Rev. Ralph Wiltgen: The Rhine Flows Into the Tiber: A History of Vatican II

[Stone]

THE FIRST SESSION
October 11 to December 8, 1962

II. THE EUROPEAN ALLIANCE

The crucial question before the Council Fathers was the membership of the ten Council commissions. The German bishops discussed possible candidates at the residence of seventy-five-year-old Joseph Cardinal Frings, Archbishop of Cologne, whose dynamic qualities of leadership were unimpaired by frailness, age and partial blindness. Considerable agitation was caused when someone reported that the Roman Curia had prepared a list of candidates for distribution at election time. To counteract this move, it was proposed that each national episcopal conference should be permitted to nominate candidates from its own ranks for each commission. The idea was laid before seventy-eight-year-old Achille Cardinal Lienart of Lille, president of the episcopal conference of France, by Cardinal Frings, president of the episcopal conference of Germany, and both cardinals agreed upon a plan of procedure for the opening day.

After the Mass which opened the first General Congregation on October 13, the Council Fathers received three booklets prepared by the General Secretariat. The first contained a complete listing of Council Fathers, all of whom were eligible for office unless they already held some position. The second listed the Council Fathers who had taken part in the various preparatory commissions of the Council. This was the so-called “Curial” list which had caused so much agitation among the German bishops. As the General Secretariat later explained, the list was prepared simply as an aid to Council Fathers so that they could see who already had had experience in particular fields. But since all preparatory commission members originally had been appointed to office by the Holy See, some Council Fathers resented this list. The third booklet contained ten pages with sixteen consecutively numbered blanks on each page, on which the Council Fathers were to enter the candidates of their choice. Each of the ten Council commissions was to be presided over by a cardinal appointed by the Pope, and to consist of twenty-four members, two thirds elected by the Council Fathers and one third appointed by the Pope. The papal appointments would be made after the announcement of the election results.

Archbishop Pericle Felici, Secretary General of the Council, was explaining the election procedures to the assembled Fathers in his fluent Latin when Cardinal Lienart, who served as one of the ten Council Presidents, seated at a long table at the front of the Council hall, rose in his place and asked to speak. He expressed his conviction that the Council Fathers needed more time to study the qualifications of the various candidates. After consultations among the national episcopal conferences, he explained, everyone would know who were the most qualified candidates, and it would be possible to vote intelligently. He requested a few days’ delay in the balloting.

The suggestion was greeted with applause, and, after a moment’s silence, Cardinal Frings rose to second the motion. He, too, was applauded. After hurried consultation with Eugene Cardinal Tisserant, who as first of the Council Presidents was conducting the meeting, Archbishop Felici announced that the Council Presidency had acceded to the request of the two cardinals. The meeting was adjourned until 9 a.m. on Tuesday, October 16. The first business meeting, including Mass, had lasted only fifty minutes. A Dutch bishop on his way out of the Council hall called to a priest friend some distance away, “That was our first victory!”

The different national episcopal conferences immediately set to work drawing up their lists. The German and Austrian bishops, because of linguistic bonds, decided to establish a combined list. The two German cardinals were not eligible, Cardinal Frings being a member of the Council Presidency, and Julius Cardinal Dopfner of Munich, a member of the Secretariat for Extraordinary Council Affairs. Franziskus Cardinal Konig of Vienna, however, who held no conciliar office, was immediately placed at the head of the list of candidates for the most important commission of all, the Theological Commission. At the close of the discussions, the German-Austrian group had a fist of twenty-seven candidates: three Austrians, twenty-three Germans and one Dutch-born bishop from Indonesia who had received his liturgical training in Germany and Austria.

Other episcopal conferences were similarly preparing their lists. Canada had twelve candidates; the United States, twenty-one; Argentina, ten; Italy, fifty. The superiors general presented six of their number for the Commission on Religious, and one of their number for each of the other commissions.

