The Inside Story of Vatican II

A Firsthand Account of the Council's Inner Workings

Rev. Fr. Ralph Wiltgen, S.V.D.

• Publisher: TAN Books
• Year: 1991
• ISBN:
  9781618906397
• Topic: Teologia e religione
• Subtopic: Denominazioni cristiane

Only two years after the Second Vatican Council concluded in 1965, Catholics around the world welcomed the publication of The Rhine Flows Into the Tiber, a history of the Council published worldwide in four languages. Widely hailed for its balanced, factual reporting, this eye-opening insider's account was written by Rev. Ralph M. Wiltgen, a priest and professional journalist who was an eyewitness with unparalleled access to the principal figures and events of the Council.The Inside Story of Vatican II is a revised, updated edition of that ground-breaking contemporary account, which details in particular the crucial influence on the Council's proceedings exerted by its German-speaking bishops. As Catholics continue to debate the meaning and impact of Vatican II, they will find this book an indispensable guide for understanding what actually took place there behind the scenes.

THE THIRD SESSION

September 14 – November 21, 1964

SPEED IS OF THE ESSENCE

On January 4, 1964, shortly after the closing of the second session, Bishop Franz Hengsbach, of Essen, Germany, wrote in America: “After the Council has completed work on the five or six essential schemas, all remaining matters should be left for treatment in directories or handbooks to be assembled by post-conciliar commissions set up by the Council and following its basic directives.” Such manuals would serve as guidelines, “but without the authority which comes from a decision of the Council itself.”

At that time, there were still thirteen schemas on the agenda of the Council. The question was, Which were the five or six schemas regarded by the Bishop as essential? As a leading figure in the German hierarchy, he might well have been taking this occasion to announce a new policy of the European alliance. If so, it was to be expected that the Coordinating Commission of the Council would shortly take action along those lines.

And in fact, eleven days after the appearance of Bishop Hengsbach’s article, the nine-member Coordinating Commission met in the Vatican and made decisions of so drastic and revolutionary a nature as to undo four years of work on six major Council documents.

It instructed the Commission on Oriental Churches to reduce its schema to “some fundamental points.” It instructed the Commission on the Discipline of the Clergy and Faithful to reduce its decree on priests to a number of propositions. The decree was ultimately shortened to exactly one hundred lines. The Commission on Studies and Seminaries was instructed to reduce its constitution on seminary training to “the essential points for presentation in the form of propositions … The rest of the material will be used in the coming revision of the Code of Canon Law, or in particular instructions to be issued by the Holy See.” The same Commission was also instructed to shorten its constitution on Catholic schools. The Commission on Religious was instructed to reduce its thirty-four-page constitution to “its essential points.” The Commission on the Sacraments received similar instructions concerning its decree on the sacrament of Matrimony. Three months later, the Coordinating Commission instructed the Commission on the Missions to reduce its decree on that subject “to a few sentences or propositions.” That raised to seven the number of schemas affected.

When the Secretary General informed the Council Fathers of these decisions by a letter dated May 11, 1964, he also intimated that the shortened schemas would be put to the vote in the Council hall but would not be discussed.

These, then, were clearly the schemas regarded as being of secondary importance. The “essential” ones, therefore, must have been those unaffected by the instructions mentioned—the schemas on divine revelation, on the Church, on bishops, on ecumenism, on the apostolate of the laity, and on the Church in the modern world. And those six schemas were precisely the ones in which the German-speaking Council Fathers, and the European alliance in general, were most interested, and in regard to which they had the most control. Two of them—on the apostolate of the laity and on the Church in the modern world—were within the competence of the Commission on the Apostolate of the Laity, to which Bishop Hengsbach had been elected at the outset of the Council by the highest number of votes.

