April 22, 2012 By Dr Michael Costigan Address to the Australian Catholic Historical Society, 11 March 2012
VATICAN
II AS I EXPERIENCED IT
Autumn is an enchanting time in Rome. By
October the relentless heat of July and August, from which many of the Romans
themselves flee, is only an uncomfortable memory. The days are shorter, often
blessed by cloudless skies, with mild sunshine enhancing the golden glow of some
of the ancient and modern buildings, especially in the late afternoon.
The Romans, including the Pope and his court, have returned, the number
of tourists has declined, the schools and universities are open for business and
hot roasted chestnuts are on sale at street corners – or used to be in my day.
After living through nine Roman autumns as a
seminarian and student-priest between 1952 and 1961, I welcomed the chance in
1963 to experience one more of those magical seasons, probably my last and
certainly the most memorable of all.
I was there that year for the second of the
four autumnal sessions of the Second Vatican Council, as a priest-reporter
commissioned to cover the event for the Melbourne Catholic Advocate,
of which I was the Associate Editor, as well as for three other Australian
Catholic weekly newspapers.
With the Australian Catholic Historical
Society marking the 50th anniversary this year of the opening of
Vatican II by making that event the theme of several of the monthly papers
scheduled for 2012, the Society’s President suggested I help to set the scene
by painting a picture of what it was actually like to be at the Council.
My
writings and diary
My memory of the 77 days I spent in Rome
during that autumn is aided by the voluminous reports I mailed back to Australia
and by a pamphlet subsequently published by the Australian Catholic Truth
Society with the title Vatican Council
Survey, in which I summarised those reports.
In addition, I kept a rough diary in an
exercise book in which, usually before retiring late at night, I noted my daily
activities in and around the Council. I
also used another exercise book for notes taken at press briefings, for drafts
of a few of my reports and for other reflections and comments. Altogether, there
are 294 pages of untidy handwriting,
not always easy for me now to decipher, in
these two dog-eared volumes, which have luckily escaped my spasmodic and largely
unsuccessful efforts to cull my papers.
Many people participating in or observing
the Council kept diaries, one of the most celebrated, soon to be published in
English translation, being that of the French Dominican theologian, Yves Congar.
Another diary that came to my notice in Josephine Laffin’s fine biography of
Matthew Beovich is the meticulous daily record kept during the Council (and
throughout his life) by that long-serving Archbishop of Adelaide.
My scrappy diary, of course, bears no
comparison with the learned and astute observations of a Congar or with
Beovich’s account of his gradual conversion from a conservative’s scepticism
to a more moderate and pastorally sensitive appreciation of what the Council was
about. Mostly my entries allude, sometimes in one or two words, to what I had
done, where I had gone and the people I had encountered during each day. If they
have value now, it is because some of those 294 pages offer a taste of the
flavour of conciliar Rome as experienced by one fledgling religious journalist.
I will draw on a few of those entries in what follows.
A
life-changing experience
I have often said of those days spent at
Vatican II, as in the article I contributed to a National Council of Priests’
publication in 1982, marking the 20th anniversary of the Council’s opening,
that it was a life-changing experience. Ten years ago, when the opening’s 40th
anniversary was commemorated, similar words came from Bishop Geoffrey Robinson,
who described the Council as the greatest event in the Church in his lifetime,
which had inspired his life over the previous forty years.
My only direct taste of the Council was of
the ten-week session that took place 49 years ago, not of the opening session a
full half-century ago, nor of the two subsequent sessions, in 1964 and 1965. The
Advocate had reported the first
session from distant Melbourne, recounting events, like most of the diocesan
Catholic Press around the world, with some difficulty because of our reliance on
official sources at a time when tight control was exercised by the Vatican over
the release of information.
This had not prevented news about the
sometimes sensational occurrences inside the Council hall from eventually
finding other outlets, by courtesy of some of the Council Fathers and advisers
who believed in the Catholic public’s right to know. The process was aided in
the English-speaking world by alert investigative writers like the ex-Jesuit
Robert Kaiser and the Redemptorist priest Francis Xavier Murphy, alias Xavier
Rynne. At the same time, an
expectation about what the Council might achieve was being aroused by the pre-conciliar
writings of theologically literate priests like Hans Kung, Riccardo Lombardi SJ
and Edward Schillebeeckx OP.
My
reporting commission and accommodation in Rome
It was Archbishop Guilford Young of Hobart
who urged the Australian Catholic Press at its annual convention early in 1963
to be better represented at the Council’s second session. This led to the
commission I received to attend.
The Superior General of the Blessed
Sacrament Fathers, an American named Father Roland Huot SSS, generously offered
me free accommodation in his Congregation’s large head house, in Via G.B. de
Rossi, near Rome’s Via Nomentana.
The quid
pro quo for this wonderful hospitality was that every day when the Council
was meeting I would drive the Superior General (who was ex
officio a Council Father), with a Colombian Archbishop and his
priest-secretary, who were other house guests, and another resident theological
adviser to and from St Peter’s Basilica. This put me behind the wheel of a new
Fiat 1500, purchased by the Congregation for the occasion. My familiarity with
Roman traffic after my previous long sojourn in the city had not disappeared, so
that the task presented few problems. The good Blessed Sacrament Fathers also
gave me the use of a motor scooter for my own needs when I was not acting as the
chauffeur.
