January 25, 2009 marked the 50th anniversary of the announcement of the Second Vatican Council by Pope John XXIII. This is the second in an ongoing series in our parish newsletter on the Council. Read the first in the series here.
Pope John XXIII announced the Council in January of 1959.
He hoped that the Council would begin within two years, but the
slow-moving Vatican bureaucracy was dragging its feet. It was
nearly a year before the Preparatory Commission sought the input of the
bishops of the world, and it was another year before the responses were
tabulated. It was not until Christmas Day, 1961, that the agenda
of the Council began to take shape. And it was clear that it would
be wide-ranging, touching on almost every aspect of the Church’s life:
“Pope John indicated that the council will consider problems relating to
Holy Scripture, to tradition, the sacraments, prayer, ecclesiastical
discipline, charitable and relief activities, the lay apostolate and the
missions. He said that the council must also consider problems of the
temporal order as well.” (The Catholic Northwest Progress)
Once the major topics of discussion had been settled, various committees were entrusted with the task of creating schemata, or draft documents, which would summarize the issues and provide a basis for discussion. In the summer of 1962, just a few months before the Council would open, only 7 of the 70 proposed schemata were ready to send to the world’s bishops for review. The Pope was understandably frustrated. When a visitor asked him, “How many people work at the Vatican, your Holiness?” John swiftly replied, “about half.” (Thomas Cahill, Pope John XXIII)
Meanwhile, Pope John XXIII also prepared for the Council in a much more
significant way: by prayer. Again and again he urged the world to pray
for the success of the Council. Early in 1962, he asked the priests of
the world to dedicate their daily recitation of the breviary (the
Liturgy of the Hours) to the success of the Council. And he asked
Catholics everywhere to join in a solemn novena of prayer and penance,
beginning October 2, “to invoke the blessings of divine grace on the
Fathers of the council.” He gave the priests of the world special
faculties to offer Masses during the night so that all over the world,
at the moment of the Council’s opening in Rome, the faithful would be
raising a “great crescendo of prayer” for its success (Progress).
On October 4, one week before the Council opened, John himself made a
pilgrimage of prayer (the first time a Pope had gone outside of Rome in
living memory), visiting Loreto and Assisi. At these shrines, he
entrusted the Council into the eminently capable hands of the Blessed
Virgin Mary and the great St. Francis of Assisi. Pope John already
knew that he would not see the end of the great work he had begun. On
September 23, 1962, less than three weeks before the Council opened, he
had been diagnosed with inoperable stomach cancer. He had less than a
year to live.
This facsimile from the Catholic
Northwest Progress shows the immense procession of bishops |
The Council opened on October 11, 1962, with a grand procession and ceremonial that lasted more than five hours. Those who were present could only speak in superlatives. “That I should live to see a day such as this!” exclaimed Seattle’s Archbishop Connolly, in the account he wired home that evening. “How good is the good God.” A week later he was still talking about it: “Mere words, even the gigantic, colossal, stupendous of Hollywood usage are so inadequate to describe the scene and the experience itself.” Even normally staid journalists were shaken into awe by the proceedings: “The magnificent splendor of the procession and the Mass, the great line of Council Fathers wending their way into the Basilica is a precious memory that will live with me to the end of my days on earth,” wrote Bob Jackson for the Progress.
The bishops gathered in the Hall of Inscriptions at 7:30am, where local priests had the task of getting the thousands of prelates into place. All along the great hall cubbies had been constructed so that each bishop had a place to leave his hat and coat. The procession did not begin until 8:30am, so the bishops had time for some “informal chatting,” as Archbishop Connolly reported, “in English where possible, and in Latin where necessary.”
It took a full hour for the immense procession to enter the Basilica. The bishops walked six abreast through St. Peter’s Square, right through the crowd of 500,000 who had gathered to be part of this historic moment. The incredible diversity of the Church was suddenly apparent to all eyes: the bishops represented every race and almost every nation on earth. “Every now and then, this white mass was dotted with the black cassock, full beard, and cylindrical headdress of an oriental bishop, and here and there with the bulbous gold crown and crossed pectoral reliquaries of a bishop of the Byzantine rite” (Rynne). After the bishops came the “scarlet ranks” of the Cardinals, and finally Pope John XXIII himself, carried on the sedia gestatoria by sixteen Papal guards.
