by Eamon Duffy
But Lumen Gentium was not the only revolutionary document produced by the Council. Gaudium et Spes, the ‘Pastoral Constitution on the Church in the Modern World’ (the Latin actually says ‘in this world of time’), represented a complete overturning of the conciliar and papal denunciations of the ‘modern world’ which had been so regular a feature of the Ultramontane era. Setting out to ‘discern the signs of the times,’ the Constitution embraced the journey of humanity in time as a place of encounter with the Divine. It emphasized the need of the Church ‘in the events, needs and the longings it shares with other people of our time’ to discern in faith ‘what may be genuine signs of the presence or the purpose of God’. Faith is thereby presented as something which completes and seeks to understand our common humanity, not a matter of exclusive concern with a supernatural realm set over against a hostile world. The religious pilgrimage towards the ‘heavenly city’ is claimed to involve ‘a greater commitment to working with all men towards the establishment of a world that is more human’. In the wake of the Council, this emphasis would provide the charter for the development of theologies of social and political engagement, like Liberation Theology. It was one of the Council’s most profound acts of theological reorientation, and one which transcended the somewhat glib optimism of the Gaudium et Spes itself, which, it must be admitted, in its concern to affirm the worth of human culture, shows little sense of the tragedy and brokenness of human history.32
Its central emphasis, nevertheless, lay at the heart of the Council’s rethinking of Catholic theology, and was worlds away from the aggressive, hard certainties of the age of Vatican I. Then Catholics had felt that they, and they alone, knew exactly what both Church and world were. By contrast, six months before his own election as Pope Paul VI, Cardinal Montini told the young priests of his diocese that in the Council:
the Church is looking for itself. It is trying, with great trust and with a great effort, to define itself more precisely and to understand what it is … the Church is also looking for the world, and trying to come into contact with society … by engaging in dialogue with the world, interpreting the needs of society in which it is working and observing the defects, the necessities, the sufferings and the hopes and aspirations that exist in human hearts.33
Lumen Gentium and Gaudium et Spes were great acts of theological reorientation, reshaping the parameters of Catholic theology. The Council’s work on specific issues was hardly less revolutionary. The decree on the Liturgy established a series of principles which would transform the worship of Roman Catholics, introducing the vernacular in place of Latin, encouraging greater simplicity and lay participation. The Decree on Revelation abandoned the sterile opposition between Scripture and Tradition which had dogged both Catholic and Protestant theology since the Reformation, and presented both as complementary expressions of the fundamental Word of God, which underlies them both. The decree on Ecumenism broke decisively with the attitude of supercilious rejection of the ecumenical movement which Pius XI had established in Mortalium Annos, and placed the search for unity among Christians at the centre of the Church’s life. The decree on other religions rejected once and for all the notion that the Jewish people could be held responsible for the death of Christ, the root of the age-old Christian tradition of anti-Semitism. Perhaps most revolutionary of all, the decree on Religious Liberty declared unequivocally that ‘the human person has a right to religious liberty’, and that this religious freedom, a fundamental part of the dignity of human beings, must be enshrined in the constitution of society as a civil right.34
This was truly revolutionary teaching, for the persecution of heresy and enforcement of Catholicism had been a reality since the days of Constantine, and since the French Revolution pope after pope had repeatedly and explicitly denounced the notion that non-Catholics had a right to religious freedom. On the older view, error had no rights, and the Church was bound to proclaim the truth, and wherever it could to see that society enforced the truth by secular sanctions. Heretics and unbelievers might in certain circumstances be granted toleration, but not liberty. The Decree was opposed tooth and nail, especially by the Italian and Spanish bishops (the decree flew in the face of the Concordat which regulated the life of the Spanish church, and which discriminated against Protestants). Another opponent was Archbishop Marcel Lefebvre, who, after the Council, would eventually form his own breakaway movement committed not only to the pre-Conciliar liturgy but to the intransigent integralism and rejection of religious liberty which had flourished under Pius X and the last years of Pius XII.
The decree on Religious Liberty was largely drafted by the American theologian John Courtney Murray, another of those under a cloud in the pontificate of Pius XII. It was strongly pressed by the American bishops, who felt that a failure to revise the Church’s teaching on this issue would discredit the Council in the eyes of the democratic nations. A lead had been given by the new pope, Paul VI, during a flying visit to the United Nations in October 1963, when he spoke of ‘fundamental human rights and duties, human dignity and freedom – above all religious liberty’, a clear endorsement of the new teaching. Key support for the change also came from the Archbishop of Krakow, Karol Wojtyla, the future Pope John Paul II, who saw in the decree’s assertion of the fundamental human right to freedom of conscience a valuable weapon in the hands of the churches persecuted under Communism.