Filling
77 days at the Council
How were those 77 days filled?
Through Father Huot and my friend and
superior Justin D. Simonds, Coadjutor Archbishop of Melbourne, who asked me to
act unofficially as his theological adviser, I was able to attend the debates in
the Council Hall, which took place in the morning. I used this privilege
sparingly, only six or seven times, as I found that information about all that
was said and done during these daily “Congregations” became readily
available in multi-lingual briefings very soon after the Fathers of the Council,
mostly clad in their choir robes, emerged from the Basilica not long after noon,
providing gatherings of tourists and others with a colourful and much
photographed spectacle.
One of my memories of time spent inside the
Council Hall is of some of the robed bishops, the appointed periti
(theological experts), the non-Catholic observers and others chatting over
coffee in the two bars set up in two of the Basilica’s side chapels (popularly
named Bar Jonah and Bar Abbas) while the speech-making continued. Others spent
time in earnest conversation while strolling together up and down the Basilica,
behind the tribunes where more scrupulous comrades sat listening, attentively or
otherwise, to the Latin-language interventions.
By this time, the officials who had tried in
the previous year to stem the flow of information from inside the Council had
lost the battle. I can only praise
the facilities made available to us accredited correspondents by the Council
Press Office, under the direction of Father Fausto Vallainc, and by the American
priest Father (later Archbishop) Edward Heston, in his role as the briefing
officer for the English-language media.
Rather than listening every morning to a
series of 10-minute speeches in Latin, I found it more profitable to rely on the
summaries provided so promptly by Father Heston and in the meanwhile to spend
time typing my reports in the Press Office, across the road from St Peter’s
Square, or in exchanging thoughts and information with fellow correspondents.
This latter highly educative activity was also pursued often during the day and
the evening in coffee bars and (usually cheap) eating places in the Borgo or
Trastevere districts.
An
education in theology and journalism
I attended all of the marvellous briefing
sessions organised in the mid-afternoon for the media by the United States
Bishops in their USO office in a basement at the Tiber end of the Via della
Conciliazione. That year they were chaired openly and amiably by Father John B.
Sheerin of the Paulists, supported by an interchangeable panel of such expert
theologians as Gustav Weigel, Francis Connell, Thomas Stransky, Bernard Haering,
Frederick McManus, George Tavard, John Long, Gregory Baum and Charles Davis.
I went as well to a few of the less
enthralling media briefings organised by the UK Bishops and to the usually
stimulating lectures delivered on the Council’s themes by Conciliar Fathers
and theological advisers, often held in religious houses or seminaries where
some of the participants were lodged. My diary reminds me that some of the
lecturers included the following members of the Council: Cardinals Suenens,
Lercaro and Ruffini, Archbishops Heenan, Laurence Shehan, Thomas Roberts SJ and
Eugene D’Souza, and Bishops Holland, Wright, Dwyer and (Abbot) Christopher
Butler. Among the priest-theologians at whose feet I sat, in some cases on
several occasions, were Yves Congar, Karl Rahner, Jean Danielou, Henri de Lubac,
Hans Kung, John Courtney-Murray, Barnabas Ahern and Clifford Howell.
It all added up to an extraordinary opportunity for a young cleric
trained in the narrow Roman school of theology to receive a thorough
re-education in the subject.
That time at the Council was also invaluable
for the development of a novice journalist and editor. I met or formed
friendships, mostly short-term but in a few cases destined to be enduring, with
some of the other correspondents covering the event for either the general media
or the Catholic press. I think of the Irish-American freelance writer and Latin
American expert Gary MacEoin, whom many years later on one of his visits to
Australia I introduced to Morris West, Desmond Fisher of England’s Catholic
Herald, Donald Campion SJ of America,
Robert Kaiser of Time, Milton Bracker
of the New York Times, Michael Novak
of Commonweal, Raniero La Valle of L’Avvenire
d’Italia, Henri Fesquet of Le Monde,
Rene Laurentin of La Croix and James Johnson of the Kansas City Star. Other Australian writers with whom I often
exchanged views and Council gossip were the Rome-based Desmond O’Grady and
Alan McElwain, who were both contributing material to the Sydney Catholic
Weekly and other publications, and the Marist priest Stan Hosie, covering
the event for Harvest magazine.
Management
of a “School for Bishops”
What can I say about the actual business of
the 1963 session?
Each annual session of the Council had its
own distinctive character, achievements, controversies and disappointments. The
1962 session had been a time of discovery, with the Conciliar Fathers learning
from the progressive leadership provided by a few – the likes of Cardinals
Suenens, Lercaro, Montini (soon to become Pope Paul VI), Doepfner, Lienart,
Frings, Alfrink, Bea and Koenig, the Melchite Patriarch Maximos IV Saigh and the
talented Bishop De Smedt of Bruges. The no less articulate leaders of the
conservative minority included Cardinals Ottaviani, Siri, Ruffini, Larraona and
Browne OP.
What others gleaned from all of these
personalities in what has been called a “School for Bishops” was that they
were not at the Council to accept passively what had been set down in advance
under Roman Curia direction by the compilers of position papers. They had a
voice and a vote – and the right and duty to make their voice heard. In this
they had been encouraged by the man who convened the Council, Pope John XXIII,
whose opening speech on 11 October 1962 and interventions during that opening
session made it clear that he was serious about the need for change and updating
in the Church and that he welcomed the challenging of some of the positions
defended by those he labelled “prophets of doom”.
