7 Vatican II

7 Vatican II The purple, black and red procession of nearly 3000 mitred and coped bishops takes two hours to file into St Peter’s. They don’t come down from a mountain, actually. More likely they come down from the small hills of their dioceses, where they each feel they can hear what God has to say without much consultation about what He (Yes! ‘He’) is saying. The plain on which they gather at the foot of this particular Sinai—the dome of St Peter’s— is two long lines of twelve-tiered bleachers. When things settle after this momentous day, October 11, 1962, they will find themselves in numbered seats, ordered principally according to the date of their ordination as bishop. (That is a work of the Spirit that they will have to get used to after Vatican II. They are no longer ‘consecrated’ as bishops. They are ‘ordained’.) They will remember the number of their seats—say, 878, 791, 670, 630—for the four autumn sessions of the years, 1962 to 1965. In those seats, they belonged to a Church Alive! as it had never been in their spiritual lifetimes. They file into a Babel—Plymouth beside Pernambuco, Melbourne beside Madagascar, and Hiroshima beside Hobart. Yellow, black, brown and ruddy faces far outnumber white. They come from the extremes of the earth. Ironically, they will return to their homes confident that this Babel had been a Pentecost. They will go home knowing that their tongues, whether Swami or Tahitian, Aranda or Mandarin, are tongues of fire. They are tongues of a graced and inspirited human nature, finding expression of the Spirit’s work in diversity. But the miracle of this Pentecost will be that in the midst of this global glossolalia they will come to a common understanding of their living Church. The procession into St Peter’s ended with a rotund man seated uncomfortably in the sedia gestatoria , the pope-mobile of an earlier, more triumphalist Church. Twelve palafrenieri in red uniforms carried him aloft. This eighty-one year old man is Angelo Roncalli, Pope John XXIII. He is dressed up, as he said of himself, ‘like a Persian satrap’. He refuses to let them take him in the sedia gestatoria past the doors of St. Peter’s. There he descends. Then, in an eager shuffling sort of trot, he moves along the whole length of the bleachers. These 2908 bishops know from his face, his body movements, and his whole demeanour that here indeed is graced human nature, eccentric, ordinary, energised by love. 8 They know that, as he intones ‘ Veni Creator Spiritus’ —‘Come, Creator Spirit, Possess our souls’—and as they join him, that this occasion is more momentous than they had thought. As the bishops turned from the Mass that followed to the first procedures of their Council, they witnessed a gesture that would give them focus every morning of their four years of meetings. The Book of the Gospels was solemnly, prayerfully, enthroned before them. This first morning, the rite of that enthronement was Roman. But in the mornings that followed, all the rites would have their theatre. So the Word in His histories, and in the interpretive understandings of early witnesses, would be danced or sung or flourished down that long aisle between the bleachers. They would know, if they did not know already, that a sign to be sacramental, to effect what it signifies, is a thing of colour, of smell, of raw air, water and fire. If emptied, by rote or by rubric,of immediacy, it is dead. When John gave his opening address, the hours had been long, and the strain of listening to so much Latin a little overwhelming. For many, the magic of his words only came alive when they returned to them reflectively, or when they were dramatised for them by the media reports, or when they made history for themselves of that first day over dinner or in the innumerable small group meetings that began immediately. Many said that the Spirit worked on them not so much at St. Peter’s, but as they sat on the steps of their pensions and talked of their experiences, while Roman life bubbled around them in the cafes and shops, and in the talk over their heads from windows and balconies. They heard John say, they remarked to one another, things they themselves had thought but never dared to utter. Hope began when they read or heard others say something that they themselves were about to say. The winds of change blew more turbulently than the creative breath of the Spirit on those new beginnings. Three years after his election, John knew that he was caged in his papacy. He was given an insight into that even on this day of his triumph. Osservatore Romano , the official Vatican organ of information, threw, into the report of his speech, phrases he’d