Once inside the Basilica, the Holy Father stepped down from his throne and intoned Veni, Creator Spiritus, and all sang the ancient hymn together, praying for the Holy Spirit’s guidance. Mass was said; the Gospel was proclaimed not only in Latin but in Greek as well, as a sign of the unity of East and West; and the Litany of Saints was chanted. Then Pope John XXIII delivered his address for the occasion.
“Mother Church rejoices,” the Pope began, “because, by a singular gift of divine providence, the desired day has finally dawned…. the Second Vatican Ecumenical Council is being solemnly opened here beside St. Peter’s tomb.” The Holy Father looked to the glories of the past, the authority and dignity of the Church through the ages—familiar and comfortable territory for his listeners. But then he spoke of the present day. And in spite of all that was happening in the world, he spoke with hope and confidence:
"In
the daily exercise of our pastoral office, sometimes (much to our
regret) we have to listen to people who… can see nothing but calamities
and ruin in these modern times. Comparing our era with previous
centuries, they say that we are becoming worse. By their actions they
show that they have learned nothing from history, which is the teacher
of life…. We feel that we must disagree with these prophets of gloom who
are always forecasting disaster, as if the end of the world were
imminent. In the present day, Divine Providence is leading us to a new
order of human relations. By man’s own efforts, and beyond the greatest
expectation, we are being directed towards the fulfillment of God’s
higher and inscrutable designs.”
After his address, the Holy Father reascended the sedia and was carried
out of the Basilica. The Pope would not re-join the Council Fathers
until December 7, just before the Council closed.
The next day, with Pope John’s challenge still ringing in their ears,
the Fathers went to work. While the deliberations of each day were
supposed to be secret—no journalists or laypeople being allowed inside
the Basilica—somehow each day’s happenings were reported in great detail
in the world press. The journalists joked, “why the great conciliar
secrecy? Because secrets spread faster!” (Rynne)
As important as the discussions of the Council Fathers were, they could
not always be described as interesting. Everything was in Latin. With
more than two thousand Council Fathers present at any given session, it
was of course impossible for there to be spontaneous discussion of the
issues. Instead, those who wished to speak had to submit their address
in writing ahead of time, and any straying from the text was frowned
upon. The Fathers were not to speak more than ten minutes, nor were they
to repeat what had already been said. But as Archbishop Connolly
observed, such rules were “more honored in the breach than the
observance. The presiding cardinal for the day hesitates to cut a
speaker short for, as a democratic assembly, every bishop has the right
to talk and that right is regarded as sacred. So, we suffer in silence.”
Though Latin was supposed to be the universal language of the Church,
the Fathers soon discovered that they could not easily understand the
language as it was pronounced by their brothers from other nations. The
American bishops came under particular fire in this regard!
 May we quote your no comment? From the Progress, 1962 |
During the first week of meetings, many technical matters were clarified, and commissions formed. On October 22, the proceedings began in earnest with the debate on the schema on the liturgy.
Why did the discussion begin with the liturgy? In his 1998 memoir, Pope Benedict XVI (who served as a peritus or expert at the Council) explains: “The fact that this text became the first subject for the Council’s discussions really had nothing to do with the majority of the Fathers having an intense interest in the liturgical question. Quite simply, no great disagreements were expected in this area, and the undertaking was viewed as a kind of practical exercise to learn and test the method of conciliar work.” Catholics today tend to think of the Council as primarily a liturgical revolution—”Oh, that was when they started saying Mass in English.” But in fact, the liturgical renewal had begun many years before, under two of the century’s most “conservative” Popes—Pius X and Pius XII. By 1962, the momentum for renewal was already strong.