The outcome was that much of the material
prepared in advance of the gathering was either rejected or completely revised,
but not without a struggle. And the Council majority also agreed that they
should have more say about the composition of the various commissions or
committees working on the revising if not the complete re-writing of documents.
Returning in September 1963 under a new
Pope, following Pope John’s death nearly four months before, the participants
had a much better appreciation of what they were called to do. By this time it
was apparent that a majority favoured a program of change or moderate reform.
The fact that such a program still did
not have the support of some important Council members of the old school meant
that lively debating could be expected during the 1963 session.
The
first two documents issued
In the discussions a year earlier the way
had been prepared for the passage of one major document, the Constitution on the
Liturgy (Sacrosanctum Concilium). It
had priority for the simple reason that the liturgical movement was already well
under way and had widespread support in the Church before the Council opened.
Indicative of this was the successful International Liturgical Congress held in
Assisi in 1956, which I had attended as a recently ordained Melbourne priest
still studying in Rome.
The other document promulgated at the end of
the 1963 session was the Decree on the Instruments of Social Communication (Inter
Mirifica). There is an impression that the subject of the media received
less attention at the Council than it warranted and that most of the Fathers
were content to approve a document more noteworthy for its truisms than for any
inspiration it might offer to people working in the media or for any
encouragement it might give to Church leaders to respect and foster the People
of God’s right to be informed and to take part in an open exchange of views on
Church life and practices.
I was present when Paul VI promulgated these
two documents on 4 December 1963. It is interesting to note in passing that it
was Pope Paul who promulgated all of the Council’s sixteen documents – its
four Constitutions, nine Decrees and three Declarations. The two issued in 1963
were followed by three at the third session, in 1964, and the remaining eleven
in the 1965 final session. So the great Pope John XXIII did not have the chance
to issue any of the conciliar documents, although his stamp and his call for aggiornamento
influenced all of them.
Development
of Council procedures
By the time of the 1963 session, the
Council’s way of handling business had evolved. The number of schemata or
embryonic documents had been reduced by elimination or amalgamation from around
seventy to seventeen. Those exhaustively debated at one session were generally
but not invariably ready for final discussion, approval and promulgation in the
following year. This is what occurred in 1963 with the Liturgy Constitution and,
less satisfactorily, the Media Decree.
With the debates in the Council becoming
more theological in content, some of the journalists covering the event began to
feel a little out of their depth. The representative of one news agency was
heard to say: “Last year they told us nothing and we knew everything. This
year they tell us everything and we understand nothing.”
The whole of October 1963 was spent
discussing the pivotal draft Constitution on the Church. The main subjects
considered in November were the drafts on the Role of Bishops and on Ecumenism.
The proposed document on Bishops struck so much trouble that it was eventually
dumped and fully rewritten, so that the interval before the promulgation of a
completely new text, the Decree on the Bishops’ Pastoral Office in the Church
(Christus Dominus), was extended to 28
October 1965, during the final session.
The draft text on Ecumenism fared better,
although it too was subjected to rigorous and occasionally acrimonious
attention.
While Archbishop (later Cardinal) Heenan of
Westminster, in the name of many Bishops in the English-speaking world and
elsewhere, gave general support to the draft, Cardinal Gilroy, with several
other Australians, submitted in writing what
John W. O’Malley in his admirable book What
Happened at Vatican II (2008) calls a “scathing denunciation”. Gilroy
wrote: “Is it really possible for an ecumenical council to say that any
heretic has the right to draw the faithful away from Christ, the Supreme
Pastor, and to lead them to pasture in
their poisoned fields?” (emphasis
mine). The use of terms like “heretic” and “poisoned fields” is
indicative of the distance some of our Catholic Church leaders in Australia had
to travel in 1963 before fully accepting the Council’s direction on ecumenism.
The main outcome of the 1963 discussions was
the historic issuing a year later, on 21 November 1964, of the Dogmatic
Constitution on the Church (Lumen Gentium),
the Decree on Ecumenism (Unitatis
Redintegratio) and the Decree on the Eastern Catholic Churches (Orientalium Ecclesiarum).
On
other issues and controversies
Meanwhile, in a sometimes ad hoc way, other
issues came to the surface at times in 1963, affecting the schemata that did not
reach full fruition for two more years. The most important of these were the
foreshadowed or possible documents on the Church in the Modern World, an
unprecedented topic for an ecumenical council, on Revelation, on Freedom of
Religion and on Relations between the Church and Other Religions, with
particular concern over relations with the Jews.
Even the journalists who might have found
the theologising occasionally baffling appreciated the news value of disputes
and confrontation. Those at the Council that year found no shortage of
reportable happenings with a conflict ingredient. My diary reminds me of several
examples.
The first has to do with the key issue of
episcopal collegiality, the co-responsibility of Bishops with and under the Pope
for the whole Church. This was debated at length in the Council Hall over
several days.
The
influence of a new Bishop
On 11 October, one of the assembly’s most
junior Bishops, Luigi Bettazzi, ordained only the previous week as an Auxiliary
Bishop to Cardinal Lercaro of Bologna, delighted many of his hearers when he
demonstrated in a learned and witty fashion that collegiality was a traditional
doctrine. Smiles greeted his assertion that the Council’s true innovators or
radicals were those who opposed or questioned collegiality.
