Historians, Preparation and Beginning

Writing the history of the Second Vatican Council

Thanks to the history of the Second Vatican Council that Guiseppe Alberigo (1926-2007) projected and realized with his transnational team of colleagues, we are allowed to study the picture of the most important event of the Roman Catholic Church in the 20th century.

Algerigo studied law and Church history at the Catholic University of Milan, was married and had three children. He directed and edited his project on the history of the Second Vatican Council - that was published in five volumes from 1994 to 2005 - realizing the conviction that the work of the historian consists of assessing all accessible documents, which must be studied, compared, and carefully used as elements to form the historic picture (Alberigo, Giuseppe. 1995. “Premessa. A trent’anni dal Vaticano II.” In Il cattolicesimo verso una nuova stagione. L`annuncio e la preparazione gennaio 1959 – settembre 1962. Vol. 1 of Storia del concilio Vaticano II, directed by Giuseppe Alberigo, 9–12. Bologna: Società editrice il Mulino. 10-11). Finding diaries, documentations of conversations, notes, drafts of documents, letters, etc., and getting permission from the authors - Council fathers and theologians -, to use them, was a possibility condition for the project. The search for documents was surprisingly successful.

We cannot understand Giuseppe Alberigo’s project for the history of the Second Vatican Council without taking notice of its cultural context, that is the Fondazione per le scienze religiose (FSCIRE).

“The Fondazione per le scienze religiose (FSCIRE), founded by Giuseppe Dossetti and directed by Giuseppe Alberigo until 2007, is a research institution that publishes, trains, serves, organizes, welcomes and communicates research in the field of religious sciences, with particular regard to Christianity, Islam and the religions with which they have been in contact (https://fscire.it/lang/eng/chi-siamo-1/storia. Accessed April 8, 2023).

We read further on the homepage of FSCIRE about its founding father: “Giuseppe Dossetti (1913-1996) left national politics in 1953. His political career had started when he was a militant in the Italian Resistance movement; in the following year he became vice-secretary of the Democrazia Cristiana Party, founder of the Civitas humana association and then soul of the Cronache sociali journal. Thanks to the presence of Cardinal Giacomo Lercaro in Bologna, he settled in the city, where he founded, with a group of like-minded people, the Centro di documentazione, a library specializing in Church History, … Dossetti participated in the Second Vatican Council as one of Lercaro’s periti and the Centro, called from 1964 Istituto per le scienze religiose, contributed as a workshop offering materials for the debates” (ibid.). Dossetti was a precious expert at the Council: His formation in jurisprudence and his political life and leading personality of Italy’s most influential political party at the time enabled him to assist Lercaro and Pope John XXIII with his procedural know-how for organizing processes of debate and decision making. He wanted the Council to work on a constitutional base but did not succeed getting the Council to draft a constitution for the Church. Till our days there is discussion going on in the Roman Catholic Church to base her canon law on a constitution, that is a kind of Bill of Rights. For true, this project of discussing academic canonists and theologians never went beyond wishful thinking.

Dossetti’s analysis of the Second Vatican Council’s failure to structurally reform the government of the Roman Catholic Church identifies as original sin of the Council the fact that the head of the commissions of the Council were Cardinals who were in charge of the Vatican’s congregations. In no council so far in the history of the Roman Catholic Church the presidents of commissions did come from the Roman curia. It is true, any reform that would open the Vatican’s government to the participation of bishops representing the world-Church, would have significantly reduced the influence and power of the Roman curia.

Dossetti was ordained priest on January 6, 1959. When in 1968 Pope Paul VI removed Cardinal Lercaro as archbishop from Bologna, Dossetti retreated to the monastic community which he had founded, the Piccola Famiglia dell’ Anunciata in Monteveglio. He lived in different houses of the community, also in Israel and died in 1996 in Monteveglio. The Istituto per le scienze religiose for some decades was following the strategy of emancipation from Church influence and control. The Roman Catholic Church did not reform her absolutist government, and the Catholic scientists consequently abandoned the institution. “The Fondazione per le scienze religiose (FSCIRE), was founded in 1985 and assumed the name of “John XXIII” since it held John XXIII’s diaries. … FSCIRE has an agreement with the University of Bologna and other universities: it operates in conditions of full autonomy from churches and universities, collecting funds from public and private donations, foundations, companies and cooperatives, and creating synergies with other centers. FSCIRE continues the scientific research in the field of historical-religious disciplines initiated by Giuseppe Dossetti and developed by Giuseppe Alberigo (1926-2007), who was its soul and secretary for almost fifty years” (see Homepage FSCIRE).

