FIFTY-THREE years ago this week, Pope John XXIII stunned the Vatican Curia, startled the Catholic Church’s 3,000 bishops and raised the hopes of the world’s 1.2 billion Catholics by announcing that he intended to summon an ecumenical council.
The announcement was a real bombshell. The pope had been elected only three months earlier when the conclave that chose him had become deadlocked between rival candidates. After three days of indecisive voting, they decided to elect an older pontiff who could be relied on to do nothing but act as an interim pontiff. So they picked the 77-year-old Archbishop of Venice, Cardinal Angelo Roncalli, to hold the fort.
By his own later admission, Cardinal Roncalli was the last person to expect such a result. Anticipating a short conclave, he had got a return train ticket from Venice to Rome and had brought only an overnight bag. The conclave lasted four days and its rules are that no one is let in or out until it is finished. What Cardinal Roncalli did about his laundry is a Vatican secret. He did not go back to Venice and his train ticket simply expired.
The new pope was one of the 13 children of a small tenant farmer from the village of Sotto il Monte in Lombardy near the Swiss border. He was not regarded as an intellectual or an innovator. He had not distinguished himself in the Vatican diplomatic service and his appointment as Patriarch of Venice was seen as a move to put him out of harm’s way. So the 18 cardinals he invited to accompany him on January 25th 1959 to the Basilica of St Paul Outside the Walls had no suspicions of his intentions.
The occasion was the celebration of the feast of St Paul and the closing day of the annual Christian Unity Octave. Only the pope’s personal secretary knew what the pope planned to say. He had a press statement ready with an embargo on release before the expected time of the ceremony finishing. But the pope’s attendance had delayed the proceedings and the news had been broadcast before the cardinals were told.
When they did hear him say that he intended to call an Ecumenical Council they were flabbergasted. Only 20 previous such councils had been held, including the first at Nicaea, now Iznik in Turkey, in 325 AD. Such councils are summoned only when there are heresies or other serious issues to be discussed and decided. There was no such crisis at the time. In any case, the previous council in the Vatican in 1870 had proclaimed the doctrine of papal infallibility. Surely there was no need for councils now? Yet here was a 77-year-old pope, who had been only three months in office, taking this major step into the unknown without even consulting them first.
Unsurprisingly, the cardinals greeted the announcement with a frosty silence. Even when the pope asked for their advice there was no reply. Afterwards, the pope gave his reaction. “Humanly, we would have expected that the cardinals, after hearing our allocution, might have crowded round to express approval and good wishes.” And, in a sentence that could be interpreted as either extraordinary Christian tolerance or ordinary secular sarcasm, he added, “Instead there was a devout and impressive silence. Explanations came on the following days.”
Nearly three years later, when the pope knew he had not long to live, he was even more forgiving. In his address to the opening session of the council on October 11th, 1962, he explained that the decision to call the council “came to Us in the first instance in a sudden flash of inspiration”. And, referring to the silent reaction of the cardinals, he went on to say: “The response was immediate. It was as though some ray of supernatural light had entered the minds of all present: it was reflected in their faces; it shone from their eyes.”
What was shining in their eyes was more likely to have been their spontaneous reaction – determination to minimise the damage they believed the council would do to the church. Curia cardinals mistrust change. In their view, change implies that the existing status quo is incomplete, mistaken or in some way unsatisfactory. That, in their eyes, is a reflection on the church, an attack on papal infallibility and, by association, a threat to the Curia itself.
Their strategy had been carefully prepared for the first working session of the council two days later on October 13th, 1962. They proposed 10 commissions of 24 members each to run the council. Sixteen members would be elected and eight appointed. The majority of the names submitted for the positions were members of the preparatory commissions who had drawn up the 70 documents or schemata proposed for discussion. Their hope was that the council fathers would rubber-stamp the appointments, accept the schemata after perfunctory debate and finish the council in one session.
They were to be quickly disillusioned. As soon as the Curia proposal was made, two European cardinals, Achille Liénart of Lille in France and the 75-years-old nearly blind Josef Frings of Munich objected. The council bishops, they said, could not be asked to vote for people they did not know. They needed a few days to get to meet each other so they could select and appoint the right commission members.
The vast majority of the 2,500 bishops enthusiastically agreed. The voting was postponed for two days and the Curia ploy thwarted. The first working session of Vatican 2 that was to last for four years and produce continuing divisions in the Catholic Church was adjourned. It had lasted a mere 17 and a half minutes.