The liturgy was, therefore, a ‘safe’ subject for discussion. But that
did not mean that everyone agreed. There was much debate about
Latin—would unity be sacrificed if the liturgy was celebrated in the
vernacular?—about the possibility of communion under both kinds (hygiene
was the principal concern), and about concelebration (were ten separate
masses better than one mass at which ten priests concelebrated?). The
presentations made by the various Council Fathers ranged from the
sublime to the ridiculous to the merely tedious; and they dragged on to
the point that John XXIII (who, though he was not present in the Council
Hall, was watching the proceedings on closed-circuit television) had to
intervene. He created a new rule allowing the presiding cardinal to call
for a vote to end a given discussion. There was general applause when
the interminable discussion on Chapter 2 of the liturgy schema finally
ended!
The Council Fathers also confronted more controversial issues during
this first session. The schema they had been given on the subject of
divine revelation was highly traditionalist. Cardinal Liénart of Lille,
France, voted to reject the draft outright—”we should be thinking more
along the lines of our separated brothers,” he declared, “who have such
a love and veneration for the Word of God.” The majority of the Fathers
agreed, and to the chagrin of those who had prepared the original draft,
a new commission was formed to prepare a fresh document which would be
more expressive of the Council’s views.
Much the same thing happened to the highly-anticipated document on the
Church, which all knew would be among the most important works to come
out of the Council. Bishop de Smedt of Bruges, Belgium, spoke for many
of the Council Fathers when he rejected the draft outright, exclaiming,
“no mother ever spoke thus!” (Rynne). The draft equated the Church with
the hierarchy of the Roman Church. The Church, said Bishop de Smedt,
could not be equated with the hierarchy—the Church was the People of
God, the Mystical Body of Christ. And so this draft was also sent back
for revision.
A document on relations with the Orthodox was similarly rejected; in
fact only the liturgy document and the short document dealing with the
communications media—TV, film, and radio—were passed, though each with
substantial revisions.
In the midst of these debates, life outside the Council went on. Pope
John XXIII, in the midst of serious health problems, spoke out on behalf
of peace as the Cuban missile crisis escalated in an already precarious
world situation. The Bishops from the Pacific Northwest had time to feel
homesick on a grey rainy morning in Rome, “a typical Portland day,” as
Archbishop Connolly described it, and they were even more nostalgic on
Thanksgiving Day, when they shared Rome’s version of an American
Thanksgiving dinner at their hotel.
 Northwest bishops at the Second Vatican Council: Bernard Topel, Spokane; Archbishop Connolly; Raymond Hunthausen, Helena; and Sylvester Treinen, Boise. |
When the First Session of the Council concluded on December 8, 1962, after sixty days of work, no document had been promulgated, no official change had come about. The proceedings had been slow in starting, and the debates had sometimes been agonizingly tedious. But the smiles and the consistent enthusiasm of Pope John XXIII restored the confidence of those who felt discouraged. It was all for the good, the Holy Father said in his closing address. “The first session was like a slow and solemn introduction to the great work of the Council,” said the Pope, and the time had not been wasted. “Brothers gathered from afar took time to get to know each other; they needed to look each other in the eyes in order to understand each other’s heart.” For Pope John XXIII, the Council was still a tremendous promise of things to come, a “new Pentecost.” “In this hour of heartfelt joy,” he said at the conclusion of his remarks, “it is as if the heavens are opened above our heads and the splendor of the heavenly court shines out upon us, filling us with superhuman certainty and a supernatural spirit of faith, hope, and profound peace.” The Pope urged the Fathers to continue praying and working on the various schemata during the months ahead, and to look to the Second Session, scheduled to begin in September, 1963. And so the Council Fathers went home again, “out of the trenches and home for Christmas,” as Archbishop Connolly observed.
The Cathedral’s own pastor at the time, Bishop Gill, aptly summarized the feeling at the end of the first session of the Council. “Vatican II,” he wrote, is “a historical moment, but more—history itself moving.”
- Want to read more about the Council? Try John W. O’Malley’s What Happened at Vatican II, available in the Cathedral Bookstore.
- In the next article in the series: The death of good
Pope John; the election of Pope Paul VI; and the second session of
the Second Vatican Council.