Dopfner and Suenens went directly to the Pope to complain about the Bishops’ Secretariat. When that group’s president, Archbishop Perantoni, learned of this, he explained to the Holy Father that his organization had come into being only to ensure a hearing for a minority which the powerfully organized European alliance, protected and promoted by the two Cardinal Moderators, was ignoring. As long as the pressure group of Cardinals Dopfner and Suenens continued, he said, the Bishops’ Secretariat would also be forced to remain in existence.
At a press conference held in Rome on September 13, the day before the opening of the fourth session, Cardinal Dopfner said that the Pope and a large majority of Council Fathers wanted the forthcoming session to be the last one. The work on the remaining schemas was so far advanced, he said, that the session could easily be closed before Christmas “without restricting the liberty of the Council Fathers and without strangulating the Council itself.” He also stressed that the Rules of Procedure would be observed “in their entirety.”
But despite Cardinal Dopfner’s assurances, the Council during the fourth session was in fact “strangulated” more than ever before. This was because the cardinals nearly monopolized prime time. So many of them spoke each day that the interventions of bishops were often read only at a late hour when Council Fathers were either tired or missing from their places. And bishops were repeatedly silenced by closure of debate. Fifty-one cardinals, making up only 2 per cent of the general assembly, delivered 33 per cent of the oral interventions made during the fourth session.
On September 14, 1965, the opening day of the fourth session, the Holy Father announced that, “in accordance with the wishes of the Council,” he intended to establish an episcopal synod composed of bishops to be chosen “for the greater part by conferences of bishops, and approved by us.” The synod, he said, would be convened “by the Roman Pontiff, for consultation and collaboration, when this seems opportune to us for the general good of the Church.” He made it clear, however, that this synod would not supplant the Roman Curia. Just as diocesan bishops needed a chancery office to run their dioceses, he said, “so we too always need the Curia to carry out our Apostolic responsibilities.”
On the following day, Pope Paul formally constituted the Synod of Bishops, thereby fully complying with the wishes of the Council Fathers even before they had given formal approval to their own suggestion.
As the Pope had promised, the fourth session began with the discussion of the revised schema on religious freedom. A total of sixty-six speakers addressed the assembly on this subject between September 15 and 22, 1965.
Because no apparent action had been taken on its letter of July 25 to Pope Paul, the International Group of Fathers drew up a new letter dated September 18, addressed to the Cardinal Moderators. Referring to Article 33, Section 7, of the Rules of Procedure, which provided that a substitute schema or an organic list of amendments might be submitted by fifty Council Fathers at any time, the signers asked for authorization for the reading of a second report on religious freedom to the general assembly, a report “which would completely and systematically explain and defend another manner of conceiving of and declaring this doctrine.” The letter was reproduced and signatures collected, but the Moderators seem to have ignored it.
The general assembly subsequently accepted the fourth edition of the schema “as a basis for the definitive declaration” by a vote of 1997 to 224. When the fifth edition came back to the Council hall for a vote on October 26 and 27, hundreds of qualifications were submitted with affirmative votes. Once again the schema was revised, and on Wednesday, November 17, the sixth edition was distributed to the Council Fathers. They were informed at the same time that they would be asked to vote two days later on whether they were satisfied with the way in which the qualifications had been handled by the Secretariat for Promoting Christian Unity.
The sixth edition did not completely satisfy the International Group. In a new letter dated November 18, distributed to 800 Council Fathers, the group acknowledged that notable improvements had been made in Article 1 regarding true religion. It argued, however, that the criterion determining the limits of religious freedom should be the common good, and not the preservation of law and order. The State, it maintained, must safeguard the common good as a whole, and not only in part, and the preservation of law and order was only “a part of the common good, as is expressly stated in the schema.” If this “correction” were made in two places in the text, and if in one of those two places the pertinent words of Pope John XXIII’s Pacem in Terris were quoted, then the text would be satisfactory, and the International Group would give it an affirmative vote. The desired changes, however, were not made.
According to the letter, the fundamental thesis of the Secretariat for Promoting Christian Unity was that state neutrality should be considered as the normal condition, and that there should be cooperation between state and Church only “in particular circumstances ” This principle the International Group could not in conscience accept. To justify its stand, the group cited Pope Pius XII’s statement that the Church considered the principle of collaboration between .Church and State as “normal,” and that it considered “as an ideal the unity of people in the true religion, and unanimity of action” between Church and State.
In the balloting which took place on the following day, 246 negative votes were cast on the first ballot, 237 on the second, and 217 on both the third and fourth. In the over-all vote, 1954 voted in favor and 249 cast negative votes. This meant that far more than the required two-thirds majority was in favor of the text as it stood.