On every front, then, the Council redrew the boundaries of what had seemed till 1959 a fixed and immutable system. For some Catholics, these changes were the long-awaited harvest of the New Theology, the reward of years of patient endurance during the winter of Pius XII. For others, they were apostasy, the capitulation of the Church to the corrupt and worldly values of the Enlightenment and the Revolution, which the popes from Pius IX to Pius XII had rightly denounced. For others, perhaps the majority, they were a bewildering stream of directives from above, to be obeyed as best they could. Many of the older clergy of the Catholic Church found themselves sleep-walking through the Conciliar and post-Conciliar years, loyal to an authority which called them to embrace attitudes which the same authority had once denounced as heresy. Pope John’s successor would have to deal with all this.
With a sort of inevitability, Giovanni Battista Montini, middle-class son of a Partito Popolare politician from Brescia, was elected to succeed John on 21 June 1963, taking the name Paul VI (1963 —78). Everyone knew how crucial Montini’s insight and determination was to the shaping of the Council and the forcing through of its reforms. John had often felt outflanked by the Vatican bureaucracy, his peasant shrewdness no match for the complexities of curial filibuster and red tape. Montini, by contrast, who had worked in the secretariat of State from 1922 to 1954, knew every inch of the Vatican and its ways, and could fight fire with fire. While still a young man he had toyed with the idea that the pope of the future should break away from St Peter’s and the claustrophobia of the Vatican City, and go to live among his seminarians at the Cathedral Church of Rome, the Lateran, to take the papacy once more to the people. He never in fact had the daring to put this vision into practice, but it says much about his understanding of the tasks and challenges that confronted the pope and the Council that he entertained it at all.
Yet he was emphatically no radical, and could hold the confidence of all but the most die-hard reactionaries. It was up to him to steer the Council to the successful completion of its work, to oversee the implementation of its reforms, and to hold together conservatives and reformers while he did so. In the turbulent sixties and early seventies, when religious reform and social and moral revolution flowed together, the task was almost impossible. No pope since the time of Gregory the Great has had so daunting a task. The societies of the West were passing through a period of general questioning of structures and authority, a crisis of confidence in old certainties and old institutions which was far wider than the Church. The reforms of Vatican II flowed into this general flux and challenging of values, and were often difficult to di
stinguish from it.
A century and a half of rigidity had left the Church ill-equipped for radical change. An institution which had wedded itself to what Manning had called ‘the beauty of inflexibility’ was now called upon to bend. The transformations of Catholicism which flowed from the Council were drastic and to many inexplicable. A liturgy once seen as timeless, beautiful and sacrosanct, its universality guaranteed by the exotic vestments and whispered or chanted Latin in which it was celebrated, was now reclothed in graceless modern vernaculars to the sound of guitars and clarinets. Before the Council Catholics had been forbidden even to recite the Lord’s Prayer in common with other Christians: they were now encouraged to hold joint services, prayer-groups, study-sessions.
The reform was experienced by many as the joyful clearing away of outmoded lumber, by others as the vandalizing of a beautiful and precious inheritance. In addition to the signs of renewal and enthusiasm, there were signs of collapsing confidence. Thousands of priests left the priesthood to marry, nuns abandoned the religious habit, vocations to the religious life plummeted. In the exhilaration – or the horror – of seeing ancient taboos broken, prudence, a sense of proportion, and the simple ability to tell baby from bathwater were rare commodities. Both the enthusiasts and the opponents of reform looked to the papacy for leadership and support. To hold this strife of voices in some sort of balance was a daunting task. Montini, who took the name Paul to signify a commitment to mission and reform, rose to the challenge, signalling both continuity and reform from the very moment of his election. He allowed himself to be crowned according to custom, but then sold the papal tiara which had been used for the ceremony, and gave the money to the poor.
Not everyone liked Paul’s methods. Determined that the Conciliar reforms should not be thrown off course, he was also determined that no one should feel steam-rollered. There was to be, he declared, no one who felt conquered, only everyone convinced. To achieve this, he tried to neutralize conservative unease by matching every reform gesture with a conservative one. In a series of deeply unpopular interventions, he watered down conciliar documents which had already been through most of the stages of conciliar debate and approval, notably the decrees on the Church and on Ecumenism, to accommodate conservative worries (which he himself evidently shared). He gave to Mary the title Mother of the Church which the Council had withheld because it seemed to separate her unhelpfully the rest of redeemed humanity. He delayed the promulgation of the decree on Religious Liberty.
This balancing act was not confined to his interventions at the Council. In 1967 he published his radical encyclical on social justice, Populorum Progressio, which advanced beyond the generalities of Gaudium et Spes and denounced unrestrained economic liberalism as a ‘woeful system’, and called for the placing of the ‘superfluous wealth’ of the rich countries of the world for the benefit of the poor nations. This encyclical delighted the theologians and pastors of the Third World, and established Paul’s credentials as a ‘progressive’ on the side of the poor. In the same year, however, he reiterated the traditional teaching on priestly celibacy, alienating many of the same people who had acclaimed the encyclical. These contradictory gestures earned him, unjustly, the title ‘amletico’ – a waverer like Hamlet.