One impressed listener was the conservative
theologian Pietro Parente (who had been my Dogmatic Theology Professor at the
Pontifical Urban university in the 1950s). In 1963 Archbishop (later Cardinal)
Parente was the Assessor of the Holy Office, virtually the deputy to one of the
principal opponents of the collegiality movement, Cardinal Ottaviani. On 21
September 1964 Parente, probably remembering Bettazzi’s maiden speech the year
before, was to make one of the most crucial interventions at the Council. His
supportive report on sections 22 to 27 of the proposed Constitution on the
Church, dealing mainly with collegiality, ensured its comfortable passage in the
final voting because it persuaded many, including conservative Bishops and some
of his former students, that collegiality as described in the text should have
the Council’s endorsement.
The
Moderators and Giuseppe Dossetti
Back in October 1963, however, the issue had
remained alive and divisive. Before that session commenced, Pope Paul had
reorganised the management of the Council, appointing four “Moderators” to
preside over the gathering. They were Cardinals Suenens, Lercaro, Doepfner and
Agagianian.
In the absence of a more precise definition
of the controlling powers of the four, some Council members claimed they were
exceeding their role when they decided to call for a kind of straw vote on
several questions, including collegiality, raised by the Church document –
four questions at first, five in the end.
There was also concern because a well-known
priest from Bologna, Giuseppe Dossetti, an unofficial adviser to Cardinal
Lercaro, was coopted to act as Secretary to the Moderators. Dossetti had been a
latecomer to the clergy, at the age of 45, but was already by then an
acknowledged expert on ecclesiastical law. He had fought as a partisan during
the war and had played a part in the Christian Democrat Government’s drafting
of Italy’s post-war Constitution as a Republic.
The fact that Dossetti had some influence on
the drafting of the October test questions for the Council riled those of its
members who had issues about his appointment and his perceived left-wing
orientation. In the end, after a long delay during a period of growing tension
late in October, the questions received strong positive support from the
Council’s majority, while Dossetti either diplomatically withdrew or was asked
to withdraw from his role as the Moderator’s Secretary.
Although this is not noted in my diary, I
remember my fellow journalist Desmond O’Grady introducing me to Dossetti one
day in the Council Press Office. I was not fully aware of his significance at
the time, but I now know that for a time Dossetti was an important if intriguing
background figure at Vatican II, whose activities, controversial in part to this
day, receive many mentions throughout the great five-volume history of the
Council edited by that other notable son of Bologna, Giuseppe Alberigo.
The
Blessed Virgin Mary: no separate document
One of the most polarising controversies
during the debate on the Church document concerned the Blessed Virgin Mary. A
good number of the Conciliar Fathers wanted the Council to retain what the
original drafters had intended – a separate document dedicated to Mary.
Some hoped for the definition of another
Marian doctrine, preferably as Co-redeemer with Christ or as Mediatrix of All
Graces. Others argued, partly for ecumenical reasons, that a more low-key
treatment of Mary and her role should be incorporated in the Constitution on the
Church. The case for a separate document was put by Cardinal Santos of Manila.
The spokesman for integration within the Constitution on the Church was Cardinal
Koenig of Vienna.
In the end, the vote on 29 October favoured
integration, although the winning margin was the smallest in all the Council’s
votes. I was in the Council hall that morning and was conscious of the tense
atmosphere, while my diary records that much was said about it at the US
Bishops’ media gathering that afternoon.
The
Mass Media
My diary mentions another occasion late in
the session when conflict over the draft decree on the Instruments of Social
Communication led to an open argument in St Peter’s Square. It happened on 25
November, only nine days before the Pope promulgated the Decree. In my brief
notes about the media conference at
the USO that day I wrote: “Bernard Haering spoke of a fight involving Bishops
in the Piazza, over the circulation of a sheet protesting about the
Communications Media schema”.
The diary observes in the same place that
two Australians had been among those who signed this criticism of the schema’s
shortcomings. They were Bishop Francis Thomas of Geraldton and Auxiliary Bishop
John Cullinane of Canberra and Goulburn. The
circulating of this comparatively innocent attempt to improve the Decree shortly
before it was due to be issued had angered the gathering’s organisers, led by
Archbishop Pericle Felici, Secretary-General of the Council.
Attack
on the Holy Office
The nearly blind Ottaviani gave a strong and
emotional answer to this attack, reminding the Council that the President of
“the Supreme Congregation of the Holy Office” was the Pope himself. He spoke
with a quivering voice of the Congregation’s carefulness in inquiring among
experts before reaching and submitting a conclusion to the Pope about matters
brought to its attention.
What adds piquancy to this episode
retrospectively is that the theological adviser to Frings was the young German
theologian Joseph Ratzinger, the future Pope Benedict XVI and before that for
many years a successor to Ottaviani in the Congregation for the Doctrine of the
Faith. One wonders if or to what extent Father Ratzinger had some involvement in
1963 in the sensational criticism by Frings of the powerful body he would one
day lead.
More
polarising issues
Three other polarising issues at the 1963
Council session were anti-semitism, religious liberty and the role of women in
the Church.