On December 3, Monsignor Giuseppe di Meglio, an Italian specialist on international law, circulated a letter stating that the voting figures indicated “that for a notable number of Council Fathers the teaching and practical applications of the schema are not acceptable in conscience. In fact, the fundamental principle of the schema has remained unchanged despite the amendments that have been introduced: that is, the right of error.... Since the declaration on religious freedom has no dogmatic value, the negative votes of the Council Fathers will constitute a factor of great importance for the future studies of the declaration itself, and particularly for the interpretation to be placed upon it.”
Father Courtney Murray described Monsignor di Meglio’s position as the “tolerance” theory, based on the principle that ‘ truth has exclusive rights and error no rights.” Those who held this position, he said, were of the opinion that Catholicism should be the State religion wherever possible. Where this was not possible, non-Catholic religions were merely to be tolerated as the “lesser evil ” By contrast, the supporters of what Father Courtney Murray called “the more contemporary theory of religious freedom were convinced that this freedom was “an exigency of the dignity of the human person. ’ They favored religious freedom not for opportunistic reasons, but because it was sound doctrine.
The sixth edition of the schema received the support of Pope Paul despite the large number of negative votes that had been cast against it. The final and formal vote took place at the public session of December 7. On this ballot, the negative votes dropped to 70, and 2308 Council Fathers voted in favor of the text. It was then promulgated by Pope Paul VI to the accompaniment of great applause.
Nearly all of the 70 negative votes had been cast by the hard core of the International Group of Fathers. And yet, after the voting was done, they were as ready as the next man to accept the promulgated decree. Basically, this was the attitude of all Council Fathers, whether they belonged to the liberal or to the conservative camp; each was convinced that his position on a given topic Was the correct one, the one which would bring greater blessing upon the Church and mankind. But these men, trained in Church law, also realized that both sides could not be right. And ultimately they went along with the majority view, when this finally became clear and was promulgated by the Pope as the common doctrine taught by the Second Vatican Council.
"So let us be confident, let us not be unprepared, let us not be outflanked, let us be wise, vigilant, fighting against those who are trying to tear the faith out of our souls and morality out of our hearts, so that we may remain Catholics, remain united to the Blessed Virgin Mary, remain united to the Roman Catholic Church, remain faithful children of the Church."- Abp. Lefebvre
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THE FOURTH SESSION
September 14 to December 8, 1965
SOLVING THE WORLD'S PROBLEMS
At Ariccia, a suburb of Rome, the schema on the Church in the modern world was subjected to thorough revision during a week of meetings in early February, 1965. Present were twenty-nine Council Fathers, thirty-eight periti and some twenty laymen, in addition to men and women auditors. The central subcommission then worked on the revision for another week, and in early April the text was approved by the Joint Commission (Theological Commission and Commission on the Apostolate of the Laity). The Coordinating Commission approved the new schema on May 11 and Pope Paul gave it his approval on May 28.
In the process, the schema had been expanded from forty-five to 122 pages. Since the supplement had been incorporated in the text, the entire schema had to be discussed once more on the Council floor. The discussion continued from September 21 to October 8. Archbishop Garrone of Toulouse, in presenting the schema to the general assembly, said that it had been so extensively altered in size and content because the Joint Commission had been anxious “scrupulously to satisfy the wishes expressed by the Council Fathers.”
Cardinal Bea called the Latin of the schema “frequently unintelligible” and “unworthy of the Council.” Although the text was to be issued in several modern languages, the Latin version, he insisted, was the only official one. A fundamental revision of the Latin was therefore necessary; otherwise there would be “endless discussions as to its meaning, and the doctrinal authority of the document would suffer by reason of the uncertainty of the text.”
Cardinal Konig of Vienna asked for the introduction of more fundamental principles in the schema which would show that the Church “always had the task of diagnosing the signs of the times, and that new attempts must continually be made to achieve such analyses.” Like Cardinal Siri of Genoa, who spoke immediately after him, Cardinal Konig called for the inclusion of concepts that had been omitted by those who had prepared the schema, concepts such as “sin, the truth of the Cross, the need for repentance and the hope of resurrection with Christ ” Only thus could the danger be averted of “promising a paradise on earth and a solution to all problems, something that cannot be realized save in the world to come.”
In the name of ninety-one Scandinavian and German-speaking Council Fathers, Cardinal Dopfner of Munich said that the schema had made much progress. It presented the problems more clearly, set forth more profound doctrine, and used a language which was better suited to modern man. At the same time, he said, it did not clearly distinguish the natural 1 and supernatural orders, nor did it adequately describe the deep consequences of the state of sin. He also wanted the text to state more precisely how faith could illumine and strengthen the world.
Speaking for a group of Italian bishops, Archbishop Giuseppe Amici of Modena said that the entire text needed revision, since it was “only a first step toward dialogue with the world.” In form and substance it was unsatisfactory, because it only affirmed “in simple propositions of common sense what everyone regarded as obvious.” Since the text said little to men who desired to know the “authentic Christian concept of life,” it would not succeed in establishing dialogue with all men.
