by Eamon Duffy
The pope himself retired into ever more remote isolation. Giovanni Battista Montini, one of his two closest assistants during the war, and widely tipped as the next pope, fell under suspicion of holding dangerously liberal sympathies. A sensitive, warm, and highly intelligent man, Montini, though himself impeccably loyal and sharing something of Pius XII’s mystically exalted view of the papacy, sympathized with the new theology and disliked the reactionary ethos which Pius had let loose. In an age when Vatican attitudes to other churches were characterized by hostility or dismissiveness, he was an ecumenist, cultivating friends among Anglicans and Protestants, seeking to make and maintain contacts in other churches. He did what he could to protect potential victims of the new ultra-orthodoxy, and even rescued stocks of condemned books by the French Jesuit Henri de Lubac. He had especially close links with the Church in France, and sympathized with the Worker-Priest experiment. He strongly disapproved of the Vatican-backed political alliance between Christian Democracy and neo-Fascists.
In 1954 the inevitable happened. The pope’s mind was poisoned against Montini by a whispering campaign, and he was dismissed from his Vatican post, and kicked upstairs to be Archbishop of Milan. This post invariably carried with it a cardinal’s hat, but Pius XII, who had last held a consistory to name new cardinals in 1953 never held another. Whether or not the withholding of the Red Hat was a deliberate rebuke, Montini, who would increasingly be seen as the inevitable choice as next pope, was in fact excluded from the succession.
Surrounded now by ultra-conservative advisers, his privacy jealously guarded by his German nun-housekeeper, the dragon-like Sister Pasqualina, Pius XII retreated into a suffocating atmosphere of exalted piety exacerbated by hypochondria. His health, always a subject of acute anxiety to himself, visibly deteriorated. A quack remedy designed to prevent softening of his gums tanned and hardened his soft-palate and gullet: he developed a permanent uncontrollable hiccup. As he weakened, his doctor tried to keep him alive with injections of pulverized tissue taken from slaughtered lambs. Rumours of visions of the Virgin and participations in the sufferings of Christ granted to him circulated. He cultivated his role as Vatican oracle. Teaching gushed from him, unstoppable, a speech a day. Since the pope was the Church’s hotline to God, everything he had to say must be of interest. Pius himself came to believe that he had something valuable to contribute on every subject, no matter how specialized. He lived surrounded by encyclopedias and monographs, swotting up for the next utterance. Midwives would get an update on the latest gynocological techniques, astronomers were lectured on sun-spots. One of his staff recalled finding him surrounded by a new mountain of books in the summer of 1958. ‘All those books are about gas,’ Pius told him – he was due to address a congress of the gas industry in September. The notion of pope as universal teacher was getting out of hand.
IV THE AGE OF VATICAN II
Pius XII died on 10 October 1958. As always at the end of a long pontificate, the conclave that met two weeks later to replace him was deeply divided between an old guard committed to continuing and extending Pacelli’s policies, and a group of younger cardinals disillusioned by the sterility, repression and personality cult of the last years of Pius XII’s regime. The ‘youth’ of these men was relative. Pius XII had held only two consistories during his long pontificate, and although for the first time Italian cardinals were outnumbered almost two-to-one, nearly half the Sacred College were in their late seventies or eighties. The ideal pope of those who hoped for change, however, was Archbishop Montini, electable in theory, even though he was not a cardinal, (he got two votes during the Conclave) but in practice ruled out by his absence. Deadlocked, the cardinals looked around for an interim, seat-warming pope. Their choice fell on the fat seventy-seven year old Patriarch of Venice, Angelo Roncalli, a genial Vatican diplomat who had been made Patriarch as a retirement job, with a reputation for peaceable holiness and pastoral warmth, and who clearly did not have long to live. He was too elderly to rock any boats, and everyone believed that a few years of King Log inactivity would give the Church time to take stock before choosing a younger and more vigorous man to set the Church’s agenda for the second half of the century. Human calculation has seldom been more spectacularly mistaken.
