"Lewd Fellows of the Baser Sort": Vatican II, Session Three from the Press Table.

Marty, Martin E.

Roman Catholics and others who lecture on Catholic college and university campuses regularly report that the Second Vatican Council hardly registers in the consciousness of most students, be they Catholic or not. On one level, that memory loss should not be surprising. The council years, 1962--1965, occurred concurrendy with a shaping set of incidents in the United States whose central figure, Martin Luther King Jr, remains, as they say, "iconic" in later generations. But ask students to detail the consequences in legislation and civic life of the civil rights movement and you will get blank stares from many. In both instances, memory loss takes its toll after a half century. What is more, the meaning today of the events "back then" is still hard to define, given the complexity of the drastic changes that resulted from actions in the mid-1960s.

I remind myself of this loss when I recall that when I attended the Vatican Council in 1964,1 was as far in time from 1914 and the beginning of World War I as we are from the council. True, the hundredth anniversary of the Great War is being observed with the publication of many books, regular showings of television programs about the conflict, and other media attention. Still, ask students and their peers, or for that matter their parents and grandparents, why there was a war that took tens and tens of millions of lives, and you cannot get many intelligent answers. Even the experts cannot agree about the origins, prosecution and consequences of that war. So how can we expect a new generation to have knowledge or curiosity about what happened to cause consequent change in Catholicism, the churches and civil order in Rome during those four autumns in the 1960s?

Still, it is not difficult to show that many of the urgent questions facing the church and the churches 50 years after Vatican II are both direct and indirect consequences of the council. For that reason, efforts by church leaders, historians and educators to revisit the council are important and can be revealing. We can only point to several of these in a short article. In this case, as in all others like it, the credentials and viewpoints of the reporters can throw light on their chronicles, perhaps prompt creative suspicion and, one hopes, help stimulate fresh discussion.

With that in mind, here goes: I attended only one--the third--of four sessions. Like all other Protestants, I had no seat at the council. Of course. Nor was I an appointed official ecumenical observer. In fact, I was there as a member of the press, a cohort seen by many council fathers--voting bishops--as "lewd fellows of the baser sort" (Acts 17:5, KJV). Yet, if the combination "Protestant+Press" represented one kind of limits, it also offered preferred vantages. A coincidental conversation also gave me a plus. On my first day in Rome I met the congenial bishop of St Cloud, Minnesota, who glanced at my press badge and, with a smile of recognition, said, "Ah, Martin Marty. I've been wanting to meet you! You have the same name as my predecessor, the first bishop of St Cloud." What, he asked, could he do for me? I hinted a response. A day later I was gifted with a pass that gave me a seat in St Peter's in range of the action.

Let it also be remembered that friendly Protestants were an exotic breed in the eyes of many hierarchs in those "pre-ecumenical" days. Ask any Protestant who was at the council and I am sure you will hear that we were treated very cordially and with curiosity. We got to hobnob withperiti, the experts, assistants to bishops, and welcomed members of the category listed as "Laity: Men and Women" who had special places at the council. Hospitable participants from religious orders invited us to dine at their Roman residences. Our press conferences were always more fun than the sessions themselves, long and Latinate as those were. We stored up memories and grist for interpreting Catholic experiences ever since.

For this publication, let me come at once to the focal topic: ecumenism. I was reporting for The Christian Century, a magazine that had been invented to contribute to Christian unity on particular Protestant terms as the founders saw them in 1908. However, we editors in the years before Vatican II were told, and as we knew, that to use the word "ecumenical" in a news story signalled something so remote and obscure that it needed definition and explanation--or deletion. Then along came Pope John XXIII, who convoked the council and spoke of it as "ecumenical." The public soon heard or read it in media, and church-goers of many denominations, those who were "pro-" and "anti-" ecumenical alike, scrambled to learn of its nuances and extensions, and of the possibilities connected with it. The term had been available for theologians and historians since at least the time of the ecumenical councils in the early church. Now it was to become widely available again, thanks to Vatican II.

Creed-related Christians related this ecumenical theme to ancient creedal affirmations: belief in the one, holy, catholic and apostolic church. The council participants traded on all of these, fought about them, forced others to reckon with them and--no journalist or visitor could miss it--exposed each of these marks to challenge, reappraisal and often expansion. What did we find out about them from the first two sessions and the early days of Session III? One answer is that the key feature of ecumenism, the one-ness of the church open to empirical observation and inquiry, was elusive, obscured and publicly invisible, yet it was open to faith. The one-ness was not supposed to be a problem for council participants and those they were representing. The church was the Roman Catholic Church. Others had been, by definition, though not always in action, seen as false, wicked, faithless, heretical. Vice versa, many in even the smallest of Protestant communions thought the same of the giant Church of Rome.

In the council, gains were won with respect to mutual recognition and common action, as in the change in the centuries-old concept of "the other" Christians (Orthodox and Protestant) from hated heretics to "separated brothers and sisters." Most of the positive steps in the pursuit of Christian unity among the communions can be traced to the ecumenical movement of the 20th century, typified by the interchurch organizations that became the World Council of Churches (WCC). At the same time, the Vatican Council II also magnified and drew attention to the, yes, "giant leaps" and many small steps it will take for the churches to be in "full communion" with each other. Still, the council provided helpful terms, insights and motivations to advance ecumenical ventures.