Yet steadily he pushed the essential changes onwards: the reform of the Mass and its translation into the language of everyday so as to involve ordinary people more deeply in worship; the establishment of the notion of episcopal collegiality along with the pope, and the creation of the Synod of Bishops, which was to meet regularly to embody it. To increase efficiency and to break the stranglehold of Pius XII’s cardinals and bishops over the reform process, he introduced a compulsory retirement age of seventy-five for bishops (but not the pope!) and decreed that cardinals after the age of eighty might not hold office in the Curia or take part in papal elections. This was a drastic measure. The average age of the heads of the Vatican dicasteries was 79: ten of the cardinals were over eighty, one was over ninety. Two of the leading curial conservatives, Cardinal Ottaviani and Cardinal Tisserant, made public their fury at their disenfranchisement.
To make the central administration of the Church more representative, he hugely increased the membership of the College of Cardinals, including many third world bishops, thereby decisively wiping out the Italian domination of papal elections. In the same spirit, he established a series of bodies to carry out the work of the Council. In particular he confirmed permanent Secretariats for Christian Unity, for Non-Christian Religions and for Non-Believers as permanent parts of the Vatican administration. He was deeply committed to Christian unity, going to Jerusalem to meet the Greek Orthodox leader Patriarch Athenagoras in 1964. In the following year they lifted the age-old mutual excommunication of the Eastern and Western churches. In 1966 he welcomed the Archbishop of Canterbury, Michael Ramsay, on a formal visit to Rome, to whom in a warmly personal but shrewdly dramatic gesture he gave his own episcopal ring. With calculated theological daring, he spoke of the Anglican and Roman Catholic churches as ‘sister churches’.
Paul began to travel, a new development for the modern papacy, addressing the United Nations in 1963 in a dramatic speech which greatly enhanced his standing as a moral leader – ‘no more war, war never again’ – and visiting the World Council of Churches in Geneva in 1969, the first pope to set foot in Calvin’s city since the Reformation. In 1969 also he became the first pope to visit Africa, ordaining bishops and encouraging the development of an indigenous church. In 1970 he visited the Philippines (where there was an assassination attempt) and Australia (where the Anglican Archbishop of Sydney boycotted the visit).
The character of Paul VI’s pontificate is perhaps most clearly revealed in the emergence under him of a new Vatican Ostpolitik, to ease the condition of the churches behind the Iron Curtain. Despite his apprenticeship under Pope Pacelli, Paul believed that the Church’s confrontational attitude to Communism was sterile and counter-productive, and he went far beyond Pope John’s personal warmth, to a new policy of realpolitik and accommodation to Communist regimes. There were casualties. The symbol of the old confrontational attitude which had dominated the pontificate of Pius XII was the heroic and intransigent cold warrior Cardinal Josef Mindszenty, who had been living in the secular ‘sanctuary’ of the American embassy in Budapest since the failure of the Hungarian Revolution in 1956, refusing every offer of rescue, a permanent witness against and thorn in the side of the Hungarian Communist authorities. In 1971 the Americans told the pope that Mindszenty was an embarrassment to them, preventing rapprochement with the Hungarians. The pope ordered him to leave, and he settled in Vienna, writing his memoirs and denouncing the Hungarian regime. The Hungarian bishops told the pope the denunciations were making life harder for the Church in Hungary. In 1973 the pope asked Mindszenty to resign as bishop of Esztergom. He refused, on the grounds that the new Vatican arrangements with the Hungarian government would give Communists the final say in appointing his successor. Paul declared the see vacant, and in due course a replacement was appointed. The cardinal never forgave this ‘betrayal’, and denounced Paul in his Memoirs. Mindszenty, like Archbishop Marcel Lefebvre, was the ghost of the pontificate of Pius XII, haunting the Church of the Second Vatican Council.
In all this however, aspiration went further than achievement. Paul himself was often frightened by the runaway speed of change and was afraid of sacrificing essential papal prerogatives. However much he believed in the Church of the Second Vatican Council, however sincerely he fostered episcopal collegiality, he had been formed in the Church of Vatican I, and he never abandoned the lofty and lonely vision of papal authority which underlay the earlier Council’s teaching. Six weeks after becoming pope, Paul jotted down a private note on his new responsibilities. ‘The post,’ he wrote,
is unique. It brings great solitude. I was solitary before, but now my solitariness becomes complete and awesome … Jesus was alone on the cross … My solitude will grow. I need have no fears: I shou
ld not seek outside help to absolve me from my duty; my duty is to plan, decide, assume every responsibility for guiding others, even when it seems illogical and perhaps absurd. And to suffer alone … me and God. The colloquy must be full and endless.35
This is a papacy conceived as service, not as power, but it is not a papacy conceived in terms of partnership with others. Given such a vision, and for all his good intentions, there were severe limits to the sharing Paul thought possible with his fellow bishops. Between him and them was the awesome gulf of that lonely vision, an absolute difference in responsibility and authority. The international synods of bishops would increasingly turn into talking shops, with little real power, where even the topics for discussion were carefully chosen by the Vatican. In 1968, within three years of the end of the Council, his pontificate was profoundly damaged by the furore provoked by his encyclical on artificial birth-control, Humanae Vitae.