The first two matters arose in 1963 when the
schema on Ecumenism was being discussed. Cardinal Bea himself, head of the
Christian Unity Secretariat, raised the question about relations with the Jews.
At the time and in the following year, some of the Eastern Rite Bishops led by
the formidable octogenarian Melchite Patriarch Maximos IV Saigh voiced concerns
about the way in which a statement on anti-semitism might be misconstrued in the
Arab world as the adoption of a pro-Israel stance.
In the end, the relevant passages were
removed from the Decree on Ecumenism and, after revision, became part of the
Council’s Declaration on the Relationship of the Church to Non-Christian
religions (Nostra Aetate). With its
other sympathetic sections on other Religions including Islam, the Declaration
was to be issued on 28 October 1965.
Religious freedom had also been raised in
the Ecumenism schema, in a chapter introduced by the Belgian Bishop De Smedt.
This subject also engendered strong debate.
It too was removed from the Ecumenism Decree, leading eventually to the
promulgation on 7 December 1965, the Council’s final day, of the declaration
on Religious Freedom (Dignitatis Humanae).
In 1963 I had the privilege of hearing
several addresses on the subject by one of the principal architects of the
Declaration, the American Jesuit John Courtney-Murray, whose belated appointment
as an expert at the Council on the vigil of the second session can be credited
to Cardinal Spellman of New York as his major contribution to Vatican II.
Another influential background figure in the area was my former lecturer
and thesis moderator at the Pontifical Lateran University, Monsignor (later
Cardinal) Pietro Pavan.
The
laity: male and female
The Council’s second session had also seen
the appearance of its first male lay auditors, including the English Jocist (YCW)
leader Pat Keegan, who made history as a layman addressing an ecumenical
council. But women were not to make their debut as official auditors at the
Council until the following year. One of the first appointed was the Rome-based
Australian high achiever Rosemary Goldie, who died in Sydney at 94 early in
2010.
While I had been excited when first entering
the Council Hall by the vision of all those rows of well over two thousand
Council Fathers, most of them in colourful robes, I recall pondering on the
totally male character of the event. Not only were all the participants male,
but most were over fifty and all were unmarried. Leaving aside the Holy
Spirit’s presence, one can surely be excused for wondering
how such an assembly could legislate effectively for the millions of
women, young people and married people constituting the People of God.
Nevertheless, I must acknowledge in a
penitential spirit that my own attitudes at the time were gravely in need of
reform. This is revealed to my shame and embarrassment in my diary entry for 22
October 1963. I wrote: “At US Press Panel, discussion on women’s role in the
Church. Suenens had mentioned this today. Hysterical dame next to me – the
best argument against the idea is the people themselves who push it (she and the
effeminate Father Tavard).”
May I be forgiven for this unjust and
uncharitable outburst, perhaps scribbled in a fatigued state or when I’d had
one scotch too many before hitting the pillow? I have no idea who my anonymous
female neighbour was that day, but I beg her forgiveness now, while hoping all
her reasonable aspirations will one day be met.
As for the Assumptionist priest George
Tavard, he was a wonderful ecumenist who made a major contribution to the Church
unity movement for a long period in his native France and his adopted USA until
his death in the 90s a few years ago. Father Tavard too is owed a profound
apology from me.
Later on the same day, by the way, I record
that I went to hear Archbishop Roberts SJ, formerly of Bombay, on “Modern
Inquisitions”. My notes add that it was “sensational stuff”.
Years afterwards, in London, this charismatic Jesuit offered me sound
pastoral advice when I was about to leave the priestly ministry.
A
tragic November
I have spoken at the beginning of this paper
of the pleasure of being in Rome during that autumn. Those words apply more to
what was a glorious October but less to November, largely because of what
occurred in the world in what turned out to be a terrible month.
Friday 22 November had been a historic day
at the Council. The Constitution on the Sacred Liturgy had received sweeping
endorsement by the Conciliar Fathers. There was a jubilant mood at the US Press
Panel in the afternoon. Many questions were asked about the ways in which the
large-scale changes in liturgical practice would be implemented.
For a reason that is not clear to me after
so many years, my notes about the afternoon media gathering include without
explanation the name of Bishop Thomas K. Gorman of Dallas-Fort Worth. I have no
idea whether or not the Bishop was there that day to answer questions about the
liturgy or some other activity of the Council. It might have been that, as a
former religious journalist himself he liked to be in our company. Before
becoming the Bishop of the Texan diocese he had edited and promoted Catholic
newspapers elsewhere. He died in 2006 aged 96. Whatever about that, it is
strange if not eerie in the light of events later that day to find his name in
my diary entry for 22 November.
At the Blessed Sacrament Fathers’ house
that evening I was preparing, at the request of their Youth Group chaplain, to
give a late-night talk on the Council to a group of young Italian parishioners.
This is what I wrote in my diary after
returning from the talk, during which my and my audience’s concentration had
been challenged by what we had all learned just before coming together:
Friday 22 November: The
John Kennedy story is over, or has it properly started? At 45, the first
Catholic President of the US was assassinated today (8pm, Rome time) in Dallas,
Texas. The incredible, stunning news came to me from Father Stan Hosie, whom I
was telephoning about 9pm. So, since my departure from Melbourne: Adenaur has
retired; Macmillan has resigned; Kennedy has been assassinated; Diem has been
murdered; there have been upheavals in Iraq; Italy’s Leone Government has
fallen; and Archbishop Mannix has died. November 1963 will not be quickly
forgotten.
