Vatican II, Part 4: The Third Session

The Third Session Opens

           The Third Session of the Council opened with a concelebrated Mass:  the first.  Pope Paul VI stood with twenty-four of the Council Fathers around the altar of St. Peter’s Basilica in a powerful sign of collegiality.  The altar had to be enlarged to allow all of them to stand around it together—a symbolic and very appropriate beginning for this Third Session, in which the Council itself would experience significant growing pains as the Fathers fought hard to stretch the Church in new directions.

          The Third Session was both highly productive and highly contentious.  The proceedings were even more fast-paced and streamlined than in the Second Session.  Women auditors were admitted to the aula for the first time.  But the rift between progressive majority and Curia-driven, conservative minority widened dramatically.  That minority—fond of calling themselves the “remnant of Israel”—was praying hard, it was said, for the Holy Spirit’s intervention in the Council.  When he was told this, Pope Paul VI exclaimed, “But the Holy Spirit has intervened.  He inspired Pope John to summon the Council and He has given us the courage to carry out the directives of the divine will.”  In spite of his own progressive leanings, Pope Paul VI found himself caught between two groups of well-intentioned, holy men who were utterly at odds with each other.  “He cannot bear the thought that minority and majority should remain permanently unreconciled,” wrote Xavier Rynne in 1964.  “Appreciating the merits of both sides so well, he finds all bitter-end resistance unthinkable and abhorrent.”  Paul's responses to this dilemma in the Third Session would earn him the nickname “The Pope of ‘Buts,’” and frequent comparisons to the Prince of Denmark.  The Holy Spirit was still hard at work in the Council:  but the Third Session also revealed all the weaknesses of the institution, with behind-the-scenes machinations by the minority, offensives by the majority, last-minute appeals to higher authority, and the beleaguered Pope Paul VI playing the role of deus ex machina.

 The Challenges of the Third Session

           “The interest of the world at large,” reported the Progress shortly before the Third Session began, “centers chiefly on… [the] statement on religious liberty…. widely regarded as the keystone of Catholic ecumenism.”

          Why was religious liberty so controversial?  We take it for granted that people should be free to worship as they choose without interference—or special favor—from their governments.  But the “classical Catholic position… claimed preferential treatment of the Catholic Church by the state while according only tolerance to other religions…. this was a terribly burdensome anachronism for progressives,” who demanded that the Council proclaim “the Church’s total commitment to complete religious liberty” (Bokenkotter).  An American theologian—the great Jesuit John Courtney Murray—had been instrumental in the formation of the Catholic expression of religious liberty and in the drafting of the schema under consideration at the Council. 

Archbishop Connolly did not attend the third session.  He stayed in Seattle to oversee the implementation of liturgical renewal in the Archdiocese of Seattle and to celebrate the silver jubilee of his episcopal ordination.  Read more about Seattle's reaction to the new liturgy by clicking here.

          But the conservative minority was, as usual, loud in its condemnation.  “The declaration should be entitled ‘On Religious Tolerance,’ not ‘Liberty,’” said Cardinal Ruffini, “because those in error have no rights.”  And Archbishop Felici, the General Secretary of the Council, did not hesitate to use his position to influence the proceedings in favor of the minority.  It was suddenly announced that the document on Religious Liberty would be handed to a new commission for revision—a commission that included some of the most moss-backed of the moss-backed conservatives (to borrow a phrase from Archbishop Connolly!), including Archbishop Lefebvre, who later established the schismatic Society of St. Pius X.

          A group of Cardinals immediately wrote to Pope Paul, a letter beginning with the words “magno cum dolore,” a phrase which became associated with the whole Third Session.  “With great sorrow we have learned that the declaration on religious liberty, although in accord with the desire of the great majority of the Fathers, is to be entrusted to a certain mixed commission…. This news is for us a source of extreme anxiety.”  Not only the Council Fathers, they said, but the whole world, was waiting for this document; official hesitation on this subject could significantly set back the ecumenical movement.  They urged the Holy Father to order that the document be treated according to the rules of the Council.

          Paul VI, perturbed, agreed, and the document was sent to a mixed commission for revision, with a promise that it would be returned to the Council Fathers for a vote before the end of the session.  But on November 19, two days before the end of the Third Session, it was suddenly announced that there was no time for the vote on the Decree on Religious Liberty, which would be postponed until the Fourth Session.  Uproar in the Council Hall!  Cardinal Meyer, who was seated at the front with the other Cardinal Moderators, got up and walked around the table to argue with Cardinal Tisserant, who had read the announcement.  Everywhere the Fathers were on their feet, loudly protesting the arbitrary change.  Within minutes someone had begun a petition to the Holy Father, and hundreds of names were collected; but this time Paul VI did not intervene.