The European Values Study Group had been founded in the 1978, in 2020 the European Values Study (EVS) is also a foundation and the homepage of the EVS does not document any more the start of the projecting of the EVS as an initiative of Catholic priests, scientists and theologians (https://europeanvaluesstudy.eu/about-evs/history/). Just as the FSCIRE, the EVS and similar institutions in Western Europe followed the same way of emancipation, the social sciences and the sciences of religions needed freedom of thought and speech, and the principles of dignity of equal rights of all faithful:

Why does the homepage of FSCIRE in 2023 not mention that Giuseppe Dossetti left in 1958 communal politics at the city council of Bologna to prepare for priestly ordination? Already in 1956, the Centro di documentazione had split into a part for the history of the Roman Catholic Church and religious science, and a monastic part (ibid.). Would the mentioning of the vow of obedience to Roman Catholic Church authorities by the priest Dossetti in 1959 damage the scientific qualifications of FSCIRE in 2023? I do not think so. FSCIRE operates in conditions of full autonomy from churches and universities (ibid.). FSCIRE holds a decree of recognition by the President of the Republic and telling of Dossetti’s priestly ordination is no reason to retract this recognition. What then are the reasons for FSCIRE staying silent about the clerical turn in the biography of its founding father? I do not know. Probably it simply did not come up in the mind of the writers of the homepage of FSCIRE that Dossetti was a priest. Being a Catholic priest simply has become redundant in 2023 for a team of researchers in an institution doing research in religious science. Hopefully, in 2023 faithful Catholics and a-theists alike develop together the philosophies of religion that assure independence and religious identity, scientific integrity, respect of individual biographies of women, men and queer, and fight together for equal opportunities of women, men, and queer researchers, from the bottom to the top of direction.

The context of gender emancipation makes me observe that Alberigo’s team of 47 Catholic scholars collaborating with the history of the Second Vatican Council exclusively consisted of white males, most of them celibate Catholic priests. No woman theologian or historian participated in the above construction of the Second Vatican Council. Women, not to speak of queer, were not allowed to take part in the Second Vatican Council. They are discriminated and cannot become priests and bishops. Women theologians were not welcomed and excluded from the commissions of the Council. How then can Alberigo speak of the Second Vatican Council as an historic event of transition in the Roman Catholic Church? Did the Second Vatican Council inspire a transition? Giuseppe Alberigo is right, today’s lack of enthusiasm with the results on the Church of the Second Vatican Council is part of developments that the same Council started to bring about (Alberigo, Giuseppe. 1995a. “Premessa. A trent’anni dal Vaticano II.” In Il cattolicesimo verso una nuova stagione. L`annuncio e la preparazione gennaio 1959 – settembre 1962. Vol. 1 of Storia del concilio Vaticano II, directed by Giuseppe Alberigo, 9–12. Bologna: Società editrice il Mulino., 9).

Nevertheless, Alberigo’s research team of white men excludes the perspective of women and queer, and is not conscientious of gender discrimination, racism and sexism within the Roman Catholic Church when writing the history of the Second Vatican Council. There is one exception: Jan Grootaers, a lay Catholic intellectual and historian in Alberigo’s team, documented the first reactions of the Catholic lay women, men and queer to the developments at the Second Vatican Council (Grootaers, Jan. 1996. “Flussi e riflussi tra due stagioni.” In La formazione della coscienza conciliare. Il primo periodo e la prima intersessione ottobre 1962 – settembre 1963. Vol. 2 of Storia del concilio Vaticano II, directed by Giuseppe Alberigo, 559–612. Bologna: Società editrice il Mulino).