The event cast a shadow over the remaining
days of the Council session, leaving us
all and in particular my American friends in the Press Office in a state of
shock.
To offer a further taste of the atmosphere
before and after 22 November I will quote a few more short entries written in
the diary at different times during the whole session.
Other
diary entries sampled
Tuesday 10 October:
Tragic landslide today provoked by
collapse of hydroelectric dam at Vajont, near Belluno. Estimated three thousand
dead….. At the US Press Panel, Father Weigel SJ was nasty to Father Connell
CSSR over the latter’s outdated way of explaining papal infallibility and its
objects….. Visit Pope John’s tomb and confess in St Peter’s.
Tuesday
17 October: To
Marist General House for dinner. Guests included Cardinal Gilroy, Bishop
Muldoon, Bishop Joyce (NZ), Archbishop O’Donnell, Archbishop Cody of New
Orleans (the future controversial Cardinal Cody of Chicago), several other
American prelates and our own Father Bell.
Wednesday 23 October:
At US Press Panel I asked my first
question: “Can part of the Office be said in Latin and part in
English?”….. Paul Blanshard also asks a question.
Friday 25 October:
Visit Cardinal Gilroy at 4.30.
Spend an hour with him. Chat about difficulties of journalists at the Council,
the situation in Australia (election coming off etc.)…. I informed the
Cardinal, one of the twelve Council Presidents, that there would be no General
Congregation on Monday! …. Back to
Herder reception. Cardinal Marella speaks. Archbishop Young there. Meet Hans
Kung again…
Wednesday 6 November:
A day to remember. At about 11.40
am Sam Dimattina informed me in the Press Office (as I emerged from the toilet)
that Archbishop Mannix was dead…. At St Peter’s College, hear Congar on
Ecumenism.
Thursday 7 November:
I go on the back of his Vespa with
my student-priest friend Bill Jordan of Melbourne to the Blue Sisters’ chapel
for the 5pm Requiem Mass for Archbishop Mannix. Great turn-up of Bishops and
others. Cardinal Gilroy celebrates the Mass and preaches. (I send a report back
to Australia.)
Monday 18 November:
Lunch with Desmond Fisher, the
Canadian journalist Bernard Daly and the English theologian Father Charles
Davis. Run into Father Tom Boland at the US Press gathering.
Sunday 24 November:
To Propaganda Fide College for
festive lunch for former students attending the Council (in various capacities).
Met several Australian Bishops, also many companions of yesteryear… The old
College choir, of which I was a member, reassembled and performed under the
direction of our former Choir Prefect, now Archbishop Robert Dosseh of Lome,
Togo. Photo of all the guests afterwards on the College soccer field. Met a
number of present Australian Prop students, including Christopher Hope of Hobart
and the recently arrived George Pell of Ballarat.
Thursday 28 November:
Supper in pasticceria with Father
Ralph Wiltgen. Tells me of his interview with Ottaviani, whom he found very
charming and helpful. Worried by the alliance of the French and Germans at the
Council. Considers that the German news agencies are managing the Council news
coverage and invariably attribute most importance to interventions by German
Bishops.
Friday 29 November:
Go by scooter to US Press Panel and
then interview Bishops Jimmy Carroll of Sydney and Joyce of New Zealand…. Meet
Pietro Pavan, Pat Keegan and Fred McManus…. Watch Fulton Sheen doing a TV show
in St Peter’s Square…. Go on scooter at night to the Domus Mariae to hear
Kung on Ecclesiology.
Sunday 1 December:
Paul VI says a Mass for Council
journalists and greets each one… Attended symposium of International Catholic
Press Union where Courtney Murray spoke. At final session of symposium I made a
brief speech, with Cardinal Lercaro in the chair….. Went to Domus Mariae to
hear De Lubac on Teilhard de Chardin.
The
Australian involvement
During the Council session I had many
meetings, mostly casual or unplanned, with members of the Australian hierarchy.
I did have regular appointments with Guilford Young, who dictated a number of
short pastoral letters about the Council for publication in his diocesan paper,
the Hobart Standard. On one occasion
I drove him to and from the Blessed Sacrament Fathers’ house, where he
was a lunch guest. My diary says that on that day he looked tired and
“underfed”. I also had
discussions with Archbishop Simonds a number of times before the death of Daniel
Mannix meant that he, as the old Archbishop’s successor, had to return in
haste to Melbourne.
Before leaving for the Council’s opening session in 1962, the Australian Bishops had issued a Pastoral Letter titled What the Vatican Council Means to You. Dated 12 August 1962 and signed by the 34 Bishops (only one of whom, John Jobst, is still alive today) and also by Abbot Gregory Gomez of New Norcia, the letter is said to have been drafted by the theologian Thomas Muldoon, Auxiliary Bishop to Cardinal Gilroy. It summarises well the accepted teaching on the nature and history of ecumenical councils, looks forward to the expected denunciation of atheism and error at Vatican II, denies that it would be a Council aimed at “the re-union of the separated Churches with the See of Peter” and in general shows little knowledge of or sympathy with the true vision of Pope John XXIII. It ends on a triumphalist note, calling on the faithful “to unite in a special crusade of prayer and sacrifice that the Holy Spirit will bless and prosper all our deliberations”.
