A ROMAN EDUCATION What I saw at the council
Weiss, James M
A ROHAN EDUCATION A college kid at the council James M. Weiss Scclesia adest!...Spiritus adest! "The church is present! The Spirit is present!" I heard these refrains repeated throughout Pope Paul...
...The council's third session witnessed intense debates on the collegiality of bishops, religious liberty, the declaration concerning the Jews, the nature of revelation, the role of the laity, the work of priests, the Eastern Rite churches, missions, seminaries, marriage, and more...
...Out popped a uniformed chauffeur, who opened the car door for the aged Cardinal Fernando Cento...
...By a coincidence that feels more like providence, I was ordained a priest at Pentecost thirty-three years later, in the Episcopal Church, to which God had called me...
...There, I came upon an American bishop tying his shoelace, who gladly treated me to a double espresso and told me how wonderfully everything was working out...
...Cardinal Meyer was not among them: he had died in the interim...
...The tiny prelate kept peeping around his peers, trying to find where he fit in, like the loser in musical chairs...
...One Thursday morning, around 10:30, as I was listening to the debates and comparing the ways that different nationalities spoke Latin (the Germans spoke it most clearly), I decided to check out the famous coffee bar (Bar Jonah) set up in a chapel of St...
...the proclamation of a new title for Mary...
...Two occasions, if symbolic, come to mind...
...Untill, even those compromises were reached only with great wrenching back and forth...
...The liturgy was reborn as an action of the entire people of God...
...While the council called for renewal, it rarely named what it clearly intended to repudiate...
...Decades later, I learned that the music was arranged and directed by my Boston College colleague, Prof...
...First, Vatican Radio needed voices for its news broadcasts to the English-speaking world...
...Thanks to my Jesuit high-school training in public speaking, I served as a news announcer...
...The vast majority of the council's documents, eleven of sixteen, were not passed until the final weeks of the closing session (1965...
...I even gained a baciatnano ("hand kiss") ticket to one audience, allowing me to kiss the pope's hand as he reached the altar...
...And who could have foreseen the healing and deepening of Christian relations with our sisters and brothers, the Jews...
...One may hope that the coming anniversary will be an occasion to revisit and, where necessary, revive the spirit of Vatican II...
...As my mother asked: "What happened to all the people who went to hell for eating meat on Friday...
...Vatican II claimed a scope wider than any council in church history...
...This has made it easy later to manipulate the council's meaning...
...Vatican II viewed the world optimistically and placed itself at the service of human culture...
...Even if they were only saying the diplomatic thing, later critics agreed that the council fostered an unsustainable optimism that affirmed almost everything and condemned almost nothing...
...The daily parade of white-men-in-black, black-men-in-purple, brown- and yellow-men-in-red made the universality of the church part of a routine that led Karl Rahner and others to observe that a decisive turning point was taking place-away from the church's Western and European axis toward a more universal church...
...Dante lost his place in line...
...At this distance, that excitement appears a symptom of both a strength and a weakness...
...Xavier Rynne would write that "pandemonium broke loose...
...Yet one secret is out...
...Similarly, Archbishop D'Souza of Bhopal, India, an outspoken liberal who frequently dined at our school, would glow about the changes in store...
...Of course, memory and history are very different things, memory being personal, history being social...
...The subsequent collapse of Paul VI's prestige took many months to repair...
...This set the stage for struggles throughout the 1970s and 1980s between Rome and national bodies of bishops...
...The Declaration on Religious Freedom underwent further revisions, which in fact strengthened it, and it was finally approved by the council on December 7,1965...
...The procession into St...
...And, for a while, at least, national groups of bishops found new creativity and collegiality...
...When Rome says it can't change, many no longer accept that at face value...
...But, in February 1965, Paul VI created his first cardinals, among them Dante...
...This explains my most puzzling encounter at the council...
...For many years, Archbishop Enrico Dante had ruled ritual with an iron hand as the papal master of ceremonies...
...Peter's got jumbled, perhaps because the Eastern Rite patriarchs couldn't settle their quarrels over precedence...
...In confusion, Paul VI perched the wrong birettas on the wrong heads: the American Lawrence Sheehan's large biretta landed on Dante's small Italian head, hanging down over his ears...