Cardinal Giacomo Lercaro (1891-1976)

Giacomo Lercaro as a young parish priest in 1938 protested the antisemitic laws of the Italian fascists. During the war he helped Jews and persecuted politicians. In 1947 he was appointed Archbishop of Ravenna-Cervia. Since then, he had hosted young people with social difficulties in his episcopal palace. In 1952 he was appointed Archbishop of Bologna and in 1963 he was made cardinal. He was known as the protector of the liturgical movement and a pastor of the workers. After condemning the American bombings in Vietnam on January 1, 1968, Paul VI removed him from his office and Lercaro retired to his family of young people around him (Subotic, Goran. 2013. “Lercaro.” In Personenlexikon zum Zweiten Vatikanischen Konzil, edited by Michael Quisinsky and Peter Walter, 169–72. Freiburg im Breisgau: Herder).

Wikipedia gives a more empathic biography of the Cardinal than does the German catholic lexicon on Council personalities: Giacomo Lercaro was born in 1891 as the eighth of nine children in Genoa. He came from a family of seamen. He studied at the Pontifical Biblical Institute in Rome, served as military chaplain in World War I, worked as prefect in the seminary of Genoa where his brother was rector and in 1927 became a teacher of religion in secondary school and became involved in numerous student movements. During World War II he was one of the most prominent anti-fascists within the Church, opened his home to Italian Jews and had to flee to a vacant monastery to save his life. He was an outspoken critic of Communism and in 1952 was made archbishop of Bologna, the largest Italian city under Communist rule. In 1953 he was made cardinal. He turned his Episcopal palace into an orphanage and was one of the first to popularize the theory of a “Church of the poor” that developed further in Latin America during the 1970s as liberation theology (“Giacomo Lercaro,” Wikipedia, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Giacomo_Lercaro).

Pope John XXIII

Angelo Giuseppe Roncalli was born on the 25th of November 1881 as the fourth of fourteen children to a family of sharecroppers that lived in a village in Lombardy. The young priest Roncalli learned from his bishop Radini that it is possible to organize, hold and manage a Diocesan Synod to improve communication between the clergy and lay men and women Catholics who engaged in the revival of the liturgical life. In the decades before his papacy, Angelo Giuseppe Roncalli prepared the edition of the documents of 16th century Saint Charles Borromeo’s apostolic visit to Bergamo as archbishop of Milan. Cardinal Borromeo, only twenty-two years old, was already the leading statesman at the papal court in Rome. After the death of his uncle Pope Pius IV, the former Cardinal Angelo de Medici, Charles Borromeo turned to care for his diocese. Caring for a diocese in the time of the Council of Trent (1545-1563), where Borromeo was taking part as the Pope’s advisor, meant to take care of the education and formation of the clergy. Borromeo therefore established seminaries, colleges, and clerical communities. He was the most important of the 6 cardinals who in 1565 founded the Roman Seminary where the young Roncalli got a scholarship to study theology.

Roncalli was ordained priest in 1904 and became secretary of his bishop Radini in Bergamo. He served as military chaplain in First World War. In 1925 he was made bishop and sent as apostolic visitator to Bulgaria where he was in dialogue with the Eastern Churches. In 1935 he was assigned as apostolic delegate to Turkey and Greece, engaged in dialogue with the Muslims and tried to save the lives of as many Jews as possible. In 1944 he was appointed nuncio in Paris and became the first permanent observer of the Holy See at UNESCO.

In 1953, Roncalli was created cardinal-patriarch of Venice. As Pope John XXIII, many members of the college of cardinals were formed too in the Grand Pontifical Roman Seminary near the Lateran Basilica in Rome. From the beginning, the Seminary was run by the Jesuits and after the suppression of the Jesuits in 1773 the formation followed in the spirit of Saint Ignatius combining his Spiritual Exercises with the task of intellectual reflection. The pastoral context of Roncalli was the Tridentine Church. The historians point at Borromeo and his application of the Council of Trent as the internalized model for the pastoral priorities of the later John XXIII (Alberigo, Giuseppe. 1995. “L’annuncio del concilio. Dalle sicurezze dell’arroccamento al fascino della ricerca.” In Il cattolicesimo verso una nuova stagione. L`annuncio e la preparazione gennaio 1959 – settembre 1962. Vol. 1 of Storia del concilio Vaticano II, directed by Giuseppe Alberigo, 19–70. Bologna: Società editrice il Mulino., 26).

