Then there was the case of Sister Faustina Kowalska, a young mystic who had died in Kraków in 1938. Her “Divine Mercy” devotion was spreading throughout Poland even as her writings were coming under the theological suspicion of certain Roman authorities. The Archdiocese of Kraków was eager to propose Sister Faustina for beatification, and Wojtyła helped clear the doctrinal air with the Roman Curia so that Sister Faustina’s cause could be introduced.32
Archbishop Wojtyła also kept the lines open between Rome and Poland by regularly visiting the Polish College, the Roman residence for priest-students and seminarians. On one such occasion, a student asked bluntly what the point was of an ecumenical council without a clearly defined objective. The archbishop replied that Pope John, a very insightful student of his times, was deeply concerned about the “cultural deracination” of modernity and thought that the Church had to renew itself in order to preach the Gospel in an age transformed and in some respects distorted by technology. Christian unity, he stressed, was another essential goal of the Council and was central to the Pope’s intention in summoning Vatican II.33
Finally, Vatican II was a profound intellectual experience for Wojtyła and a stimulus to his work as a philosopher. The debates over the Council’s two central dogmatic constitutions, on The Church and on Divine Revelation, and his work in helping draft the council’s seminal Pastoral Constitution on the Church in the Modern World were a kind of postdoctoral school of theology that, as a former Council theologian later put it, “nourished his vision of the Church.”34 At the same time, he thought that the Council’s vision of the human person would be even more compelling if it were given a deeper philosophical foundation. Out of that concern would come Wojtyła’s major philosophical work, Person and Act.
By the end of the Council in 1965, the young bishop who arrived in Rome in 1962 as the unknown vicar capitular of Kraków was one of the better-known churchmen in the world, to his peers, if not to the world press. And he was known, not primarily by contrast to the overwhelming personality of his Primate, Cardinal Wyszyński, but as a man with ideas and a striking personal presence in his own right.
STARTING POINT
On October 11, 1962, surrounded by the Renaissance pomp of a papal court that would soon be a newsreel memory, Pope John XXIII was carried on the sedia gestatoria up the center aisle of St. Peter’s Basilica to open the Second Vatican Council. The nave of the basilica had been transformed by an army of workers, the Sanpietrini, into a giant aula or hall where Vatican II’s formal sessions would be held. Tiers of seats rose on each side of the center aisle to accommodate more than 2,000 bishops who were participating in the Council—itself an indication of the Church’s growth during the past ninety years, since the First Vatican Council (1869–1870) had fit snugly within one arm of the basilica’s transept. As befit his youth and relatively humble ecclesiastical station, the Titular Bishop of Ombi and Vicar Capitular of Kraków sat next to the door, about 500 feet from the high altar.35 The Council was about to begin, but Bishop Karol Wojtyła had already made a striking contribution to the proceedings.
In June 1959, the Ante-Preparatory Commission established by John XXIII had written to all the world’s Catholic bishops, superiors of men’s religious orders, and theological faculties, asking their suggestions for the Council’s agenda. Many bishops submitted outlines of internal Church matters they wanted to discuss. Bishop Karol Wojtyła sent the commissioners an essay—the work of a thinker, not a canon lawyer. Rather than beginning with what the Church needed to do to reform its own house, he adopted a quite different starting point. What, he asked, is the human condition today? What do the men and women of this age expect to hear from the Church?
The crucial issue of the times, he suggested, was the human person: a unique being, who lived in a material world but had intense spiritual longings, a mystery to himself and to others, a creature whose dignity emerged from an interior life imprinted with the image and likeness of God. The world wanted to hear what the Church had to say about the human person and the human condition, particularly in light of other proposals—“scientific, positivist, dialectical”—that imagined themselves humanistic and presented themselves as roads to liberation. At the end of 2,000 years of Christian history, the world had a question to put to the Church: What was Christian humanism and how was it different from the sundry other humanisms on offer in late modernity? What was the Church’s answer to modernity’s widespread “despair [about] any and all human existence”?
The crisis of humanism at the midpoint of a century that prided itself on its humanism should be the organizing framework for the Council’s deliberations, Bishop Wojtyła proposed. The Church did not exist for itself. The Church existed for the salvation of a world in which the promise of the world’s humanization through material means had led, time and again, to dehumanization and degradation.
Wojtyła’s further suggestions for the Council’s agenda continually referred back to this fundamental crisis of the age. The pursuit of Christian unity (through “less emphasis on those things that separate us and searching instead for all that brings us together”) was essential to the proclamation of a compelling Christian humanism. A zealous, educated laity was essential if Christian humanism was to penetrate all of society, “especially in those places where priests and clergy cannot fulfill their own mission.” The evangelization of modern culture through Christian humanism required priests who could affirm “all things worthy in themselves of being affirmed, even if they do not have an outwardly religious or sacral character.”