Bishop Russell McVinney of Providence, Rhode Island, asked that the schema reassert the necessity of obedience to lawful authority, especially since the decline of public authority, both civil and religious, was “one of the chief causes of the constant decay of moral standards in our world.”
Bishop Paulus Rusch of Innsbruck, Austria, said that philosophical considerations prevailed over theological considerations in the schema, that the text was static in its approach rather than dynamic, and that it was
more abstract than practical.
Coadjutor Archbishop Simon Lourdusamy of Bangalore supported the text on behalf of sixty-two bishops of India, but indicated that certain improvements were desirable. The description of man in the schema applied to industrialized areas of the world, he said, “but what about the greater part of humanity, in Africa, Asia and Latin America?” He asked that the reasoning of the schema should be based on theology, rather than on natural philosophy.
Bishop Mason of El Obeid, Sudan, said that the text was so long that modern men would hesitate to read it. He suggested that the schema should confine itself to the present generation, since future generations would have their own bishops to look after them. He also asked that debate on the schema should be prudently limited so that sufficient time might remain for other topics which, he felt, pertained more closely to the renewal of the Church.
Cardinal Frings of Cologne called for a substantial reorganization of the entire text because of a dangerous confusion between human progress, resulting from dialogue, and supernatural salvation, wrought by Christ’s mission.
Coadjutor Bishop Elchinger of Strasbourg said that the schema did not strictly follow the plan which it had laid down for itself of showing how the Church understood its presence and activity in the modern world. It was not enough for the Council to repeat generalities already known to all. The schema should deal, he said, not with the modern world, but with the Church in the modern world, that is, in its new relationships to the world.
Cardinal Gracias of Bombay announced that five laymen in India had made a study of an English translation of the schema and had given it unanimous praise, saying that in this document the Church really did have something to say which was relevant to modern problems.
Bishop Hadrianus Ddungu of Masaka, Uganda, speaking on behalf of ninety-four bishops, said that the subject of racial discrimination was treated much too lightly and too confusedly in the schema, since only four lines were devoted to the problem and its solution. The problem should be treated forcefully, at greater length, and without ambiguity.
Archbishop Emile Blanchet, Rector of the Institut Catholique of Paris, said that the schema’s description of contemporary culture was inadequate, since it said nothing about history and philosophy. The style, too, was faulty, he said. In his view, everything was treated with “undue optimism, as though all differences could be composed by good will.”
Cardinal Bueno y Monreal of Seville found fault with the text for omitting any reference to the organization of collective production, “although many await the Church’s judgment on this aspect of present-day economic life.” He wished to have the text revised so that it might include references to the “possible common ownership of land.” The schema should mention the more human and Christian concept of such enterprises as communities of persons bringing their materials, technical skill and labor to the common task of production, and then sharing the profits in accordance with their contributions.
i Auxiliary Bishop Edward Swanstrom of New York City, Director of the National Catholic Welfare Conference Relief Services, praised the 1 schema for treating “in an admirable manner the searing issue of hunger, disease, ignorance and over-all misery within our human family.” He proposed, practically, “that the Church launch a deep and long-term campaign of education, inspiration and moral influence to promote among Christians and all men of good will a vital understanding and concern for world poverty,” and he suggested that a secretariat should be established for this purpose.
Coadjutor Archbishop Fernandes of Delhi, speaking in the name of all the bishops of India and more than 100 other Council Fathers from Asia, Africa, Europe, Latin America and Canada, called for a permanent postconciliar commission “for the promotion of international justice and the integrated development of all peoples.” Through such an organization, the Church could use its influence and moral authority “so that gradually the political, social and economic structures of all nations will be oriented, not toward war, not even defensive war, but toward the establishment of true and lasting peace.”
Bishop Joseph Hoffner of Munster, speaking on behalf of eighty German-speaking bishops, said that Chapter 3, on the social and economic life of man, should be completely recast. The text was too optimistic, he said, giving the impression that the sincere cooperation of men was the only thing needed for a just social order. The idea was false because “social injustice will disappear only when sin disappears.”
Bishop Mariano Gaviola, of Cabanatuan City, Philippines, said that the schema seemed to endorse the theory that the over-population of the earth in the near future was a certainty. The Commission responsible for the schema, he said, should also consider the opposite scientific theories, which dismissed the theory of over-population “as something not even probable, at least if considered in relation to the land of the whole earth which has been given to man to inhabit.”
Bishop Alexandre Renard of Versailles said that the first half of the schema, on “The Church and Man’s Falling,” was worthy of the Council, but that the second half, on “Some Problems of Special Urgency” seemed weak, and should be more modestly entitled “Notes for the Solution of Certain Difficulties,” or something along those lines. The schema, more-over, appeared to display excessive optimism. The emphasis on “basic human values” gave the impression that these were hardly contaminated by original sin, and that they would lead to Christ. “Metaphysically this is not far from the truth,” he added, “but psychologically these values can either open or close the door to faith.”