The reduction of seven schemas to the status of “propositions” was an attempt to speed up the work of the Council. Many formal petitions from individual Council Fathers, as well as from entire episcopal conferences, had requested that the Council should move faster; the United States hierarchy, for instance, had officially petitioned the Pope to make the third session of the Council the final one. On the other hand, the solution adopted by the Coordinating Commission was very unrealistic. All nine members could have anticipated that their decision would be overruled by the Council Fathers, at least in the case of the propositions on priests. For how could the bishops offer their priests a mere one hundred lines, never discussed in the Council hall, when they had spoken in detail and at such great length about their own role as bishops?

But perhaps there was some other reason behind the Coordinating Commission’s decision. The controlling power in the individual Council commissions was in the hands of the European alliance. However, those commissions were not empowered to set aside a part or parts of individual schemas that they considered unsatisfactory. The Coordinating Commission, on the other hand, was so empowered, and it made use of its prerogative by instructing the various commissions to reduce their schemas, thereby ensuring that many, if not all, unsatisfactory elements would be eliminated. The seven schemas, as reduced to propositions, could then be expanded as a result of new suggestions from the Council floor.

In the latter part of April, Cardinal Döpfner wrote to the bishops of Germany, Austria, Luxembourg, Switzerland, and Scandinavia, inviting them to a conference on Council matters to be held at Innsbruck, Austria, from May 19 to May 22. Referring to the decision of the Coordinating Commission that the propositions should not be discussed, he indicated that the last word on the matter had not yet been said, and that it was also “an open question whether or not there will be a fourth session of the Council.” The Cardinal said that the same observers from the hierarchies of neighboring countries would again be invited to attend. He announced further that, as in previous years, those “in our circle who are members of a Council commission will prepare drafts on the individual schemas with the help of the periti of their choice, and those drafts will serve as the basis for discussion.” Holding the conference so early had a considerable advantage, he pointed out, for “in this way our proposals can be passed on in time to the Council Fathers of other countries who have requested them.”

The Coordinating Commission took still further steps to speed up the Council’s work at its next meeting, on June 26. These steps involved amendments to the Rules of Procedure and were approved by Pope Paul VI on July 2. From now on, all cardinals and Council Fathers who wished to speak had to submit written summaries of their proposed addresses to the Secretary General “at least five days before discussion of the topic begins.” As a result, rebuttal was virtually impossible. According to the original Rules of Procedure approved by Pope John XXIII, any Council Father who wished to refute a statement could inform the Secretary General of his wish to speak, and was then to be given the floor as soon as the list of speakers was exhausted. During the second session, this request had to be supported by five signatures. Now, however, according to a new clause added to the rules, such a request had to be made in the name of at least seventy other Council Fathers. As might have been expected, the figure was such as to discourage anyone who did not belong to a highly organized group from asking for the floor; and the measure proved very effective in silencing minority views.

On July 7, the Secretary General informed the Council Fathers by mail that the sequence of schemas to be discussed and voted upon at the third session was as follows: on the Church, on bishops, on ecumenism, on divine revelation, on the apostolate of the laity, and on the Church in the modern world. The remaining schemas, which had been reduced to propositions and were not to be discussed, would be “submitted for voting in the sequence and manner to be determined by the Council Moderators in due course.”

ORGANIZED OPPOSITION

For a long time it appeared as though the European alliance would have undisputed control over the Council. This could have proved unfortunate, because power, be it financial, political, military, academic or theological, has a way of being abused when a near monopoly is obtained over it. As the Council progressed, however, at least half a dozen organized opposition groups came into being and performed yeoman service by forcing the majority to take a closer and more careful look at schemas before accepting them.

We have already seen how the Bishops’ Secretariat came into being to concentrate on texts concerning religious orders, and how it collaborated at all times with the Roman Union of Superiors General.

During the third session Archbishop Heenan of Westminster (formerly of Liverpool) founded the St. Paul’s Conference, an English-language group which placed the chief emphasis on matters of a practical nature. Its members were drawn from the British Commonwealth, principally, and also from Ireland and the United States.

Another opposition group, to be treated in detail in a later chapter, consisted of thirty-five cardinals and five superiors general, who concerned themselves especially with the problem of collegiality.

