Vatican II: Surprised by the Spirit

When we think of the Second Vatican Council (1962-65), it may seem strange to claim that it almost never happened. More accurately, that it may have been a very different council to what it turned out to be.

After all, we know that in 1959, a few months after his election as pope, Blessed John XXIII called an ecumenical council. It was admittedly a dramatic move by an elderly pope, elected as a “caretaker” after the long reign of Pius XII.

As they prepared to go to Vatican II, what did the world’s bishops imagine would happen? The formal closure of Vatican I—which had never formally ended, as the forces of Italian unification entered Rome in 1870, forcing the bishops to return home, their task incomplete—was obvious. But what else?

Some bishops were sure that nothing much would happen. The more perceptive bishops may have noted a hint of change in the air; change expressed by the character of Pope John. John XXIII was different: he was warm and jovial, and he had the common touch which the holy austerity of his aptly named predecessor lacked.

Those prescient bishops were perhaps less surprised than others when at its inauguration, John insisted that the new council would be “pastoral” and “ecumenical”, speaking the language of love and mercy, not of law and condemnation.

The Roman curia had meanwhile prepared a number of documents for the bishops to consider and, it was assumed, approve. Strengthened by the centralisation of Church authority after Vatican I, the preparatory committee under Cardinal Alfredo Ottaviani (a conservative whose episcopal motto was Semper Idem, meaning “Always the Same”) expected the bishops to read, approve and endorse the statements, socialise a bit, pray together and then go home. Many of the bishops attending Vatican II had more or less the same expectation.

Then suddenly, unexpectedly, a revolution occurred—by curial standards at least.

While reading the prepared document on Divine Revelation a number of bishops expressed their dissatisfaction at its repetition of Vatican I’s notion that God could be deduced by reason alone and its deep suspicion of modern historical approaches to biblical studies. They declared that they regarded it as inadequate and requested that it—and other prepared documents—be redrafted and brought before the assembly for further discussion.

Led by an unlikely coalition of Central European bishops (Belgium, Netherlands and Germany) and by Eastern Rite Catholic patriarchs like Maximos IV Saigh (the Melkite patriarch of Antioch), the document was rejected by more than 60% of bishops present. John XXIII called for the redrafting of the text by an enlarged committee of curial staff, bishops and their advisors.

The result: the short Council would last four sessions over as many years. In the process it would change the face of the Catholic Church.

Why did such an odd coalition “rebel”? For the Belgian Cardinal Leo Suenens of Malines-Brussels and many of the central Europeans, the document was simply out of touch with the lived reality of Catholics in their countries.

For Patriarch Maximos Saigh, it was more clearly a demand that the true collegiality of bishops in defining doctrine and pastoral matters—par for the course within the Eastern Rite Catholic churches that drew heavily on their Orthodox roots—be respected.

For Pope John, who was initially surprised by the strength of the reaction, it was a sign of a “new Pentecost”, a renewal of the Catholic Church.

Among the advisors to the assembled bishops—the periti—there was delight. A young theologian of 35, dismissed as a “teenage theologian” together with his colleague Fr Hans Küng by an elderly professor in Rome, called the response of the bishops “the great, astonishing and genuinely positive result” of the session, “the truly epoch-making character of the Council’s First Session”. The theologian’s name was Joseph Ratzinger.

A point to ponder: Had I been there, what would I have thought? Would I have welcomed the call to renewal or feared it? Why?