...As the fortieth anniversary of the conclusion of Vatican II approaches, we must truly celebrate the council's legacy...
...n remember the moment I knew in my gut that things would never be the same...
...This sustained our hope and patience The daily parade of white-men-in-black, black-men-in-purple, brown- and yellow-men-in-red made the universality of the church part of a routine that led Karl Rahner and others to observe that a decisive turning point was taking place-away from the church's Western and European axis toward a more universal church...
...But my purpose in drawing from memory is to convey some larger points about the council...
...This should renew the hope of Catholics today...
...That optimism fed our generation, yet it carried a negative note...
...He was delighted to meet the three of us, not least because I could hold my own in a Latin conversation...
...I bounded over to greet him but he was jotting down some notes and had a sour expression...
...It is true that the church imposed a rapid series of changes for which people were neither prepared nor instructed...
...Peter's as two thousand mitered heads bobbed together before undertaking what would be ten weeks of intense debate...
...The air in Rome that year was electrifying...
...Paul VI's first and most colorful canonization...
...For during my sophomore year at Loyola (Chicago) University's Rome Center, 1964 to 1965,1 attended many functions at the council and numerous other Vatican events, both solemn and simple: a half-dozen general audiences with the pope...
...I even invited my roommates along to see the place...
...The momentum and the enthusiasm it created aroused expectations, sometimes energizing, that proved impossible to fulfill...
...The laity began to see their authentic vocation in the church and in all other spheres...
...That ceremony was the first Dante could not superintend, because he was part of it...
...They have come to be called the "Black Week" and "Black Thursday," the latter being the day a conservative minority used a dubious parliamentary trick to block the vote on religious liberty, potentially killing the document most eagerly awaited by the secular world...
...Third, the council both allowed for an insistence on growth through dialogue with other Christian bodies, but also seemed to say that the Roman Church can be self-sufficient without ecumenical dialogue...
...Despite all the resistance and foot dragging, Vatican II betokened change, sometimes very colorfully...
...Only three documents were officially adopted during the autumn I was there...
...Nor could I have guessed that Meyer and two other cardinals were about to storm into the pope's study to reverse Tisserant's move with a letter of support that would contain signatures from more than one thousand council fathers...
...Not once did he ask how we got in...
...Second, the council left the church with a clumsy balancing act, trying to maintain both the primacy of the pope and the collegiality of all the bishops...
...Yet the 1964 session became known as the "Session of Great Pain," from a complaint several bishops sent to the pope at a critical point which opened with the words Magno cum dolore...
...Change is possible...
...It was both innocent and nervy...
...Only later did I learn that this jovial man was so rigid a conservative that he would later be removed from his see for refusing to implement the conciliar directives...
...Now, Cento was just the man I might need in this situation: his title as Grand Penitentiary of the Church meant he could forgive special sins...
...In fact, some of the council's best moments remain misunderstood to this day, since whatever else the bishops were, they were not religious educators...
...In 1870, one month after the close of Vatican I, John Henry Newman said that "it is uncommon that a council not be followed by great confusion...
...If Dante could lose his place, we knew there was hope for the new liturgy...
...Today, Catholic spirituality stands more firmly rooted in Scripture and in a vision of social justice, and it is more open to the truths of other churches and other religions...
...He meant that many accidental externals changed, but that the substance of Catholicism remained the same: blind, unbending authority...
...When I spoke with staunch opponents of the council, prelates such as Cardinal Cento, they would beam with confidence and say, Concilium magna operat ("The council is doing great things...
...We could hardly keep up with the sheer flood of news and commentaries...
...Just then I saw my own archbishop, Cardinal Albert Meyer of Chicago, who was one of the council presidents...
...Fidelity to the Holy Spirit may mean more struggle, more compromise...
...The third session of the council ended that Saturday, and a state of demoralization hung over the bishops until they reconvened, ten months later...
...and papal Masses, some of moving simplicity...
...his attendance at a theater performance (the first by a pope in centuries) honoring Shakespeare's four-hundredth birthday...
...Two bore great importance: the decree on ecumenism and the constitution on the church, Lumen gentium...
...The legacy of Vatican II has not come with clarity or ease...