As for the second mark, the "holy" aspect of the church, we heard homilies, talks, conversations and stories that witnessed to the life of holiness among members of the church world wide. Many of the services in St Peter's, conversations among the laity and other experiences by people on the scene displayed true devotion to the ideal of holiness and provided examples of this better way. Yet, as every Catholic in particular and every Christian in general knew and knows, the "un-holy underside of human life," including in every corner of the church, was also apparent. We saw as much self-centred, devious, manipulative, deceptive and exploitative behaviour in the council as we do in "ordinary" politics. If we did not "see" it, participants in the various episcopal factions announced it, whether in frustration or partisanship or just plain meanness. It is not necessary to detail any of that here, since all council fathers and all the rest who confess their sins would agree that they were on display.

So now, third, we report on how the "catholic" concept and reality showed up. Here, as elsewhere, we all observed new phenomena and, at least in this observer's eyes, we found the most positives. Not that all would welcome these perceptions, but let me illustrate by digging around in the word catholic. My early-on mentor on catholic expressions was the late Father Walter Ong, SJ, who complained that too often "catholic" refers to, or is reduced to, what is captured in the Latin definition: "universal." Ong wanted us to explore the Greek background: "catholic" derived from kata+holos, having to do with "the whole." This Catholicity looks to the "penetration of all reality" by God's word and the life of the church.

Before the council, we outsiders had been constandy reminded that the "universal" church was everywhere the same; the use of Latin in the Western church signalled that. Then we got to the council and our stereotypes were shattered. One morning, early on in my time there, the mass--with Pope Paul VI presiding--featured (dare I say "featured"?) Congolese seminarians, accompanied by their style of drums. This symbolized the fresh focus of all four sessions: more and more, the church leadership welcomed the many languages, musical styles, patterns of counselling native to Africa and Asia, and elements of Western European cultures and life in the Americas. Whether or not the "uniformists" who had been obsessive about the mass in Latin preserved their--to me--beautiful cultures, these by themselves could not speak for "the whole" in Catholicism. This change to multiplicity combined with organic unity opened many ecumenical doors on all the continents.

As we observed, the conflicts between the "progressives" and the "conservatives," by whatever name they were called in whichever cause, it often appeared that the varieties and issues in the Roman communion manifested an anything but "one" church. But not all of the differences necessitated conflict, and in fact they often contributed to more positive understandings of the third mark: "holy." Similarly, the concept of the "apostolic" mark received focused attention in the various schemas and the studies accompanying them. To us Protestants, one of the roots of this aspect was the increased focus in the scriptures. For decades, Catholics had been increasingly encouraged to study the Bible and to give witness and expression to it. If we perceived Catholicism as having been too devoted to "tradition" or "traditions" in teaching, we now were moved by movements of proclamations, prayer and theology that concerned and concern "the whole" church.

Not every day was like every other day in the autumn sessions of 1964. I have chosen not to begin chronicling events at the council; shelves of books treating these are long and they include many worthy histories. My assignment was to look at some of the enduring effects of what happened in Rome, 1962--1965. Almost all the historical summaries stress two main crises during the third session. The second tense time occurred during a November week that included what everyone remembered as "black Thursday." While much went on backstage without our being informed, one can deduce some of the behind-the-scenes actions. For example, in one crucial instance, progress of the progressives was slowed by an action that referred to a message from a "higher authority" or a "supreme authority." That could only mean the pope and bishops close to him. There was opposition by conservatives to many features in the Decree on Ecumenism, paragraphs on relations to Jews, and, notably for Americans and our kin, on "religious liberty."

The great game we observers played was to show interest, play-by-play, with progressives in the majority and conservatives in positions of "higher authority." Reports tell of cheering when a great progressive bishop spoke and of shuffling of feet indicating opposition when conservatives did not play by the rules of the game--the game of discerning what "collegiality" of the bishops in relation to the pope would mean. Often when we reporters would chat with a bishop or expert who could witness our general enthusiasm when the progressive (e.g., pro-ecumenism, pro--religious liberty) majority made gains, we would be treated to analyses that suggested that we should not read too much into the victories. They knew that "back home" the progressives were not always so progressive as they were in each other's company in Rome. Again and again we would hear that it is much easier to govern a conservative--which in this case meant a rule-bound, retrogressive, anti-modern, non-collegial--church than a more "open" one. And so it turned out.

All the standard histories suggest that the original dreams of the progressives were soon dimmed, the fires quenched, the adventurers repelled. Yet whoever compares the church of 1961 with that of 2014 quickly realizes that it was and will remain impossible for reactionary bishops to put the old, closed church back. For one thing, the current pope, by all signs, reflects what the majority of the bishops at Vatican II desired. He may not change much in church law and will not change anything affecting dogma. Instead, he moves with compelling gestures and actions more than dogmatic statements. The latter are not unimportant; the church historian in me has been taught about their value and potential. But, however cautious he may be about the warm-button issues like married priests, or women priests, or the troubling issues of sex and gender that tear churches apart, his actions show where his priorities are and he moves in ways that are hard to counter. When he kisses the bare foot of a Muslim woman at a ritual, greets the leper, or rides in a simple auto, he has invested in something that comes naturally to him: a gesture of love, humility and hope.

In church councils as elsewhere, "you win some and you lose some," you gain on one front and lose on another. Only those who operate with a metaphysic of inevitable progress or total reaction and despair have it easy. All the others, before, during and after Vatican II, had to settle for real life in the real church in the real world. But they gained impetus and precedent from the startlingly upsetting and forward-looking acts of the council majority in the mid-1960s. They tried to be catholic, to deal not only with broken parts of the Christian mission, but with "the whole," which includes the ecumenical impetus and agenda of our own times.

DOI: 10.1111/erev.12117

Martin E. Marty is professor emeritus of the history of modern Christianity, University of Chicago, USA