1964 Ad

Ecclesia adest!... Spiritus adest! "The church is present! The Spirit is present!" I heard these refrains repeated throughout Pope Paul VI's twenty-minute Latin address opening the third session of Vatican II on September 14, 1964. I saw the enthusiasm down the length of St. Peter's as two thousand mitered heads bobbed together before undertaking what would be ten weeks of intense debate. Everything in my Catholic upbringing led me to open my heart and soul to the historic turning point that I would witness--and even take a tiny part in. For during my sophomore year at Loyola (Chicago) University's Rome Center, 1964 to 1965, I attended many functions at the council and numerous other Vatican events, both solemn and simple: a half-dozen general audiences with the pope; personal encounters with fifteen cardinals; the proclamation of a new title for Mary; Paul VI's first and most colorful canonization; his creation of twenty-seven new and, as it turned out, unruly cardinals; his attendance at a theater performance (the first by a pope in centuries) honoring Shakespeare's four-hundredth birthday; and papal Masses, some of moving simplicity. I even gained a baciamano ("hand kiss") ticket to one audience, allowing me to kiss the pope's hand as he reached the altar.

Two things gave me an extra close-up. First, Vatican Radio needed voices for its news broadcasts to the English-speaking world. Thanks to my Jesuit high-school training in public speaking, I served as a news announcer. I became part of weekly spin control as I read those notoriously uninformative official reports from the council.

Second, by taking a risk that worked (whereby I got to know the chief engineer for Vatican Radio's transmitter), I figured out a more-or-less legitimate way to get into the private Vatican gardens and walk there whenever I wanted. I even invited my roommates along to see the place. It was both innocent and nervy. Imagine this: one afternoon I was ushering my friends around the pope's labyrinth of hedges when a black limousine pulled up. Out popped a uniformed chauffeur, who opened the car door for the aged Cardinal Fernando Cento. Now, Cento was just the man I might need in this situation: his title as Grand Penitentiary of the Church meant he could forgive special sins. He was delighted to meet the three of us, not least because I could hold my own in a Latin conversation. Not once did he ask how we got in.

Of course, memory and history are very different things, memory being personal, history being social. But my purpose in drawing from memory is to convey some larger points about the council.

The air in Rome that year was electrifying. The council's third session witnessed intense debates on the collegiality of bishops, religious liberty, the declaration concerning the Jews, the nature of revelation, the role of the laity, the work of priests, the Eastern Rite churches, missions, seminaries, marriage, and more. We could hardly keep up with the sheer flood of news and commentaries. Lecturers were turning up all over Rome, and the flow of bishops at our college to share the latest gossip over dinner never stopped.

The vast majority of the council's documents, eleven of sixteen, were not passed until the final weeks of the closing session (1965). That is because the Roman curia did all in its power to prevent some documents from reaching a vote, and in the meantime, the so-called progressive bishops kept sending the documents back to committee for revision. Only three documents were officially adopted during the autumn I was there. Two bore great importance: the decree on ecumenism and the constitution on the church, Lumen gentium. Yet the 1964 session became known as the "Session of Great Pain," from a complaint several bishops sent to the pope at a critical point which opened with the words Magno cum dolore.

Everyone had his or her heroes and demons, and no one knew for sure where the council was headed. At this distance, that excitement appears a symptom of both a strength and a weakness. Vatican II claimed a scope wider than any council in church history. It wanted to go beyond the traditional function of councils, that is, addressing matters of faith and discipline. It seemed to want to speak about everything, even in areas where it lacked expertise. The momentum and the enthusiasm it created aroused expectations, sometimes energizing, that proved impossible to fulfill.