Nevertheless, as these lists began to form, it became frighteningly apparent to the liberal element in the Council that their proposal for individual fists by episcopal conferences was no real safeguard against ultraconservative domination of the commissions. For it was expected in those early days of the Council that countries like Italy, Spain, the United States, Britain and Australia and all of Latin America would side with the conservatives. Italy alone was believed to have some 400 Council Fathers, the United States about 230, Spain close to 80, and Latin America nearly 650. Europe had over 1100, including those of Italy and Spain. Africa, with its nearly 300 votes, was in the balance, and might be won for either side. Such considerations prompted the bishops of Germany, Austria and France to propose a combined fist with the bishops of Holland, Belgium and Switzerland. At the same time, Bishop- Joseph Blomjous, a Dutch-born bishop in charge of Mwanza diocese in Tanzania, together with African-born Archbishop Jean Zoa of Yaounde, in Cameroun, had been busy organizing the bishops of English- and French-speaking Africa. They offered their list of candidates to the group headed by Cardinal Frings, thus assuring numerous African votes.

The six European countries, which now formed an alliance in fact, if not in name, found additional liberal-minded candidates among cardinals, archbishops and bishops of other countries. Thus they incorporated in their list eight candidates from Italy, eight from Spain, four from the United States, three from Britain, three from Australia, and two each from Canada, India, China, Japan, Chile and Bolivia. Five other countries were represented by one candidate each, and Africa by sixteen. This list of Cardinal Frings came to be called the “international” list and contained 109 carefully picked candidates so placed as to guarantee broad representation of the European alliance on the ten commissions.

By the evening of Monday, October 15, at least thirty-four separate lists of candidates had been prepared and handed in to the Secretary General of the Council, who arranged for them to be printed in a twenty-eight-page booklet entitled Lists of Council Fathers as Proposed by Episcopal Conferences for Use in Electing Council Commissions.

Tuesday, October 16, was spent entering the names of 160 candidates on the ballot sheets. The student body of the Pontifical Urban College was enlisted to count the ballots — a tedious job, there being approximately 380,000 entries in longhand. At the third General Congregation, On Saturday, October 20, the Secretary General announced that Pope John, acting on the suggestion of the Council Presidency, had dispensed with Article 39 of the Council Rules of Procedure, which required an absolute majority (50 per cent plus one) in all elections. A plurality would now suffice, and the sixteen Council Fathers who received the largest number of votes for each commission would be considered as elected to that commission.

The results of these elections were eminently satisfying to the European alliance. Of the 109 candidates presented by the alliance, 79 were elected, representing 49 per cent of all elective seats. When the papal appointments were announced, they included eight more candidates put forward by the European alliance. Alliance candidates constituted 50 per cent of all elected members of the most important Theological Commission. In the Liturgical Commission, the alliance had a majority of 12 to 4 among elected members and 14 to n after the papal appointments had been made.

Eight out of every ten candidates put forward by the European alliance received a commission seat. Germany and France were both represented on all but one of the commissions. Germany had eleven representatives; France, ten. The Netherlands and Belgium each won four seats; Austria, three; and Switzerland, one.

But the election returns did not satisfy everyone. One of the African bishops said it had been understood that, in exchange for African support for all alliance candidates to the Theological Commission, the alliance would support all African candidates to the Commission on the Missions; yet only three of the nine candidates from Africa had been voted into office. Again, not one of the fifteen superiors general proposed as candidates by the conference of superiors general was elected, although they represented communities which were exceptionally competent in liturgy, education, missions, and the religious life.

At the last moment, it was announced that Pope John would appoint nine members to each commission instead of the eight provided for in the rules of procedure. Of the ninety appointed by him, eight were superiors general. Of the 250 Council Fathers elected or appointed to the ten Council Commissions, 154, or 62 per cent, had served on a preparatory commission, and so had previous experience.

After this election, it was not too hard to foresee which group was well enough organized to take over leadership at the Second Vatican Council. The Rhine had begun to flow into the Tiber.