After eleven ballots, Roncalli was elected pope on October 28 of 1958 at the age of 77 (ibid. 21). The cardinals elected John XXIII as a transitional pope and not as the pope of transition to the culture of the world that lies outside the walls of the feudal and autocratic structures of the Vatican and the palaces of its hierarchy (ibid. 30).

As Shepherd of the universal Church, John XXIII announced a universal Council on January 25, 1959. The bureaucracy of the Vatican and most of the bishops all over the world did not understand the reasons for the announcement of a council. The public greeted the announcement with enthusiasm and interest (ibid, 48). On July 4 of 1959, John XXIII wrote down the name of the Council to come. On July 14 of 1959, John XXIII communicated the name Vatican II for the council to his Secretary of State Cardinal Tardini. Four days later John XXIII informed members of theological faculties in Rome of this decision (ibid, 66).

The political context of the announcement of the surprising Council was the Cold War and the end of national colonialism (ibid. 22). The world was split in two political blocks that deterred each other with atomic weapons, economically and culturally. The Soviet empire of Eastern Europe and Asia and the Chinese empire of the ruling Communist Party tried to win the sympathy of the Third World for their organization of social and public life. The United States of America and Western Europe tried the same (ibid.).

From Pope John XXIII to Pope Paul VI

Cardinal Lercaro was very close to John XXIII and therefore the ideal candidate of the Council to succeed John XXIII after his death on June 3, 1963 (Grootaers, Jan. 1996. “Il concilio si gioca nell’intervallo. La seconda preparazione e i suoi avversari.” In La formazione della coscienza conciliare. Il primo period e la prima intersessione ottobre 1962 – settembre 1963. Vol. 2 of Storia del concilio Vaticano II, directed by Giuseppe Alberigo, 385–558. Bologna: Società editrice il Mulino. 535).

At the Second Vatican Council Lercaro invited the Catholic Church to develop a more mature consciousness of its transcendental aspects in daily life. He claimed that the importance of the Jews for the Christians cannot be limited to what they inherited from the past (Famerée, Joseph. 1998. “Vescovi e diocese (5–15 novembre 1963).” In Il concilio adulto settembre 1963 – settembre 1964. Vol. 3 of Storia del concilio Vaticano II, directed by Giuseppe Alberigo, 133–209. Bologna: Società editrice il Mulinoibid. 150). In the eyes of Lercaro the Covenant of Go’d with Israel possess dignity and existential significance for the Catholic Church in the present (ibid.).

The reformist cardinals of the conclave were in favor of Lercaro, but in the eyes of the conservatives and the Curia he was a radical and Montini was the lesser evil. On June 21, 1963, Montini after six ballots had the necessary two-thirds majority of the votes to be elected pope (Grootaers 1996. 535).

Giovanni Battista Montini (1897 – 1978) was born in Lombardy to a family of the local landed nobility. He studied at the Jesuit Gregorian University in Rome and the University of Rome. As editor of the Catholic journal Studium he maintained contact with the Christian Democratic Party and was interested in contemporary cultural developments. The French Catholic philosopher Jacques Maritain (1882-1973) influenced his thinking. Maritain was an influential philosopher for French Catholics until the middle of the 20th century, when existential freedoms made the Catholics increasingly sceptic of authoritarian medieval Thomism. Martini worked for two years as Pro-Secretary in the Secretariat of State, when in 1954 he was unexpectedly appointed Archbishop of Milan. He was created cardinal only in 1958 (Schelkens and Mettenpenningen 2013. 207).