Archbishop Philip Hannan of New Orleans, Louisiana, founded an opposition group at the very end of the Council to give weight to certain amendments that he wished included in the war section of the schema on the Church in the modern world.

Cardinal Siri of Genoa, working in collaboration with Monsignor Luigi Rossi, faculty member of the Genoa major seminary, prepared and printed numerous qualifications and commentaries on schemas which were widely circulated among conservative elements in the Italian hierarchy and in the Spanish- and Portuguese-speaking hierarchies of Europe and Latin America.

Besides these six organized opposition groups, which were either ignored by the press or unknown, there was the International Group of Fathers (in Latin, Coetus Internationalis Patrum), which—together with the Roman Curia—was depicted as the epitome of conservatism, holding back the progressive elements in the Council. This group received much unfavorable publicity in newspapers, reviews, and books. Its founder and driving force was Archbishop Geraldo de Proença Sigaud of Diamantina, Brazil, and the group was founded precisely to help gain a hearing for conservative minority views.

During the first and second sessions Archbishop Sigaud organized weekly conferences, but the Italian members left the group when it was rumored that Monsignor Loris Capovilla, the private secretary of Pope John XXIII, had stated that he would not consider attacks on the Roman Curia as an offense against the Pope. New impetus came from the number of votes against combining the schema on the Blessed Virgin Mary with the schema on the Church, since this proved, as Archbishop Sigaud said, that a very large number of Council Fathers were “trying to orientate the Council along doctrinal lines traditionally followed in the Church.” But no conservative cardinal bold enough could be found to give the organization the needed backing until September 29, 1964, during the third session, when Cardinal Santos of Manila agreed to serve as the organization’s vocal patron in the College of Cardinals.

This group then purchased a small offset press, installed it near the Vatican, and hired an office staff. Three days after the meeting with Cardinal Santos, Archbishop Sigaud issued a bulletin announcing that the International Group of Fathers would sponsor a conference every Tuesday evening open to all Council Fathers. The purpose of these meetings, the announcement said, was “to study the schemas of the Council—with the aid of theologians—in the light of the traditional doctrine of the Church and according to the teaching of the Sovereign Pontiffs.” Patrons of the meetings were Cardinals Santos, Ruffini, Siri, Larraona, and Browne.

Soon the International Group of Fathers became so active and influential that it aroused the indignation of the European alliance, and one of the alliance cardinals stated that Archbishop Sigaud ought to be “shot to the moon.” Katholische Nachrichten Agentur, the Catholic news agency subsidized by the German bishops, called him an archconservative and depicted him and his group as working covertly against the aims of the Council. In spite of this, an almost endless flow of circular letters, commentaries on schemas, interventions, and qualifications flowed from his pen and those of the bishops and theologians whom he united through his group. Long before a schema came up for discussion, a careful program had been worked out, indicating exactly what aspects of the schema should be supported or attacked in written or in oral interventions.

On November 9, 1963, during the second session, Bishop Carli, one of the group’s most active members, drafted a letter to Pope Paul VI in which he appealed to him “to ask the Cardinal Moderators to abstain completely from making public interventions in their own name, both inside and outside the Council hall.” In the eyes of all, he said, they appeared to be “interpreters of the mind of the Supreme Pontiff,” and there was suspicion that they had leanings “in a certain definite direction.” But Cardinal Ruffini advised against making this appeal, and it was dropped.

Father Ratzinger, the personal theologian of Cardinal Frings, while dining one day with a group, mentioned that the liberals had thought they would have a free hand at the Council after obtaining the majority in the Council commissions. But in the speeches and voting in the Council hall, he said, they began to notice some resistance to their proposals, and consequently commissions had to take this into consideration when revising the schemas. Unknown to Father Ratzinger, one of those seated nearby and within hearing distance was Archbishop Sigaud, who chuckled at this public admission by a representative of the European alliance.

INFORMATION PLEASE!