When the discussion ended, Archbishop Garrone said that the sharp criticisms voiced by the Council Fathers had been expected. The Joint Commission would try to shorten the text, he said, and in the major revision now required, it would attempt to consider all the views presented, even though many conflicted with one another.
On October 4, while the Council Fathers were discussing the manner of the Church’s dialogue with the modern world, Pope Paul was flying across the Atlantic to do the very thing that they were talking about. Immediately upon landing on American soil, he carved a cross in the sky, saying, “May the cross of blessing which we now trace over your skies and your land preserve those gifts which Christ gave you and guaranteed to you: peace, concord, freedom, justice, and above all the vision of life in the hope of immortality. God bless this land of yours!”
Some hours later, he addressed the United Nations General Assembly, and said, “We bring to this Organization the suffrage of our recent predecessors, that of the entire Catholic episcopate and our own, convinced as we are that this Organization represents the obligatory path of modern civilization and world peace.”
The Holy Father’s fearless step had the immediate effect of giving the Council Fathers in Rome renewed confidence in him. On the following day, they extended their meeting in St. Peter’s so that they might be able to greet and cheer him on his return to the Vatican, and to hear an immediate report on his visit to the United Nations.
"So let us be confident, let us not be unprepared, let us not be outflanked, let us be wise, vigilant, fighting against those who are trying to tear the faith out of our souls and morality out of our hearts, so that we may remain Catholics, remain united to the Blessed Virgin Mary, remain united to the Roman Catholic Church, remain faithful children of the Church."- Abp. Lefebvre
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THE FOURTH SESSION
September 14 to December 8, 1965
THE CHURCH’S MISSIONARY ACTIVITY
After the rejection of the propositions on the missions at the third session, the task of preparing a new schema was assigned to a five-man subcommission of the Missions Commission, chosen by secret ballot. Father John Schutte, Superior General of the Divine Word Missionaries, who had received the most votes, was named chairman. The subcommission selected their own periti: Father Ratzinger, personal theologian to Cardinal Frings of Cologne, and Father Yves Congar, who were to prepare the theological groundwork of the schema.
The subcommission met from January 12 to 28, 1965, in the newly built house of the Divine Word Society overlooking Lake Nemi, south of Rome, and completed a fresh draft which was circulated to all the members and periti of the Commission on the Missions. Copies were also sent to Cardinals Dopfner and Konig for their comments, because of their great influence on the Coordinating and Theological Commissions.
A plenary session of the Commission on the Missions was held, again at Nemi, during the week beginning Monday, March 29. In the interval, a total of 131 pages of comment on the new schema had been submitted to the Commission’s secretariat, including four pages each from Cardinals Dopfner and Konig. There was also a page of comment from Pope Paul VI, who pointed out that every conceivable requirement of a missionary had been indicated save that of obedience. The daily meetings lasted from 9:00 until 1:00, and again from 4:15 until 7:30.
According to the schedule of work for the fourth session, the schema on the missions was to be treated in the third place, after the schemas on religious freedom and the Church in the modern world. That meant that little time would be left for the Commission to put its text into final form before the end of the Council. Consequently the aim at Nemi was to produce a schema which would prove readily acceptable to the Council Fathers. Such excellent accord was reached by the Commission that, before the week was over, each of the five chapters and the schema as a whole were approved unanimously by secret ballot.
Father Schutte requested Bishop Adolf Bolte of Fulda, one of the Commission members, to win Cardinal Dopfner’s support for the new schema. This he did, and the schema passed through the Coordinating Commission without difficulty. By mid-June 1965, it was on its way to the Council Fathers around the world. Cardinal Dopfner remarked later that even a man “as critical as Father Rahner” had expressed himself emphatically as in favor of the text.
Bishop Bolte had become a member of the Commission on the Missions in an unusual way. This Commission was the only one to which no German Council Father had been elected or appointed in the first days of the Council. Archbishop Corrado Baffle, Apostolic Nuncio to Germany, expressed his disappointment, stating that representation on this Commission was owed to the German hierarchy in recognition for all that it had done for the missionary work of the Church through its charitable agencies, Misereor and Adveniat. Then in June 1963, before the second session, Archbishop Luciano Perez Platero of Burgos, Spain, died and his seat on the Commission was quietly given to Bishop Bolte. It almost seemed that Council leadership was being forced on Cardinal Frings, whose archdiocese was on the banks of the Rhine.
Pope Paul in making this appointment went counter to the usual procedure, because the replacement for Archbishop Perez Platero, an elected member, should have been the Council Father next in line, according to the highest number of votes received in the original election. Bishop Bolte, however, had been on no list of candidates and had received no votes. In this way the first German member was added to the Commission on the Missions; the second was Father Schutte, elected to office at the end of the second session.