Cardinal Montini collaborated with the cardinals who were reformers at the Second Vatican Council. As pope he progressively turned authoritarian and theologically conservative. Paul VI made Lercaro stop debating celibacy at the Council. There is also the group called “Jesus, the poor and the Church”, that wanted to make the Council work for the poor of this world. Cardinal Lercaro and Cardinal Gerlier from Lyon and the Melchite patriarch of Antiochia, Maximos IV and other bishops met with experts in order to address the social problems of the world at the Council (Famerée, Joseph. 1998. “Vescovi e diocese (5–15 novembre 1963).” In Il concilio adulto settembre 1963 – settembre 1964. Vol. 3 of Storia del concilio Vaticano II, directed by Giuseppe Alberigo, 133–209. Bologna: Società editrice il Mulino. 182–83). Paul VI considered this pastoral engagement as political agitation. When Cardinal Lercaro condemned the American bombings in Vietnam on January 1, 1968, Paul VI removed him from his office.

Preparing the Second Vatican Council

To successfully prepare his Council John XXIII stayed in contact with the Curia, that is the Secretariat of State, the congregations - bureaucratic departments watching over doctrine, discipline, missions, bishops, priests, seminaries, universities, liturgy, creation of saints, etc. - and the tribunals. He wanted the bureaucrats to be involved and engaged in the process of preparation (Alberigo. 1995. 64). Apparently, he calculated the price he had to pay for this collaboration (ibid.). To minimize the damage, he made his loyal Cardinal Secretary of State of the Roman Catholic Church, Domenico Tardini, (1888-1961) president of the pre-preparatory commission of the Council and the unknown Pericle Felici (1911-1982) secretary (ibid. 62). The Secretariat of State conducts all diplomatic and political functions of the Holy See as the most important department of the papal government of the Catholic Church, the Roman Curia. Since 1947 Felici had been an auditor of the Roman Rota, the highest court of the Roman Catholic Church (ibid.). Felici was ordained priest at the age of 22 years and one year later he finished his doctoral thesis in theology on Sigmund Freud. Four years later he was awarded a doctorate in Canon Law, appointed rector of the Pontifical Roman Seminary, and in 1943 Professor of Moral Theology at the Pontifical Lateran University in Rome (Faggioli 2013. “Pericle Felici”. In: Schelkens and Mettenpenningen 2013. 103). With the nomination of Tardini the Pope bypassed the conservative president of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith and Morals, the former Holy Office for the Inquisition, Cardinal Alfredo Ottaviani (1890-1979) (Fouilloux, Étienne. 1995. “La fase ante-preparatioria (1959–1960). Il lento avvio dell`uscita dall`inerzia.” In Il cattolicesimo verso una nuova stagione. L`annuncio e la preparazione gennaio 1959 – settembre 1962. Vol. 1 of Storia del concilio Vaticano II, directed by Giuseppe Alberigo, 71–176. Bologna: Società editrice il Mulino.1995. 63).

Domenico Tardini was born in Rome and like the later John XXIII studied at the Pontifical Roman Seminary. Tardini together with Giovanni Battista Montini was the main assistant to Cardinal Eugenio Pacelli (1876-1958), Cardinal Secretary of State until 1939, when he became Pope Pius XII. John XXIII would not give up control of his project and stopped all efforts of sabotage by the bureaucrats in his administration. They could foster their illusions of being in control of the process and trying to codify the results before the event took place at all, but John XXII would not give in to damage his project of free discussion at the Council (ibid. 70). Alberigo is very clear on the unwavering perseverance and determination of John XXIII for the Council.

John XXIII wanted to familiarize himself with the bishops’ pastoral concerns all over the world. In a simple letter dated June 18, 1959, Tardini communicated the Pope’s wish to the bishops and invited them and the superiors of the religious orders, the universities and the nuncios to express themselves about what they judged to be useful subjects for the Council to deal with (Fouilloux 1995,107). He asked for an open analysis, for their opinions, and their advice for preparing the coming Council. As possible themes he suggested dogmatic problems, the life of the clerics and lay persons and problems of the Church; the answers should be written in Latin and arrive in Rome before September 1, 1959 (ibid.). Of the 2,812 invited bishops 77% answered (ibid. 112). The answers in general were conformist (ibid. 122). They did not question Rome’s call for pastoral reform and did not waste energy in coming up with proper ideas, suggestions and ideas for the Council (ibid.). The pre-preparatory commission received over 9,000 suggestions that Tardini organized according to the doctrinal and canonical mental schemes of an experienced and long-serving Curial bureaucrat. At the top of the two resulting volumes of 1,500 pages stood the chapters on the clerics and religious, followed by chapters on the lay, the liturgy, the social activities of the Church, the missions, and a short chapter on ecumenism (ibid. 153).