Acoustics at the First Vatican Council, which began on December 8, 1869, were notoriously bad. All General Congregations took place in a transept of St. Peter’s without the assistance of a public address system. At first not even the speakers who had powerful voices could be heard by all the Council Fathers, so the hall was reduced in size. But even then many of the seven hundred Fathers could still not hear everything that was said.

During the Second Vatican Council, thanks to the installation of a public address system which operated flawlessly, none of the more than two thousand Council Fathers ever had any difficulty hearing the speakers. Never once in the four sessions did the system fail, nor did it cause an interruption in a single meeting. The acoustical problems had been solved by the technicians of Vatican Radio, and the Latin which came over the loudspeakers was crystal clear.

In spite of the excellence of reproduction, however, many Council Fathers were disappointed that a simultaneous translation system had not been installed. Mr. Mauro Ercole, a Vatican Radio engineer, stated that the problem was not a technical one. Experiments had been carried out, and all technical problems had been solved. Nor was the problem a financial one, because Richard Cardinal Cushing of Boston had offered to finance a complete simultaneous translation system.

At a press conference on October 29, 1963, halfway through the second session, Archbishop John Krol of Philadelphia, an Undersecretary of the Council, said that there would be no simultaneous translation system operating during the Council “because of personnel problems.”

By the time the fourth session began, this was an idea long since forgotten. But two American priests, Father Daniel J. O’Hanlon, a Jesuit from Los Gatos, California, and Father Frank B. Norris, a Sulpician from Menlo Park, California, found simultaneous translation an absolute necessity for their work. The number of English-speaking observers and guests for whom they provided translations of Council interventions during the meetings had grown so large by the fourth session that it was no longer possible to reach all of them with the unaided human voice. Although the two priests had received no previous formal training, they began providing simultaneous translation services on September 30, 1965, and continued them until the end of the Council.

Some bishops noticing the system in operation listened in and expressed the wish to have something similar. Father O’Hanlon, Father Norris, and Mr. Ercole all said that it would have been a simple matter to hook up headphones to the same microphone for the benefit of all Council Fathers who understood English. This system could have been used also for the five other languages.

The chief reason why simultaneous translation was not introduced on a large scale, however, was the objection by some Council Fathers that their interventions might not be correctly translated. Since doctrinal matters were at issue, they feared that a completely wrong interpretation might be placed upon their words through the incorrect translation of a word or phrase, and they therefore preferred to address the general assembly directly in Latin.

Another factor contributing to the poor state of internal communications at the Council was the complete lack of any official public record of the oral and written interventions submitted each day. Although the members of every responsible legislative body around the world have the right to obtain the full text of all speeches, this was not true at the Second Vatican Council.

Some questioned the advisability and even the possibility of printing the complete text of the written and oral interventions and giving them to the Council Fathers. This would have amounted to more than a hundred pages each day. Although it would have been impossible for everyone to read each intervention, those among the Council Fathers or among the periti who were experts in the subjects under discussion would have appreciated being able to make a careful study of the interventions, which in turn would have aided them to be more precise in submitting or preparing proposals and amendments.

An ideal arrangement would have been to print the entire texts of all oral and written interventions, in the Latin original, together with a Latin introduction of some fifteen lines in which the author of the intervention summarized his own proposals. In this way each Council Father could have had a reliable written summary of all interventions, and could have carefully examined the complete text of those which particularly interested him. Also, if the Council Fathers had been informed that their written interventions were to be placed in the hands of every member of the assembly, there would have been less reason for so many wanting to speak in the Council hall.

The lack of any official daily record for the Council Fathers was one of the great weaknesses of Vatican II. In seeking substitutes, large numbers of bishops subscribed to L’Osservatore Romano, which, during the first session, carried brief summaries of each General Congreg...

Table of contents

• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Publisher’s Note
• Author’s Preface
• Contents
• The First Session
• The Second Session
• The Third Session
• The Fourth Session
• Epilogue
• Appendix
• About the Author