never spoken and de-radicalised his message. Nothing trivial could be changed, it seemed, because so many small people had so much invested in the status quo. No grand gesture could be made, because there was no audience free enough to see and understand. Those in control were always scrambling his means of communication. Those who had other meanings for his words were always filtering them. He himself had thought that 9 his most creative act as Peter’s heir had been to announce an ‘Ecumenical Council’. He used the word ‘ecumenical’ in its broadest sense. His Council would not just be of the Roman church, but as far as he could manage it, of all the baptised. Those who caged him in, the Curia and all the relics of Pius XII’s nineteen years’ reign, were surprised at his announcement but were confident that they could manage whatever the Council brought forward, and that John’s age would defeat him. They misjudged his intuitive insight into how the Spirit might work in a Church alive. John knew he had not much time. He would learn, almost as the Council began, that the cancer that had taken so many of his family had him in its grip. Expediency ruled. He urged the Curia, under the Secretary of the Holy Office, Cardinal Alfredo Ottaviani (1890-1979) to prepare the schema—the discursive documents for discussion—as quickly as possible. It would take three years, they said. ‘Do it in two’, he replied. John knew what Ottaviani’s personal motto was and meant. ‘ Semper Idem’ , ‘Always the Same’. The four documents, The Sources of Revelation, The Moral Order, The Deposit of Faith, and The Family were certainly semper idem . But John had one great insight that he knew to be infallibly true. The Spirit was a Spirit of freedom, and freedom was always revolutionary. John called his freedom movement, aggiornamento. Its usual translation, is ‘renewal’, ‘bringing up to date’, ‘growth’. But this doesn’t have the sparkle that was his meaning. A ‘refreshment’ maybe. A bracing plunge into cool spring water after some hot desert journey. Or if John had read Emile Durkheim—maybe he did—an ‘effervescence’, a bubbling up of life, a Pentecostal happening. That there was life to bubble up, John knew quite well, just as he knew, as pope in the Vatican, he had been cut off from it. The Church alive was blessed with as brilliant an array of scholars and thinkers as had ever been together since the high middle ages. It is a litany of brilliance—Gregory Baum, Yves Congar, Joseph Gelineau, Bernard Häring, Josef Jungmann, Hans Küng, Henri de Lubac, John Courtney Murray, Gerard Philips, Edward Schillebeeckx, Karl Rahner, Teilhard de Chardin, Jean- Marie Tillard, and Hans Urs von Balthasar. Their knowledge and wisdom had seeded every seminary and Catholic university, every theological, liturgical, ecumenical, catechetic, moral, social justice, sacred music, literary and artistic movement of the Church. The 2908 bishops knew where that life was and would bring it here to Rome. 10 The bishops would bring their pastoral experience to Rome, too—of horrendous violence, of the disappearance of faith, of sacrament and sign inextricably mixed with colonising power, of poor ravaged by church and state, of devotions decaying into magic. They knew of dead liturgies, scandal, the inability to confront the word’s evil with anything but an empty morality by the reduction of sin, in the Church’s eyes, to the bedroom. The Spirit is always at work, but not always marvellously. Rather, in minute, ordinary ways. In fact, some of the Council Fathers’, as they began to be called, thought the first inspiration occurred when the Cardinal Archbishop of Sydney, Norman Gilroy, no theological giant, rang his bell and called ‘ Satis’ , ‘Enough’ to a speaker who had overrun his allotted ten minutes. Many ‘interventions’, as speeches were called, became much more focussed after that, and occasionally some colossus was cut down. There was something, however, that was counted marvellous, even miraculous. It was a procedural motion by the blind archbishop of Cologne, Cardinal Joseph Frings (1887-1978). The Council itself, he recommended, should control the agenda of the Council, not the Curia, not those who had made the original schema. Let the bishops meet in their regional and linguistic clusters to discuss issues and educate themselves through the hundreds of experts who had come from afar or were in the various institutions of Rome. He was a hero for that, as was Bishop Emile-Joseph de Smedt of Bruges, who denounced the schema presented by the Curia as near sinful—with the sins of triumphalism, juridicism and clericalism.

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