In some of my early writings about the
Council I made the not very well informed comment that many of our Bishops were
apathetic about the event or at least did not at first see why it was needed.
Some, like Cardinal Gilroy, expected it to be over by the Christmas following
the opening session.
I would have to revise those somewhat
immature judgements in the light of some of the research done since the Council
ended. Another corrective to those
views is the information emerging about a number of Australia’s Conciliar
Fathers in various biographical or autobiographical publications.
Guilford Young, of course, stood out among
the Australian Bishops with his grasp of the issues and his enthusiasm for the
event. Others who shared his positive approach included Frank Rush, at that time
Bishop of Rockhampton and eventually Archbishop of Brisbane, James Gleeson,
Coadjutor and later Archbishop of Adelaide and Lancelot Goody, Bishop of Bunbury
and later Archbishop of Perth. All of these took the Council seriously both at
its sessions and in their efforts to implement its decisions.
Archbishop Beovich of Adelaide and Cardinal
Gilroy of Sydney, with their unflinching loyalty to Rome, accepted in the end
whatever the Council finally laid down, even if their natural inclination was to
be hesitant about some of the decisions. The same can probably be said about the
Australian who spoke most frequently in the Council hall, Bishop Muldoon, who
had written theology textbooks mirroring the rigid position of the Roman school
in which he had been trained. Unfortunately, two of the Australians, Archbishops
Eris O’Brien and Justin Simonds, were so close to retirement and in such poor
health that they were unable to make the kind of contribution to the Council and
its follow-up that men of their quality would certainly have made if the event
had occurred earlier in their lives.
I am not sure that unquestioning acceptance
of everything coming from the Council would have been the attitude of several of
the Australian ultra-traditionalists, like Bishops Cahill of Cairns (a future
Archbishop of Canberra and Goulburn), Stewart of Sandhurst, Ryan of Townsville,
Lyons of Sale and Fox, Auxiliary of Melbourne.
Revelations
and research by Jeffrey J. Murphy and others
A quite different comment applies to one
Australian Council Father who was prevented by age from attending the sessions
in person. I refer to the absent Daniel Mannix, whose extraordinarily radical
written critique of an early draft of the Constitution on the Church was
recalled by Father Edmund Campion in his address on Vatican II on 23 February
2012. This submission by Mannix, dated 22 February 1963, when he was a fortnight
short of his 99th birthday, remained hidden for years until unearthed
by the Queensland researcher Jeffrey J. Murphy and published, with some
debatable conclusions by Murphy about Mannix’s supposedly unaided authorship,
in the Australasian Catholic Record of
January 1999.
Other articles by Jeffrey Murphy in
successive issues of the ACR in 2002
and 2003 summarise many of the other fruits of his doctoral research into
submissions made before and during the Council by other Australian Bishops. What
he writes, even where his observations are open to challenge, is important as a
corrective to any notion about our hierarchy playing a purely passive or
inactive role at the Council. Murphy’s work supplements what others such as
Father William Ryder SM, Robert J. Rice, Father Thomas Boland, Father Edmund
Campion, Patrick O’Farrell, Kevin Walsh, Father
Terry Southerwood, Archbishops James Gleeson and Lancelot Goody and others have
written before and after him in the ACR
or elsewhere.
It seems that there is much scope for
further study about Australia’s participation in the Council, including the
steps taken by the returned Conciliar Fathers to carry out its decisions. This
could well be accompanied by a survey of the ways in which the next generations
of Bishops, those appointed after
the Council until today, have implemented its decisions or have tried to govern
their dioceses in its spirit.
Bishops
McKeon and Jobst: sole Council survivors in early 2012
At the time when this paper was written
(March 2012), only two of the Australian Bishops who attended the Council (the
two were at all four of its sessions) were still living. Both in their 90s now,
having each retired many years ago, they are Bishops Miles McKeon, formerly of
Bunbury, and John Jobst, formerly of Broome.
A number of years ago, Bishop McKeon gave an
interesting account of his time at Vatican II in an interview published in the
collection Voices from the Council
(2004) together with other interviews by
fellow Vatican II veterans. Ordained an Auxiliary Bishop of Perth in the month
before the Council’s opening, he speaks frankly but amusingly of sharing
accommodation in Rome with several older traditionalist Bishops.
Although Bishop Jobst was not a speaker in
any of the Council’s debates, he has revealed in his unpublished diary that at
other later times he had at least twice asked a Pope (Paul VI on 18 September
1970 and John Paul II on 13 October 1988) face to face while on ad limina visits about the possibility of ordaining a married
Aborigine in his diocese. His requests were firmly rejected by Pope Paul and
given a “non-committal” response by Pope John Paul, as were similar requests
by Bishops from other countries. Personally, I think it unfortunate that
discussion on compulsory clerical celibacy in the Latin Rite of the Catholic
Church, as distinct from the Oriental Rites, was stifled at Vatican II.
Interpreting
Vatican II
As my intention in this paper was simply to
describe what it was like to be at the Council in Rome nearly half a century ago
I have not developed my thoughts here on the prolific and continuing discussions
about the way in which Vatican II should be interpreted.