The sanctification of all of life would happen “indirectly” in some cases, Wojtyła further suggested. Whenever the priest engaged the world of culture or work, he had to present “the sacred in such manner as seems entirely fitting to the men of today.” This, in turn, required seminaries that were “not simply professional schools but true academies,” preparing priests who could minister to an increasingly well-educated laity. The evangelical action of both priests and laity, and the Church’s witness to Christian humanism, would also benefit from an introduction of vernacular languages into the Mass and other sacramental celebrations.36
Karol Wojtyła’s submission to the Ante-Preparatory Commission reflected the imprint of his first four decades of life: the Nazi Occupation and life in Stalinist Poland; his experiences in the classroom and the confessional; his effort to grasp “God, inscrutable in the mystery of man’s inmost life” through his poetry, his plays, and his philosophical essays. There are overtones of Mieczysław Kotlarczyk and the Rhapsodic Theater in Wojtyła’s discussion of the relationship of the sacred and the worldly. His experiences with his young couples resonate through his proposals for a lay apostolate that embodies Christian humanism in venues the clergy cannot reach. (One can even hear an echo of kayak paddles on the Mazurian Lakes in Wojtyła’s proposal that canon law be changed so that “attendance at Mass on a portable altar…fulfill the Church’s requirement for Holy Days and Sundays” without special permission.)
What was singular and, to use an abused term in its proper sense, prophetic about Wojtyła’s proposal was its insistence that the question of a humanism adequate to the aspirations of the men and women of the age had to be the epicenter of the Council’s concerns. There would be much talk before, during, and after the Council about “reading the signs of the times.” Here was a thirty-nine-year-old bishop who, having done precisely that, had put his finger on the deepest wound of his century so that it could be healed by a more compelling proclamation of the Gospel.
WORKING THE PROCESS
The Second Vatican Council had a jargon all its own, largely drawn from the Latin that was its official language of business. A bishop was not a “member” of the Council but a “Council Father.” On entering the Council aula (not hall), he presented his “passport” (not his pass). If he wanted to say something, he did not give a speech; he “made an intervention.” In preparing the intervention, he might consult a peritus (or theological exp
ert), who could help polish his argument and his Latin. The draft Council documents were not printed in brochures but in fascicules. In voting on these documents, a Council Father didn’t cast a ballot “Yea” or “Nay,” but rather Placet (It is pleasing), Non placet (It is not pleasing), or Placet iuxta modum (It is pleasing but needs changes). Moderators (four cardinals who ran the proceedings) had to be distinguished from the twelve Council Presidents (whose function was never really clarified in four years).37 The Council met in formal session to hear interventions (usually a dozen or so) in the mornings. A good deal of the real business, and certainly most of the human interaction, of Vatican II took place elsewhere—in, for example, the two coffee bars that were set up inside St. Peter’s and immediately dubbed Bar-Jonah and Bar Mitzvah. Lunches, dinners, and seminars, held in hotels, religious houses, or the national seminaries in Rome where many bishops stayed, were other venues where things got talked out in a way that was often difficult, if not impossible, in the aula.
It was a rich learning environment for everyone concerned, and the “informal Council” made an important contribution to Vatican II. In later years, some participants would look back critically on the way in which these informal discussions tended to subordinate bishops to theologians and biblical scholars who almost constituted (and in some of their own minds, did constitute) a parallel teaching authority in the Church. Some bishops, Wojtyła included, took advantage of the knowledge of distinguished periti without being overwhelmed by them.
The primary historical record of Vatican II is composed of the Council Fathers’ formal spoken or written interventions and the sixteen official conciliar documents those interventions helped shape. Bishop (and, in the third and fourth periods of the Council, Archbishop) Wojtyła spoke and made written interventions in all four sessions of Vatican II. Those texts are one way of seeing how he understood the Council from inside.