When the schema came up for discussion in the Council hall on October 7,1965, the introductory report was read by Father Schutte, who called attention to the chapter on the planning of missionary activity. Here it was stated that the Sacred Congregation for the Propagation of the Faith, which was a Curial office to direct and coordinate missionary work throughout the world, must no longer be merely an administrative agency, but also an agency of dynamic direction, using scientific methods and means suited to the conditions of modern times. The future members of this Curial office, said Father Schutte, should be drawn from those who actually took part in missionary work: cardinals, patriarchs, bishops, heads of missionary orders and directors of pontifical mission aid societies. According to the schema, “these representatives will be called together at fixed times and collegially will exercise supreme control of all mission work, under the authority of the Supreme Pontiff.” Father Schutte stressed the fact that each chapter of the schema had been unanimously approved by the Commission on the Missions.
At the end of his printed report, however, there appeared an amendment which was said to have originated with the Missions Commission, but which had in fact been forced upon the Commission by the Pontifical Commission for the Reorganization of the Roman Curia. According to this amendment, the aforementioned representatives would not be members of the dynamic directive body governing all missionary activity, but would instead “participate” in its deliberations. Since participation could mean giving advice without voting, this amendment represented a drastic weakening of the original text.
Surprisingly enough, the amendment imposed by the Curia went unchallenged on the Council floor. Many Council Fathers were apparently deceived into thinking that the amendment had originated with the Commission on the Missions, and therefore raised no objections. Archbishop D’Souza of Bhopal, India, said privately, however, that the whole force of the schema hinged on the paragraph which was attacked by the amendment; “if that paragraph falls,” he said, “the entire schema will disappear into thin air as so many pious exhortations.”
The debate was closed on October 12. On the following day, however, ten additional speakers who had obtained seventy signatures apiece addressed the assembly. Bishop Herman Westermann of Sambalpur, India, had decided to speak strongly against the weakening amendment, but his list of signatures was presented too late, and he had to submit his paper in writing.
By a vote of 2070 to 15, the Council Fathers showed their satisfaction with the schema as a working basis for the final document. Once again the five-man subcommission, assisted this time by ten periti, met at Nemi to study the 193 oral and written interventions and revise the text. Their revision was then examined by the Commission on the Missions in Rome on October 27, and again unanimously approved.
When the new version was distributed, it became evident that over 300 Council Fathers had opposed the Curia’s amendment in writing, and that the Commission had therefore been in a strong enough position virtually to ignore it. While the text did not use the explicit term “members” in referring to the epresentatives to be added to the directive body, it stated that they would exercise “an active and decisive role in the direction” of the Curial office for the Propagation of the Faith, “in ways and under conditions to be determined by the Roman Pontiff.” There was thus no longer any doubt as to the kind of authority which these “representatives” were to enjoy, and the revision was regarded as a defeat for the Pontifical Commission for the Reorganization of the Roman Curia, headed by Cardinal Roberti.
Twenty ballots were taken on the new schema between November 10 and 12, and the negative votes on the individual chapters ranged only from 6 to 13. However, a vast number of qualifications were submitted with affirmative votes, with the result that considerable revision was apparently again required. Chapter 5 on the planning of missionary activity alone received 712 qualified affirmative votes, which meant that it fell 8 votes short of the necessary two-thirds majority required for adoption. An examination of the qualifications showed that the task of revision would not be so difficult as the total number of qualifications had seemed to indicate, since hundreds of them were identical printed copies submitted by large numbers of Council Fathers.
On November 30, further balloting took place on the manner of the Commission’s handling of the qualifications submitted, and the vote was favorable, 2162 to 18. The text was then forwarded to His Holiness for his private study, and presented by him for the final formal vote at the public session of December 7, where it was adopted by 2394 votes to 5. This was the largest number of affirmative votes ever to be cast on a Council document.
"So let us be confident, let us not be unprepared, let us not be outflanked, let us be wise, vigilant, fighting against those who are trying to tear the faith out of our souls and morality out of our hearts, so that we may remain Catholics, remain united to the Blessed Virgin Mary, remain united to the Roman Catholic Church, remain faithful children of the Church."- Abp. Lefebvre
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THE FOURTH SESSION
September 14 to December 8, 1965
AUTHORITY OF BISHOPS OVER SCHOOLS
The schema on the pastoral office of bishops in the Church was discussed at the second session, revised in the months that followed, and was scheduled to be voted upon at the third session on November 5, 1964. In Article 35 on the relationships of bishops with religious orders, it was stated that the local bishop should have control over “the general management of Catholic schools." The official report prepared by the commission pointed out that the interpretation of these words was to be found on page 96, Number 10, in the fifth appendix of the schema “On the Care of Souls.”
Those Council Fathers who took the trouble to check what Number 10 of the fifth appendix had to say saw that it gave diocesan bishops the right to inspect—besides the usual things like divine services, care of souls, preaching, religious and moral instruction, and catechetical and liturgical training—also every other possible aspect of education, like student life, discipline, studies, personnel, and even the tuition fee.