Leaving aside the extremist views of those
on the one hand who think it was all a disastrous aberration and those on the
other hand who welcomed it as opening the way for the jettisoning of essential
items of Catholic faith, I discern two separate but connected debates between
those groups of interpreters who are more deserving of respect and attention.
One is the difference of approach between
those who consider that the collection of sixteen documents issued by the
Council is really all that matters, that being the “real” Council, and those
who like to speak of “the Spirit of the Council” and emphasise its
importance as an “event” extending far more widely than the promulgated and
less than perfect documents. Perhaps we can refer to the upholders of the two
schools of thought as the “Minimalists” and the “Maximalists”.
The other associated debate can be said to
be between those who stress the Council’s continuity with all that preceded
and followed its four annual sessions and those who think it brought about a
rupture, welcome or otherwise, in the Church’s life, with an abandonment of
much in Catholic practice and even belief that had existed previously.
If some
of my observations in this paper have not already hinted at where I stand
personally in all of this, I should admit here that, without in any way reducing
the importance of the teachings in the documents, I see Vatican II not
as an isolated episode in the Church’s history that is now over and
done with, but as a continuing
event. And I share with Edmund Campion a more optimistic opinion than many other
commentators have expressed about the eventual or long-term fruits of the
continuing conciliar process.
It has been well demonstrated by other
commentators that much that happened while the Council was in session was the
result of years of preparation. It was by no means the outcome of a sudden whim
of Pope John, as his former Secretary, Loris Capovilla, now a retired
Archbishop, recently confirmed. That the conciliar process continues is evident
from, among other things, the subsequent and contemporary fine tuning or
amending of some of its decisions and of certain pastoral directives issued from
Rome or by the World Synod of Bishops in the years after 1965, most recently
(and controversially) on the liturgy.
Much more will certainly be written and said
about ways of interpreting the Council while the fiftieth anniversaries of its
sessions and promulgations are being marked from now until late 2015. Books like
Robert de Mattei’s recent history of the Council
(Il Concilio Vaticano II: Una
Storia Mai Scritta, 2010) and pronouncements by powerful Church leaders like
the Slovenian Cardinal Franc Rode and the Italian Cardinals Camillo Ruini and
Giacomo Biffi, not to overlook Pope Benedict XVI himself, will
undoubtedly continue to provide food for thought on the subject.
Fifty
years hence: the Council’s Centenary in 2062
One wonders how the Second Vatican Council
will be viewed when its centenary is observed between 2062 and 2065. Perhaps
historians will then conclude that Vatican II really began when the unfinished
First Vatican Council was terminated in 1870; that the social teaching of a Pope
Leo XIII was part of its preparation; that the anti-Modernist crusade in the
time of Pope St Pius X was relevant to while having a less than positive effect
on the preparatory process; that the process advanced in discernible ways from
the pontificate of Benedict XV to that of John XXIII; that the implementation of
the Council, its fruitfulness and the acceptance of its true message made real
advances, in spite of setbacks, under all the Popes who reigned in the one
hundred years since John’s death; that many of these advances were initiated
and prompted by God’s people at all levels; and that the event had not really
concluded back on 7 December 1965 but had finally been recognised as a source of
spiritual nourishment to many. One should not, however, venture too far into the
realm of prophecy or speculation when addressing a gathering of historians.
After
the 1963 session: a USA visit and the 1964 and 1965 sessions
On a long journey home from the second
session through the USA in December 1963 I spent time with media friends and
other Council veterans – episcopal, clerical, religious and lay.
In New York I accompanied the Cardinal
Archbishop of Bogota to a performance by Albert Finney as Martin Luther in the
play of that name. In Washington I
visited the three-week-old grave of John F. Kennedy and shared two breakfasts
after Mass with the de facto Kennedy family chaplain, Auxiliary Bishop Philip
Hannan – later Archbishop of Atlanta. In Kansas City I was the guest of James
Johnson of the Kansas City Star and
met the Editor of the diocesan Catholic
Reporter, Robert Hoyt, who was preparing to launch the National Catholic Reporter in the following year. In Los Angeles I
visited Disneyland, watched Fulton Sheen on the Jack Parr Show and attended a
memorial Mass celebrated in the cathedral by the traditionalist Cardinal
McIntyre for the dead President. And I touched
down in Samoa, where, in the airport, I continued a discussion about the
Council with my accidental plane companion, the relatively young Vicar Apostolic
of Samoa and future Archbishop of Suva, George Hamilton Pearce SM, also
returning from Rome.
Although offered the chance to do so by
Archbishop Simonds, I did not return to Rome for the final two Council sessions
in 1964 and 1965, as the Advocate’s
resources were stretched and in any case I knew I was now equipped to produce
adequate reports on those sessions with the help of my new contacts and of
airmailed copies of Bologna’s L’Avvenire
d’Italia, the London Catholic Herald
and Tablet, both Le Monde and La Croix from
Paris and news bulletins from Father Wiltgen and the US Bishops’ media
service.
Our paper’s coverage of Vatican II, the
result of much burning of midnight oil, was well received and highly praised by,
among others, Edmund Campion.
Memories of my Roman autumn in 1963 will always be precious to me. The Council has continued to be very much part of my life in all the succeeding years. I do not expect that to change.
Copyright:
Dr Michael Costigan, March 2012