...After Vatican II ended, a rather cynical friend called its during the ongoing civil-rights struggles, the Vietnam War, student protests, the Soviet crackdowns in Eastern Europe, and the sexual revolution...
...Later, on the way back to my seat, it seemed to me the council fathers were taking quite a noisy break...
...First, on Mission Sunday that October, Paul VI canonized more than twenty young Ugandans who had been martyred...
...As another new cardinal, Federico Callori da Vignale, reportedly complained (while tossing his biretta onto his limousine seat): "Now they have made me more ridiculous than ever...
...personal encounters with fifteen cardinals...
...What I could not know at the time was that Meyer had just finished openly rebuking the doughty dean of the College of Cardinals, Eugene Tisserant, who had pulled off this maneuver...
...The great peritus, later cardinal, Yves Congar, OP, declared in the 1980s that the council's compromise solutions made Vatican II stop halfway...
...Aloysius Lugira, who was in Rome expressly for the occasion...
...One thing rang dear from the council as we young Catholics moved into the cultural clash of the later 1960s...
...Yet Paul VI refused to intervene...
...Although we had met on many occasions back home, that morning he gave me such a look of pained distraction that I ducked away...
...I wondered at his demeanor until I later learned that week and particular day (November 19,1964) were considered perhaps the worst of the council...
...To me, he resembled what I knew of my kindly uncle, a late archbishop of Chicago...
...Everyone had his or her heroes and demons, and no one knew for sure where the council was headed...
...First, there is the conflict between a theology of church as laity and bishops in a universal communion (as "the people of God"), and one that describes the church as a juridical hierarchy...
...Peter's...
...Lecturers were turning up all over Rome, and the flow of bishops at our college to share the latest gossip over dinner never stopped...
...Two things gave me an extra close-up...
...Let me give three examples of these debated theologies...
...I heard these refrains repeated throughout Pope Paul VI's twenty-minute Latin address opening the third session of Vatican II on September 14,1964.1 saw the enthusiasm down the length of St...
...Furthermore, Vatican II fully endorsed the principle of "not deciding questions still being debated among theologians...
...Second, by taking a risk that worked (whereby I got to know the chief engineer for Vatican Radio's transmitter), I figured out a more-or-less legitimate way to get into the private Vatican gardens and walk there whenever I wanted...
...was that protocol simply fell apart...
...his creation of twenty-seven new and, as it turned out, unruly cardinals...
...It happened just before Communion...
...I became part of weekly spin control as I read those notoriously uninforma-tive official reports from the council...
...I knew for sure the old regime was crumbling when Dante sneezed...
...Everything in my Catholic upbringing led me to open my heart and soul to the historic turning point that I would witness-and even take a tiny part in...
...It seemed to want to speak about everything, even in areas where it lacked expertise...
...What happened changes "transaccidentiation...
...That is because the Roman curia did all in its power to prevent some documents from reaching a vote, and in the meantime, the so-called progressive bishops kept sending the documents back to committee for revision...
...These two prelates spoke from opposite poles of the church...
...My point is that the tensions at the heart of the council not only were real, but that they have not been resolved...
...Imagine this: one afternoon I was ushering my friends around the pope's labyrinth of hedges when a black limousine pulled up...
...This gave the concil-iar documents a kind of buoyant vagueness...
...And no matter what Rome has said since then, the council documents showed there might be other ways to look at things...
...That vagueness also grew out of the way the council brokered deep differences by including conflicting language and theologies in its documents...
...Angel Anton, SJ, has noted that on the most controversial themes, the conciliar texts present a mosaic of interpolations from opposed parties, trying to satisfy sometimes wildly divergent theologies...
...It wanted to go beyond the traditional function of councils, that is, addressing matters of faith and discipline...
...I departed Rome after Paul VI's Mass on Pentecost in June 1965...
...Now I know why that conservative bishop was beaming...
...Peter's resound with throbbing drums, a sound that still shakes my bones as I recall it...
...The ceremony proclaimed the blossoming of the church in Africa, and Africans in exotic garb made St...
...He stepped back from the altar to fish for a handkerchief up his sleeve, but as he dusted his nose, the other new cardinals turned and began to circle the altar to take Communion...
Vol. 131 • December 2004 • No. 22