Roncalli, even more than Pius X, was a peasant pope, the son of poor farming people from Bergamo who shared the ground floor of their house with their six cows. He had spent an entire life in the papal diplomatic service, mostly in obscure posts, in wartime Bulgaria and Turkey. In the process he had come to know a good deal about the Eastern churches, about Islam, about the non-Christian world of the twentieth century. A keen student of Church history, he had a special interest in the career of San Carlo Borromeo, the great sixteenth-century Archbishop of Milan, and he arranged his coronation as pope for San Carlo’s feast day. Antiquarian interests of this sort seemed harmless enough; no one noticed that what he valued about San Carlo was the fact that he was above all things a pastoral bishop, translating into action the reforming programme of an Ecumenical Council – the Council of Trent.
John himself was certainly no radical: his own theology and piety were utterly traditional. As Nuncio in France, during the early stages of the troubles over the Worker Priest experiment, he showed some sympathy but little real understanding of the issues, and as pope he was to renew Pius XII’s condemnation of the movement. He was also to issue an encyclical demanding the retention of Latin as the language of instruction in seminaries. Yet under the stuffy opinions was a great human heart. He had managed to live a long life in the papal service without making any enemies, winning the affection and trust of everyone he came in contact, Catholic and non-Catholic, Christian and non-Christian. As pope, he took the name John partly because it was his father’s name, and that human gesture set at once the keynote of his pontificate, his transparent goodness and loveableness. After the arctic and self-conscious sanctities of Pius’ reign, the world awoke to find a kindly, laughing old man on the throne of Peter, who knew the modern world, and was not afraid of it. In part, it was because he had the freedom of an old man. Announcing his name, he had jokingly pointed out to the cardinals that there had been more popes called John than any other name, and that most of them had had short reigns.
He was unconventional: he hated the white skull-cap popes wear, which would not stay on his bald scalp, so he reinvented and wore with aplomb the red and ermine cap seen in portraits of Renaissance popes. He cut through papal protocol, and was a security nightmare, sallying out of the Vatican to visit the Roman prisons or hospitals. Disapproving of Marxism, he welcomed Communists as brothers and sisters, and was visited in the Vatican by the daughter and son-in-law of the Russian Premier, Nikita Khrushchev. He sent stamps and coins for Khrushchev’s grandchildren and asked their mother to give a special embrace to the youngest, Ivan, because that was the Russian form of John. Under the warmth of his overflowing humanity the barriers which had been constructed between Church and world melted away.
And the personal warmth was matched by a willingness to rethink old issues. His first encyclical, Mater et Magistra, published in 1961, broke with Vatican suspicion of lurking socialism by welcoming the advent of the caring state, and it insisted on the obligation of wealthy nations to help poorer ones. The CIA thought the pope gave comfort to Communists. His last encyclical, Pacem in Terris, published on Maundy Thursday 1963 was characteristically addressed not to the bishops of the Church but ‘to all men of good will.’ It welcomed as representative of ‘our modern age’ the progressive improvement of conditions for working people, the involvement of women in political life, and the decline of imperialism and growth of national self-determination. All these were signs of a growing liberation. He declared the right of every human being to the private and public profession of their religion, a break with the systematic denial of that right by popes since Gregory XVI. Above all, he abandoned the anti-Communist rhetoric of the Cold War. He denounced as ‘utterly irrational’ the nuclear arms-race,
declaring that war in an atomic age was no longer ‘a fit instrument with which to repair the violation of justice,’ as near as a pope could get to repudiating the value of just war theory in a world of nuclear weapons. Even the Russians were impressed, and the Italian Marxist film director, Pier Paolo Pasolini, dedicated his masterpiece, the film The Gospel According to St Matthew, to Pope John.
One of the earliest acts of the new pope was to make Archbishop Montini a cardinal, the first of his reign. It was a clear signal that a new regime had arrived, that there would be no more of Pacelli’s later policies. Then, staggeringly, less than three months after his election, on 25 January 1959, John announced the calling of a General Council. King Log was going to disturb the pond after all.
