WHAT HAPPENED AT THE COUNCIL - PART I

As a child and teenager growing up in Ireland sixty years ago, Catholicism was a very simple system: you said your prayers, did what you were told to do by the priest in his Sunday sermon and never really questioned it all: the symbols, the liturgy, the “bells and smells”.

But whether it was due to me or to the Church, in the post-World War II era through the 1950’s things began to change. Pope Pius XII, a cautious, conservative survivor of the upheavals and carnage of war, died in 1958. I vaguely remembered his election. This time the election of his successor, a seventy-six year old reputed moderate, Angelo Roncalli, Patriarch of Venice, was seen as a temporary compromise because of his age. His pontificate was to be one of the shortest in recent history, but also one of the most decisive. It put an end to the defensive mentality of the Church since the Reformation and the exaltation of the monarchical Papacy by the Vatican Council of 1870.


Less than a year after his installation as Pope John XXIII, he announced the convening of a General Council of the Church whose goal would be the promotion of the unity of all Christian peoples. Vatican II was to be the largest assembly of bishops ever at a Church council. The 600 bishops who attended Vatican I had grown to almost 3,000 by Vatican II. In furtherance of his goal, representatives of all the major Christian communities were also invited to attend as observers. For the average Catholic it did not convey much of what was to come.

The bureaucrats of the Roman Curia (the central administrative staff of the Church) were shocked at the possible challenges to their power by this horde from all corners of the world. They sought to defuse the bombshell by controlling the council both in its agenda and its debates. They planned to confuse the bishops by using only Latin in the debates and simply having their proposals rubber-stamped by the assembly.

Pope John XXIII used his opening address to call the bishops to a complete renewal and update of the Church, to take an optimistic view of the world and a pastoral approach to their task. They were to avoid sterile academic debate and seek meaningful and positive ways to further the Church’s mission of saving the world. No more anathemas and condemnations; what God had made was good.