WHAT HAPPENED AT THE COUNCIL - PART II

Of the 70 draft documents submitted by the Curia for discussion, the bishops rejected 69 and asked that they be rewritten. The draft on the Liturgy was debated with massive support for sweeping changes. At an early session of the council an American bishop pointed out that most participants lacked fluency in Latin and offered to finance a system for simultaneous translation of the proceedings. At the suggestion of Cardinal Suenens, the bishops decided to start with the Constitution on the Church from which most of the other documents would follow. While the council was in recess in 1963, Pope John XXIII died and was succeeded by Pope Paul VI, a progressive committed to the ideas of his predecessor.

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.