There had in fact been some discussion of a Council under Pius XII. What had been imagined, however, was a continuation of the First Vatican Council, a docile assembly which would denounce secularism and Communism, compile a new list of heresies in the spirit of the Syllabus of Errors, wipe the floor with the Ecumenical Movement, and perhaps define infallibly the doctrine that Mary was the Mediatrix of all Graces, a favourite belief of Pius XII which would have further alienated the Protestant and Orthodox churches. John, however, had different ideas. He conceived his Council not as one of defiance and opposition to the world and the other churches, but as a source of pastoral renewal and of reconciliation between Christians, and with the wider world. It was time, in his words, for aggiornamento, bringing up to date, a word that to conservative ears sounded suspiciously like Modernism.
Recent studies of the origins of the Council have made clear just how opposed to it the Vatican old guard were. The whole drift of Pacelli’s pontificate had been to subordinate the local churches and their bishops to the papal central administration, the Curia. The thought of assembling the world’s three thousand bishops and letting them talk to each other, and maybe even have new ideas, was horrifying. It was suggested, apparently seriously, that there was no need for the bishops to gather in Rome at all, but that copies of papally approved ‘Conciliar’ documents should be posted to them for assent. Another Vatican adviser even suggested that no one but the pope should be allowed to speak during the Council. Even Cardinal Montini, exiled in Milan, was alarmed: he told a friend that ‘this holy old boy doesn’t realize what a hornet’s nest he’s stirring up’.29
Vatican officials did what they could to block the preparations, and when it became clear that they could not prevent the Council going ahead, tried to hi-jack its proceedings, to stack the preparatory committees, determine the agenda, and draft the Conciliar documents. At the Holy Office, Cardinal Ottaviani refused all cooperation with other bodies, insisting that doctrine was his department’s sole responsibility, and ‘we are going to remain masters in our own house.’ Lists of doctrines to be condemned mounted up, and seventy-two draft schema were prepared, all of them destined to be rejected by the Council. Theologically they were firmly rooted in the integralism of the last hundred years. The draft declaration of faith drawn up for the Council contained no scriptural citations whatever, reiterated the condemnations contained in Pascendi and Humani Generis, and quoted no theological text earlier than the Council of Trent.
John’s determination that this should be a pastoral Council devoted to opening up the Church, not to barricading it in, was absolutely vital, strengthening bishops to reject the prepared texts and to demand a real voice in the deliberations of the Council. Without his encouragement, the Council would have become a rubber stamp for the most negative aspects of Pius XII’s regime. It was his personal insistence that the Council was not to be a Council against the modern world. There were to be no condemnations or excommunications. Yet he himself had no clear agenda, and there was a desperate danger that lack of clear guidance from the pope would either lead to a demoralising lack of achievement, or allow the direction of the Council to fall into the hands of curial officials opposed to the very notion of a Council.
For guidance John turned to Cardinal Montini, and the Belgian Cardinal Suenens. They saw that the Council must centre on the nature and role of the Church, that it must be ecumenical in character, must present a pastoral not a bureaucratic vision, that it must renew the liturgy and restore the notion of Collegiality in the Church, that is, the shared responsibility of the bishops with the pope, no longer an isolated papal monarchy. It must also engage with the relationship of the Church to society at every level, freedom of conscience, peace and war, the relationship of Church and State, the world of work and industrial society, questions of justice and economics. All these issues had preoccupied popes since the mid-nineteenth century, but always in a spirit of confrontation and suspicion. The time had come for the Church to consider all these issues afresh, in the confidence of faith and with a discerning eye for what Pope John called ‘the signs of the times’.