Section 2 of Number 10 extended the powers of the bishops even further, since it authorized them, either directly or through a delegate, to check whether or not “the just civil laws concerning pedagogy, hygiene, and insurance were being observed in all schools, hospitals, orphanages, and similar institutes, as well as in all religious, charitable, spiritual and temporal activities of all religious, even those who are exempt, regardless of whether these institutions are their own, or have been entrusted to them.”
In short, the religious orders could continue to supply manpower and funds to their institutions, but the bishops would be the principals, supervisors, managers and directors. To combat this legislation the Bishops’ Secretariat issued a letter on November 3, 1964, signed by its Franciscan president and Jesuit vice-president, and by the Carmelite president of the Roman Union of Superiors General. This letter invited the Council Fathers to cast a negative vote on the single ballot covering Articles 33 to 35, and to sign and submit a special qualification for Article 35. Largely as a result of this letter, 172 Council Fathers cast negative votes against Articles 33 to 35, and 889 submitted qualifications on the chapter as a whole. Since the straight affirmative votes amounted only to 57 per cent, the necessary two-thirds majority was not reached, and the commission had to revise the entire chapter.
The qualification on schools, prepared by the Bishops’ Secretariat, was submitted by 273 Council Fathers, and had to be taken into consideration by the commission. The amendment called for the addition of the following phrase to Article 35: “The legitimate autonomy of these schools, however, should remain intact.” As the text of the schema stood, these Council Fathers argued, legitimate autonomy was diminished, and this was contrary to the principle of subsidiarity, which was “necessary for the normal conduct and healthy development of Catholic schools.” The qualification also asked for the deletion of the reference to Number 10 in the fifth appendix of the schema “On the Care of Souls,” because here the commission was asking the Council to approve a doctrine “in a certain appendix to a certain schema which had never come up for discussion.”
A long list of supporting reasons was appended to the qualification: The fine detail regarding tuition fees and insurance policies was said to be contrary to die otherwise general tenor of the decree. The Roman Curia had repeatedly been cridcized for violating the principle of decentralization, and now the schema was guilty of the same violation, by indicating that everything connected with schools was to be under the bishop’s control. The long pedagogical experience of religious orders was not sufficiently esteemed, and the individual character proper to each school was threatened. Finally, the principles laid down for religious in this schema were substantially different from those which the Council had laid down in the schema on the Apostolate of the Laity, when treating of the responsibilities and rights of adults.
When the schema was once again presented to the Council Fathers for a vote on October 6,1965, during the fourth session, the proposed addition on legitimate autonomy had been made, and the objectionable reference to the fifth appendix had been deleted. The handling of the qualifications was then judged acceptable by a vote of 2167 to 15, and at the public session of October 28,1965, the Decree on the Pastoral Office of Bishops in the Church was accepted by a vote of 2319 to 2. It was then promulgated
by Pope Paul VI.
The Post-Conciliar Commission on Bishops and the Government of Dioceses, made up of the same members as the corresponding Council commission which was responsible for this decree, incorporated verbatim in its “Instruction” the text of Number io in the fifth appendix of the schema “On the Care of Souls,” in spite of its having been defeated by ballot during the Council. The ruse was discovered shortly before the “Instruction” was to be published, and by order of Pope Paul VI publication was delayed so that the citation could be removed and a new text, in full conformity with the document as accepted by the Council, could be substituted.
"So let us be confident, let us not be unprepared, let us not be outflanked, let us be wise, vigilant, fighting against those who are trying to tear the faith out of our souls and morality out of our hearts, so that we may remain Catholics, remain united to the Blessed Virgin Mary, remain united to the Roman Catholic Church, remain faithful children of the Church."- Abp. Lefebvre
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THE FOURTH SESSION
September 14 to December 8, 1965
PRIESTLY CELIBACY
The sensational and unfounded news reports that the Council might decide to allow Catholic priests to marry caused large sections of the world to believe that the Council would in fact make such a decision. The press and the public apparently did not realize that the Council Fathers took celibacy so much for granted that they did not even intend to deal with the subject in any of their decrees. And precisely because the press sensationalized the matter and spread so much confusion about it, the Council found itself forced to come out more strongly on celibacy than ever before in the history of the Church. The Council stressed the importance, necessity and obligation of permanent celibacy for priests of the Latin rite, and exhorted the married Eastern-rite clergy to live model lives.
The episcopal conference of France was the first to react to the spreading confusion by issuing the following statement to the press on November 15, 1963: “Since some bishops are in favor of conferring the diaconate on married men, the public has been assured by fantastic stories that the Church is progressively moving toward a married priesthood. Realizing the confusion which such news can create in people’s minds, the French episcopate declares unanimously that these assertions are completely false.