That optimism fed our generation, yet it carried a negative note. When I spoke with staunch opponents of the council, prelates such as Cardinal Cento, they would beam with confidence and say, Concilium magna operat ("The council is doing great things"). Similarly, Archbishop D'Souza of Bhopal, India, an outspoken liberal who frequently dined at our school, would glow about the changes in store. These two prelates spoke from opposite poles of the church. Even if they were only saying the diplomatic thing, later critics agreed that the council fostered an unsustainable optimism that affirmed almost everything and condemned almost nothing. While the council called for renewal, it rarely named what it clearly intended to repudiate. This gave the conciliar documents a kind of buoyant vagueness.

That vagueness also grew out of the way the council brokered deep differences by including conflicting language and theologies in its documents. Angel Anton, SJ, has noted that on the most controversial themes, the conciliar texts present a mosaic of interpolations from opposed parties, trying to satisfy sometimes wildly divergent theologies. Furthermore, Vatican II fully endorsed the principle of "not deciding questions still being debated among theologians." This has made it easy later to manipulate the council's meaning.

Let me give three examples of these debated theologies. First, there is the conflict between a theology of church as laity and bishops in a universal communion (as "the people of God"), and one that describes the church as a juridical hierarchy. Second, the council left the church with a clumsy balancing act, trying to maintain both the primacy of the pope and the collegiality of all the bishops. This set the stage for struggles throughout the 1970s and 1980s between Rome and national bodies of bishops. Third, the council both allowed for an insistence on growth through dialogue with other Christian bodies, but also seemed to say that the Roman Church can be self-sufficient without ecumenical dialogue.

My point is that the tensions at the heart of the council not only were real, but that they have not been resolved. The great peritus, later cardinal, Yves Congar, OP, declared in the 1980s that the council's compromise solutions made Vatican II stop halfway.

Still, even those compromises were reached only with great wrenching back and forth. This explains my most puzzling encounter at the council. One Thursday morning, around 10:30, as I was listening to the debates and comparing the ways that different nationalities spoke Latin (the Germans spoke it most clearly), I decided to check out the famous coffee bar (Bar Jonah) set up in a chapel of St. Peter's. There, I came upon an American bishop tying his shoelace, who gladly treated me to a double espresso and told me how wonderfully everything was working out. Only later did I learn that this jovial man was so rigid a conservative that he would later be removed from his see for refusing to implement the conciliar directives. To me, he resembled what I knew of my kindly uncle, a late archbishop of Chicago.

Later, on the way back to my seat, it seemed to me the council fathers were taking quite a noisy break. (Xavier Rynne would write that "pandemonium broke loose.") Just then I saw my own archbishop, Cardinal Albert Meyer of Chicago, who was one of the council presidents. I bounded over to greet him but he was jotting down some notes and had a sour expression. Although we had met on many occasions back home, that morning he gave me such a look of pained distraction that I ducked away.

I wondered at his demeanor until I later learned that week and particular day (November 19, 1964) were considered perhaps the worst of the council. They have come to be called the "Black Week" and "Black Thursday," the latter being the day a conservative minority used a dubious parliamentary trick to block the vote on religious liberty, potentially killing the document most eagerly awaited by the secular world.

What I could not know at the time was that Meyer had just finished openly rebuking the doughty dean of the College of Cardinals, Eugene Tisserant, who had pulled off this maneuver. Nor could I have guessed that Meyer and two other cardinals were about to storm into the pope's study to reverse Tisserant's move with a letter of support that would contain signatures from more than one thousand council fathers. Yet Paul VI refused to intervene. Now I know why that conservative bishop was beaming. The subsequent collapse of Paul VI's prestige took many months to repair. The third session of the council ended that Saturday, and a state of demoralization hung over the bishops until they reconvened, ten months later. Cardinal Meyer was not among them: he had died in the interim. The Declaration on Religious Freedom underwent further revisions, which in fact strengthened it, and it was finally approved by the council on December 7, 1965.