The pope’s inaugural address at the Council, Gaudet Mater Ecclesia, contrasted strikingly with most papal utterances since the 1830s. For over a century the popes had confronted the modern world in the spirit of Jeremiah, as a place of mourning and lamentation and woe. John urged a different spirit, and challenged the ‘prophets of misfortune’ who saw the world as ‘nothing but betrayal and ruination’. The Church had indeed to keep the faith, but not to ‘hoard this precious treasure’. The Church could and should to adapt itself to the needs of the world. There was to be no more clinging to old ways and old words simply out of fear: it was time for ‘a leap forward’ which would hold on to the ancient faith, but re-clothe it in words and ways which would speak afresh to a world hungry for the gospel: ‘for the substance of the ancient deposit of faith is one thing, and the way in which it is presented is another’.30
From the perspective of the twenty-first century, there seems about John’s rhetoric a note of over-optimism, a confidence in progress which was a characteristic of the 1960s. He spoke confidently and perhaps naively of Providence guiding humanity towards ‘a new order of human relationships,’ which the years since have not delivered. It was his language about the possibility of the recasting the substance of Catholic teaching in new forms, however, that alarmed conservative forces in the Church. This was the language of Modernism, and there were many who believed that they now had a Modernist pope. When the Latin text of his speech was published, it had been heavily censored to remove any hint that the teaching of the Church might change, and recast in words borrowed from the anti-modernist oath.
John lived to inaugurate his Council, but not to guide or conclude it. While battles raged between the forces of conservatism and reform within the Council, his life ebbed away in cancer. He had reigned for only five years, the shortest pontificate for two centuries, yet he had transformed the Catholic Church, and with it the world’s perception of the papacy. When he died on 3 June 1963 the progress of his last illness was followed by millions of anxious people across the world, and throughout his last hours St Peter’s square was thronged with mourners for this, the most beloved pope in human history.
The Council he had called, with no very clear notion of what it might do, proved to be the most revolutionary Christian event since the Reformation. Despite the divided state of Christendom, it was, geographically at least, the most catholic Council in the history of the Church: 2,800 bishops attended, fewer than half of them from Europe. Orthodox and Protestant observers attended the sessions, and substantially influenced the proceedings. The monolithic intransigence which had been the public face of the Catholic Church since 1870 proved astonishingly fragile, and over the four sessions of the Council, between 11 October 1962 and 8 December 1965, every aspect of the Church’s life was scrutinized and transformed. As at Vatican I, the Council rapidly polarized (with the help of sensational media coverage), but this time the intransigent group with curial backing were in a minority, and one by one, often with considerable bitterness, the curial draft documents were swept aside, and replaced with radically different texts, more open to the needs of the modern world, and more res
ponsive to pastoral realities. By a supreme irony, the most influential theologians at the Council were men like Yves Congar and Karl Rahner who had been silenced or condemned under Pius XII, and their ideas shaped many of the crucial Conciliar decrees.
The central document of the Council was the Decree on the Church, Lumen Gentium. It moved far beyond the teaching of Mystici Corporis, abandoning the defensive juridical understanding of the Church which had dominated Catholic thought since the Conciliar movement, and placing at the centre of its teaching the notion of the People of God, embracing both clergy and laity. This concept moved understanding of the nature of the Church out of rigidly hierarchic categories, and enabled a radical and far more positive reassessment of the role of lay people in the life of the Church. The decree also moved beyond Mystici Corporis and all previous Roman Catholic teaching by refusing to identify the Roman Catholic Church with the Church of Christ, stating instead that the Church of Christ ‘subsisted in’ the Roman Catholic Church, and not that it simply ‘was’ the Roman Catholic Church. This apparently fine distinction opened the way to the recognition of the spiritual reality of other churches and their sacraments and ministries. The decree’s use of the image of the ‘pilgrim people of God’ also opened the way to a new recognition of the imperfections and reformability of the Church and its structures. In one of its most crucial and contested chapters, the Decree sought to correct – or at any rate complete – the teaching of Vatican I on papal primacy and the episcopate, by emphasizing the doctrine of Collegiality, and placing the pope’s primacy in the context of the shared responsibility of all the bishops for the Church.31
