April 22, 2012          By Dr Michael Costigan        Address to the Australian Catholic Historical Society, 11 March 2012

                                                       
                                 
VATICAN II AS I EXPERIENCED IT                                

  A memorable Roman autumn  

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

 An even more sensational confrontation had occurred on 8 November, when, in the diary’s words, there were “fireworks in the Council: Ottaviani versus Frings”. The occasion was a discussion on the ill-fated schema on the Role of Bishops, which had been defended by the conservative Irishman Cardinal Michael Browne, former Master-General of the Dominicans and Vice-President of the Council’s Theological Commission. Replying to the assertions of Cardinal Browne, an ally of Ottaviani, about what was seen as an exaggeration of the Theological Commission’s powers compared with those of the Council itself, the Archbishop of Cologne, Cardinal Frings, delivered what John O’Malley calls “his bombshell, an attack on the whole centralising tendency in the Church but specifically on the Holy Office.”  There was applause in the Council Hall (plausus in aula, according to the official record) when the German Cardinal described the Holy Office, headed by Ottaviani and later re-named the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, as having used procedures that “in many respects are inappropriate to the times in which we live, harm the Church, and are for many a scandal”.  

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

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