Among the hundreds of interventions made at the Council, none has envisaged the possibility of any change whatsoever in the law of priestly celibacy as practiced in the Latin Church. In spite of unfortunate cases which might result, the Latin Church has no intention whatsoever of setting aside a law which, while having its origin in the Church, has its primary source in the Gospels and in the priest’s complete gift of himself to Christ and the Church.”
An even stronger reaction came between the second and third sessions from the bishops of Germany, Austria, Switzerland, Luxembourg and Scandinavia. At Innsbruck, in May 1964, they prepared their official comments on the propositions on priests. Since the propositions contained nothing on the law of celibacy, and since it was being called into question “by public opinion and by certain Catholics,” they decided that a sound explanation of its significance should be given in order to clarify the issue for the public, and they prepared an appropriate text. At the same meeting, these Council Fathers examined the propositions on seminary training.
The original schema on this subject had contained a paragraph on training for celibacy, but in the shortening process this paragraph had been dropped. The Innsbruck conference called attention to this omission and requested that the subject should be reintroduced in the form of a statement on the kind of training needed by those who were to bind themselves by the law of celibacy. This suggestion was acted upon.
The propositions on priests were on the agenda of the third session and were scheduled to come up on Tuesday, October 13,1964. Two days earlier, the following “Declaration” appeared in L'Osservatore Romano:
Quote:“Stories, interviews and fantastic comments regarding the law of ecclesiastical celibacy have lately been multiplying in the press.
“We are authorized to make the following clarifications: The law is to remain intact and in full force. As for cases where sacred ordinations and their resultant obligations have been declared null and void, or where dispensations have been granted, all this has been done in conformity with canonical practice and Church discipline. There exist regular established processes which the Church is accustomed to use in examining and judging such cases. The Church determines whether certain reasons exist which prove or disprove the validity of the obligations assumed by those who have approached Holy Orders. It also determines the obligations of validly ordained priests who have become unworthy to belong to the clergy.
“A judgment of nullity or an eventual dispensation from obligations, issued after rigorous examination of motives, far from weakening the law of sacred celibacy serves rather to guarantee its integrity and safeguard its prestige.”
Such a statement could not, of course, have appeared in the semiofficial Vatican newspaper at that time without the knowledge and approval of Pope Paul VI.
Archbishop Francois Marty of Rheims, France, presented the propositions on the priesthood to the general assembly on behalf of the Commission on the Discipline of the Clergy and Faithful. Explaining why the Council Fathers had received a revised text of the propositions, the Archbishop said: “Because so many confused voices are making themselves heard today in an attack upon sacred celibacy, it has seemed most opportune expressly to confirm celibacy and to explain its exalted significance in the life and ministry of a priest.”
Article 2 of the newly revised propositions exhorted “those who have promised to observe sacred celibacy, trusting in God’s grace,” to hold fast to it magnanimously and wholeheartedly. They should persevere faithfully in that state, rejoicing that through celibacy they were inseparably united to Christ (cf. 1 Cor. 7:32-34), and more free to render service to the family of God.
After discussion in the Council hall, the propositions were revised by the competent Commission and returned to the Council Fathers on November 20, the day before the third session ended. The ten lines on celibacy and “perfect chastity” had been expanded to eighty, and a spirituality proper to priests was gradually being developed around this section of the schema. This might never have happened had it not been for the great confusion spread by the press and by the anti-celibacy campaigns. Yet another revision was made between the third and fourth sessions, and the schema was now so changed that it had to be discussed all over again.
Although it was clear that the Council would not seriously consider allowing priests to marry, a new suggestion was now proposed that married men might be permitted to become priests. The advocates of this proposal drew their arguments from the circumstance that the Council, at the end of the third session, had decreed that the diaconate might be conferred, with the consent of the Roman Pontiff, “upon men of more mature age, even upon those living in the married state.” If married men of mature age might become deacons, they argued, why might they not also become priests?
One Council Father publicly took action in the matter early in the fourth session. He was Dutch-born Bishop Pedro Koop of Lins, Brazil, who gave wide distribution to an intervention on the subject which he planned to read in the Council hall. This intervention began: “If the Church is to be saved in our regions of Latin America, then there must be introduced among us as soon as possible a married clergy, formed from our best married men, but without introducing any change in the existing law of celibacy.”
To show the need for priests, he used the same statistical argument as Bishop Kemerer of Posadas, Argentina, had used during the second session in connection with a married diaconate. He also said that the Church was obliged by divine command to evangelize and sanctify the world, and that the People of God had “a strict right to receive the Gospel and to lead a sacramental life. This is a true right, which no human law can obliterate. The Church in justice must respect it.” In conclusion, he made the dire prophecy that the Church in Latin America would collapse if the Council did not “throw open the door to the possibility of conferring the sacred priesthood upon suitable laymen who have been married for at least five years.”
There were recent precedents, of a sort, for the proposal, since Pope Pius XII had allowed married German Lutheran pastors who became Catholics to become priests and retain the use of their marriage rights. This practice had been continued by Pope John XXIII and Pope Paul VI.