 Collegiality Again

           That was not the only the disappointment of the Third Session.  When the Constitution on the Church, which included the hard-won notion of collegiality, came before the Fathers for the final vote, they found that the document had acquired an appendix full of juridical language and italics, quite different from the rest of the document:  “It is the unmistakable teaching of tradition, including liturgical tradition, that an ontological share in the sacred functions is given by consecration.  The word function is deliberately used in preference to powers which can have the sense of power ordered to action…. the Roman Pontiff undertakes the regulation, encouragement, and approval of the exercise of collegiality as he sees fit, having regard to the Church’s good.”  Translated out of Vaticanese, the appendix stated that collegiality was just another facet of papal power.  The whole issue had been stripped of its controversy, and its impact.

          The appendix, it was soon discovered, was a concession on Pope Paul VI’s part to the minority, and it achieved its desired effect:  the final vote on the Constitution was nearly unanimous.  But as Xavier Rynne points out, “in his extreme anxiety to conciliate an unimportant minority, Pope Paul seems to have forgotten that he might be doing less than justice to the majority.”

          The Third Session concluded in an atmosphere of gloom.  “Pope Paul was carried into the basilica on Saturday morning, November 21, for the closing public session, through tiers of stony-faced bishops in white mitres and copes.  There was no applause.  He himself looked glum and tense” (Rynne).  But in his address Paul assured those gathered that in the fourth session the schema on religious liberty would be discussed first, and that it would “crown the work of the Council.”  He concluded with a heartfelt address to Mary, whom he proclaimed Mother of the Church, and to whom he commended the cause of Christian unity:  “O Virgin Mary, Mother of the Church, to you we recommend the entire Church and our Ecumenical Council….  intercede with your only Son, mediator of our reconciliation with the Father, that he may have mercy on our shortcomings and dispel any difference between us, giving us the joy of loving.”

          In spite of all that had happened during the Third Session, Father John Sheerin could write in his syndicated column at the end of November, 1964, “Today it almost seems that you can reach out and touch the Holy Spirit at work.  One would have to be awfully obtuse to deny his presence.  It is in a very true sense the age of the Holy Spirit…. In these exciting days, the Spirit is no longer whispering his inspirations.  He is working so obviously and calling so loudly that the devout can honestly say, ‘It’s a great time for a Christian to be alive.’”

 Words from the Council Floor

 The documents of the Second Vatican Council were shaped by the powerful words uttered on the Council floor.  Here is a sampling of statements from the debates of the fast-paced Third Session of the Council:

 ON CHURCH LAWS  Bishop La Ravoire Morrow of India said, “How can the men and women of our time understand that God is good if we continue to teach them that those who do not abstain on Fridays go to hell?  They do not see any proportion between the Church’s precepts and God’s commandments.  How can eating meat on Friday deserve the same punishment as committing adultery or murder?  This causes the moral sense of people to become blunted and ecclesiastical authority to be despised….  No precept should be imposed lightly under pain of mortal sin.  Religion is not fear, but love.” 

 ON RACIAL DISCRIMINATION  “It is a scandal to see parishes deserted whenever Negro families move in,” said Bishop Grutka of Gary, Indiana.  “The Council must proclaim the absolute opposition of the Church to all forms of racial discrimination.”

 ON THE LAITY   Archbishop Heenan of Westminster urged the formation of an official Vatican Secretariat for the Laity, and he further urged that “we do not want to send to Rome only old gentlemen who are loaded down with ecclesiastical honors.  We must also choose some of our young men and women who have to earn their daily bread.”

 ON BIRTH CONTROL  “I beg of you, my brother bishops, let us avoid a new Galileo affair.  One is enough for the Church,” said Cardinal Suenens.  “The problem confronts us not because the faithful try to satisfy their passions and their egotism, but because thousands of them try with anguish to live in double fidelity, to the doctrine of the Church and to the demands of conjugal and parental love.”

 ON WORLD POVERTY  James Norris, an American lay auditor, was invited to address the Council during the debate on the Church in the modern world.  He rose to the challenge, speaking in flawless Latin.  “The gap between the rich and the poor is rapidly widening—side by side the rich grow richer and the poor grow poorer, in a single world community.  This is a wholly unprecedented historical fact, and it presents the Christian conscience of the western nations with a challenge…. From this Ecumenical Council could come a clarion call for action.”

 ON RELIGIOUS  “Schema non placet,” announced Cardinal Suenens, “The draft does not please me.  We should give up the habit of treating nuns as minors, an attitude so typical of the nineteenth century, which is still found in many religious congregations today…. Let us abandon these customs which perpetuate a feeling of inferiority among women religious.”    

Corinna Laughlin
Pastoral Assistant for Liturgy

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