At Vatican II’s first session, in the fall of 1962, Bishop Wojtyła joined in a heated theological controversy about how the Church should understand the relationship between the sources of divine revelation, Scripture and Tradition; it was a topic with considerable ecumenical repercussions, given the classic Reformation maxim, Sola Scriptura [Scripture alone]. Wojtyła argued that the entire debate ought to be recast. God himself is the only Source of revelation. By stressing God’s self-revelation in Scripture and Tradition, rather than treating “revelation” as a matter of biblical or theological propositions, Wojtyła was applying his personalism to the Church’s understanding of God and God’s relationship to the world.38
When the Council Fathers debated the renewal of the liturgy in the first session, Wojtyła made a brief intervention reflective of his own pastoral experience, urging that the revised rite of baptism stress the parents’ and godparents’ obligation to instruct the child in the faith.39 In the debate over the nature and mission of the Church, Wojtyła submitted a written intervention urging a more personalistic and pastoral stress on the salvation of souls as the Council worked through the implications of Pius XII’s image of the Church as the Mystical Body of Christ. In addition, he wanted the notion of a distinctive lay vocation given higher visibility in any document on the Church. This was a legitimate “demand” of men and women today, and acknowledging it would broaden a “sense of responsibility for the Church” within the Catholic community. Wojtyła stood with the rest of the Polish hierarchy in asking for a separate conciliar document on the Blessed Virgin Mary, a position the Council would eventually reject for theological and ecumenical reasons. In line with the solution that would eventually be adopted (which was to incorporate the Council’s statement on Mary into the Dogmatic Constitution on the Church), Wojtyła proposed early on that any discussion of Mary speak of her “mother-hood” in the Church, a maternal care that all the sons and daughters of the Church be conformed to Christ. This kind of Marian theology, he suggested, would also help improve a draft document in which “the Church is presented to us more as a teaching society than as a mother.”40
In the Council’s second session, in the fall of 1963, Wojtyła spoke during the debate on the Church as the “People of God,” suggesting that this image be described sacramentally, in analogy to the Incarnation of Christ. The Church was the “People of God,” a community constituted by a “supernatural transcendence” that made it unique and that gave it its particular mission in the world—which was to teach the world that its true destiny lay in the completion of history, when God would be all in all.41 In a written intervention in the same debate, Wojtyła the philosopher argued that the “final cause,” the constituting purpose, of the Church was holiness. Every baptized Christian had a vocation to holiness, which was not a preserve of the clergy or hierarchy but the destiny of all whom Christ had “sanctified in the truth” so that they might be “sent…into the world” (John 17.18–19). The holiness to which Christians were called, Wojtyła wrote, was nothing less than a “sublime sharing in the very holiness of the Holy Trinity,” of God himself.42
Karol Wojtyła participated in the third (fall 1964) and fourth (fall 1965) sessions of the Council as the Archbishop of Kraków, rather than as a very junior auxiliary bishop. His spoken and written interventions intensified accordingly. In the third session, he submitted a lengthy written intervention “in the name of the Polish episcopate” on Mary’s place in the proposed Dogmatic Constitution on the Church, and added a personal written intervention arguing that the chapter on Mary should not become the document’s last chapter but should immediately follow its first, on “The Mystery of the Church.” As Mary had nourished Christ’s body as his earthly mother, so she continued to nourish the Mystical Body of Christ.43
In the third session, Archbishop Wojtyła forcefully entered the debate on a proposed Decree on the Apostolate of the Laity. In a spoken intervention, he welcomed the revised draft text because it properly identified the source of the lay apostolate in the baptismal dignity and responsibility of all Christians, rather than in the fact that some laypeople belonged to specific apostolic movements. Basic sacramental theology, not ecclesiastical sociology, was what gave rise to a distinctive apostolate of lay men and women. The archbishop suggested that this decree would be particularly important for those who, when they spoke about “the Church,” “do not seem to be speaking about themselves,” but only about priests, nuns, and bishops. Wojtyła went on to recommend a “dialogue within the Church” in which clergy and laity were “opened to each other in complete sincerity.” This would promote the evangelical action of the entire Church, because the Church’s mission to the world depended on a mission of the Church to itself, in which the members of the Body of Christ mutually enriched one another for the sake of their common witness. Wojtyła also made a strong pitch to include young people and their unique apostolate in any conciliar document on the laity. (In this particular debate, Wojtyła was the only speaker to recognize the presence of women as auditors at the Council, beginning his remarks, “Venerabiles Patres, Fratres, et Sorores…” [Venerable Fathers, Brothers, and Sisters].44)
In a written intervention on the same proposed decree, Wojtyła argued that the point of a revitalized apostolate of the laity was not to turn the laity into quasi-clerics, concerned primarily with the internal life of the Church. It was to renew the laity as apostles in the world of culture and work. With his friends at Tygodnik Powszechny and the Rhapsodic Theater in mind, the archbishop also praised the specific contributions of writers and artists to the evangelization of culture: “they do not just teach, but they also please, by enticing minds and hearts to the truth.”45
Karol Wojtyła also participated vigorously in the third session’s most controversial debate, on religious freedom, in one spoken and two written interventions.
Why was religious freedom so controversial at Vatican II?
Some Council Fathers took a philosophical position that, once its premises were granted, was at least logical. “Error” had “no rights” states should recognize this so that j
ustice would be served; therefore, the optimum arrangement between Church and state was one in which the state recognized the truth of Catholicism and gave it a privileged place in society. Others, including a vocal French missionary archbishop, Marcel Lefebvre, were convinced that any Catholic endorsement of religious freedom meant endorsing the radical secularizing politics that had been let loose during the French Revolution. Still others worried that a conciliar defense of religious freedom would involve such a dramatic development of doctrine as to suggest that the Church had been gravely mistaken in the past. These concerns not infrequently overlapped in some bishops’ minds.
On the other side of the issue were three clusters of bishops. The Council Fathers from the United States had lived an experience in which Catholicism flourished under a constitutionally mandated “separation” between Church and state. They did not think this way of arranging things should be considered inferior to the way things had been done in the Europe of altar-and-throne alliances. A second cluster was composed of those Western European bishops who, for theological and political reasons, were determined to distance the Church from ancien régime nostalgia. Then there were the bishops of east central Europe, many of whom had done time in prisons or under house arrest, who wanted a strong conciliar defense of religious freedom to strengthen them in their struggle against communism.
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