Despite all the resistance and foot dragging, Vatican II betokened change, sometimes very colorfully. Two occasions, if symbolic, come to mind. First, on Mission Sunday that October, Paul VI canonized more than twenty young Ugandans who had been martyred. The ceremony proclaimed the blossoming of the church in Africa, and Africans in exotic garb made St. Peter's resound with throbbing drums, a sound that still shakes my bones as I recall it. Decades later, I learned that the music was arranged and directed by my Boston College colleague, Prof. Aloysius Lugira, who was in Rome expressly for the occasion.

The daily parade of white-men-in-black, black-men-in-purple, brown- and yellow-men-in-red made the universality of the church part of a routine that led Karl Rahner and others to observe that a decisive turning point was taking place--away from the church's Western and European axis toward a more universal church.

I remember the moment I knew in my gut that things would never be the same. For many years, Archbishop Enrico Dante had ruled ritual with an iron hand as the papal master of ceremonies. But, in February 1965, Paul VI created his first cardinals, among them Dante. That ceremony was the first Dante could not superintend, because he was part of it. What happened was that protocol simply fell apart. The procession into St. Peter's got jumbled, perhaps because the Eastern Rite patriarchs couldn't settle their quarrels over precedence. In confusion, Paul VI perched the wrong birettas on the wrong heads: the American Lawrence Sheehan's large biretta landed on Dante's small Italian head, hanging down over his ears. As another new cardinal, Federico Callori da Vignale, reportedly complained (while tossing his biretta onto his limousine seat): "Now they have made me more ridiculous than ever."

I knew for sure the old regime was crumbling when Dante sneezed. It happened just before Communion. He stepped back from the altar to fish for a handkerchief up his sleeve, but as he dusted his nose, the other new cardinals turned and began to circle the altar to take Communion. Dante lost his place in line. The tiny prelate kept peeping around his peers, trying to find where he fit in, like the loser in musical chairs. If Dante could lose his place, we knew there was hope for the new liturgy.

After Vatican II ended, a rather cynical friend called its changes "transaccidentiation." He meant that many accidental externals changed, but that the substance of Catholicism remained the same: blind, unbending authority. It is true that the church imposed a rapid series of changes for which people were neither prepared nor instructed. In fact, some of the council's best moments remain misunderstood to this day, since whatever else the bishops were, they were not religious educators.

In 1870, one month after the close of Vatican I, John Henry Newman said that "it is uncommon that a council not be followed by great confusion." The legacy of Vatican II has not come with clarity or ease. Yet one secret is out. Change is possible. And no matter what Rome has said since then, the council documents showed there might be other ways to look at things. This should renew the hope of Catholics today. Fidelity to the Holy Spirit may mean more struggle, more compromise. When Rome says it can't change, many no longer accept that at face value. As my mother asked: "What happened to all the people who went to hell for eating meat on Friday?"

One thing rang clear from the council as we young Catholics moved into the cultural clash of the later 1960s. Vatican II viewed the world optimistically and placed itself at the service of human culture. This sustained our hope and patience during the ongoing civil-rights struggles, the Vietnam War, student protests, the Soviet crackdowns in Eastern Europe, and the sexual revolution. I departed Rome after Paul VI's Mass on Pentecost in June 1965. By a coincidence that feels more like providence, I was ordained a priest at Pentecost thirty-three years later, in the Episcopal Church, to which God had called me.

As the fortieth anniversary of the conclusion of Vatican II approaches, we must truly celebrate the council's legacy. The liturgy was reborn as an action of the entire people of God. The laity began to see their authentic vocation in the church and in all other spheres. And, for a while, at least, national groups of bishops found new creativity and collegiality. Today, Catholic spirituality stands more firmly rooted in Scripture and in a vision of social justice, and it is more open to the truths of other churches and other religions. And who could have foreseen the healing and deepending of Christian relations with our sisters and brothers, the Jews. One may hope that the coming anniversary will be an occasion to revisit and, where necessary, revive the spirit of Vatican II.

The Rev. James M. Weiss, an Episcopal priest, is an associate professor of theology at Boston College and directs the Senior Capstone Program.

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