A group of eighty-one professional men and women from around the world lent indirect support to the proposal by circulating among the Council Fathers a letter strongly advocating that married men should be allowed to become priests, and that priests should be allowed to marry. Their reasons against celibacy were: the shortage of priests, their own dissatisfaction with “the manner in which priests are coming to terms with their vow of celibacy,” and their claim that “priests are finding it increasingly difficult to radiate the new glory of the Church in a state of celibacy.”
On October n, two days before the new schema on the priesthood was to come up for discussion, the Secretary General interrupted the proceedings to announce that he had a special letter from Pope Paul to Cardinal Tisserant, to be read to the Council Fathers. The Pope said, in his letter, that it had come to his attention that some Council Fathers intended to bring up the question of the celibacy of the clergy of the Latin rite for discussion on the Council floor, and that he therefore wished to make known his own views in the matter, without at all limiting thereby the freedom of the individual Council Fathers.
To treat the subject in the Council hall, wrote the Pope, was equivalent to treating it in full view of the general public. This, he felt, was inexpedient, since celibacy called for such delicacy of treatment and was of such far-reaching importance for the Church. He personally was resolved that celibacy should not only be preserved in the Latin Church, but that its observance should be reinforced, since through it “priests can consecrate all their love to Christ alone and dedicate themselves totally and generously to the service of the Church and the care of souls.” Here the Council Fathers interrupted the reading with warm and prolonged applause.
The Pope concluded by requesting any Council Fathers who had something special to say on the subject to do so in writing, and to submit their views to the Council Presidency. These observations would then be forwarded to him, and he promised “to examine them attentively before God.” Once again there was a burst of applause throughout the Council hall.
After more discussion on the Council floor, the schema on the priesthood was referred back to the appropriate commission for revision. The voting took place on November 12 and 13. The sections on celibacy, humility, and obedience were accepted by a vote of 2005 to 65. On the twelfth ballot, when qualified affirmative votes on this section were permitted, 123 Council Fathers asked for a modification of the text in Article 16 where the schema stated that the present Council “again approves and confirms” the law of celibacy for priests. They wanted the document to be changed to read that the Council “makes no change” in the law. Their argument was that altered conditions might prompt a future Pope to abolish celibacy. If, therefore, the Second Vatican Council reinforced the law, such a decision would have to go counter to the present Council.
This qualification might well have been prepared by Father Stanislaus Lyonnet, S.J., Dean of the faculty of the Biblical Institute in Rome, who five months earlier had issued a six-page study warning that the wording of the schema would “forever close the door” to a married priesthood. His study had included all the arguments contained in the qualification, which were much like those used by Bishop Koop as well.
The Commission’s reply to this qualification was very blunt: to alter the wording as requested would be “a substantial alteration of a text already approved by the Council”; moreover, it said, the reasons given in favor of such an amendment were not valid.
The Commission did, however, accept two other qualifications prepared by the Bishops’ Secretariat and submitted by 332 and 289 Council Fathers respectively. According to these Council Fathers, the schema implied that “the sole or principal theological reason for celibacy” was its value as a symbol and a witness. They called this a contradiction of the Dogmatic Constitution on the Church and of the Decree on the Appropriate Renewal of the Religious Life, both of which had already been approved and promulgated. According to these two documents, they argued, the more basic reason for the observance of celibacy was that it made possible a more intimate consecration to Christ. The “symbolism” theory advanced by Cardinals Dopfner and Suenens, which had already been demoted in the scale of values set forth in those two documents as a result of previous campaigns by the Bishops’ Secretariat, was also demoted in the schema on the life of priests as a result of this campaign. The Commission admitted the contradiction, and modified the text.
In its final form, the schema on the ministry and life of priests stated that “through virginity or celibacy observed for the sake of the kingdom of heaven, priests . . . profess before men that they desire to dedicate themselves in an undivided way to the task assigned to them . . The schema said further that “many men today call perfect continence impossible. The more they do so, the more humbly and perseveringly priests should join with the Church in praying for the grace of fidelity. It is never denied to those who ask. . . . This most holy Synod beseeches not only priests, but all the faithful to have at heart this precious gift of priestly celibacy. Let all beg of God that he may always lavish this gift on his Church abundantly.”
On December 2, the Council approved the manner in which the Commission had handled the qualifications by 2243 votes to n. On the final ballot in the presence of Pope Paul, at the public meeting of December 7, the result was 2390 votes to 4. Pope Paul then promulgated the Decree on the Ministry and Life of Priests.
"So let us be confident, let us not be unprepared, let us not be outflanked, let us be wise, vigilant, fighting against those who are trying to tear the faith out of our souls and morality out of our hearts, so that we may remain Catholics, remain united to the Blessed Virgin Mary, remain united to the Roman Catholic Church, remain faithful children of the Church."- Abp. Lefebvre
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