This compilation was published on February 11, 1961, by Secretary Felici (bid.: 154) and then put into the archives. The compilation was not integrated into preparation of the Council’s program (ibid.). The documents that were prepared for the Council were based on 12 short synthetic reports that were extracted by Tardini from the 1.500 pages (ibid. 157). In February 1960 John XXIII received these 12 reports and most Curia officials received only this synthesis of 300 pages that ultimately were reduced to 18 pages: The heterogeneous was made homogeneous, the complex was presented simplified and the pluralistic was replaced by the dominant curial mainstream (ibid.). The Curia’s congregations received the synthesis and were invited to react (ibid. 160). Tardini produced from his synthetic reports a document that he passed with the approval of John XXIII to the presidents of the commissions, who had to prepare from it documents that were to be presented at the Council.

The secretaries of those commissions were mostly taken from the Curia’s congregations. They were priests with secure doctrinal and canonical competence and therefore able to restrain any innovative effort that might have been left in Tardini’s report (ibid. 170). On June 5, 1959, John XXIII publicly still declared that he wanted to avoid any interference or confusion between the Curial congregations and the Council (ibid. 171). In the end, the organization chart of the commissions that were to prepare the documents for the Council mirrored the congregations of the Curia with two exceptions: In the spring of 1959 John XXIII first met the German Jesuit Augustin Bea (1881-1968), rector of the Pontifical Biblical Institute of the Gregorian University and confessor to Pope Pius XII. In December 1959 Father Bea was named Cardinal (ibid. 172). Bea’s influence on the Vatican Curia was very limited at the time and began to grow only when in June 1960 John XXIII created the Secretariat for Promoting Christian Unity with Bea as its president. Cardinal Bea was independent from the Curia but had little influence on it. Nevertheless, he was tirelessly working for Jewish-Catholic reconciliation and the end of Roman Catholic antisemitism. He was a persistent advocate for the ecumenic cause, for critical exegesis of the Bible and for arguing with the Bible and not exclusively from tradition. Cardinal Cento (1883-1973) as president of the Preparatory Committee for the Lay Apostolate was the other exception to the total victory of the Vatican Curia in retaining control of the Council’s commissions (ibid. 170).

Tardini had made clear to the Curia that John XXIII insisted on universal consultation of all bishops in the process of preparing the Council. Tardini also made it clear to John XXIII that the Council would not be possible without the Curia (ibid. 173). The prefects of the congregations became the presidents of the commissions that started to prepare the Council on the basis of Tardini’s report. Tardini was a good product of the Curia’s century-proven administrative tradition (ibid.). He was loyal to the Pope and realistic in his analysis of the Vatican Curia’s resistance to change and reform of the Catholic Church (ibid.). He refused to become president of the Central Preparatory Commission; he was used to staying in the second line (ibid.). Nevertheless, Tardini’s active role as mediator between the interests of John XXIII and those of the Curia was crucial for John XXIII’s success for his project of a pastoral Council (ibid.). The French historian of this phase of the Second Vatican Council’s history ends his work with a bitter observation: consideration of the planet’s biggest problem of that time, decolonization and the future of the many nations that were about to be born, was completely lost during the consultation process (ibid. 176). Reduction of the preparation of the Council to the Roman central government of the Catholic Church and the refusal to communicate with the Catholics and Christians outside Rome on the urgent problems of the Church and the world constituted in the judgment of Fouilloux an intellectual and spiritual hiatus between the Vatican and the world (ibid.).

John XXIII’s address on November 14, 1960, kicked off the work of the preparatory commissions for the Council (Komonchak, Joseph, 1995. “La lotta per il concilio durante la preparazione”. In Il cattolicesimo verso una nuova stagione. L`annuncio e la preparazione gennaio 1959 – settembre 1962. Vol. 1 of Storia del concilio Vaticano II, directed by Giuseppe Alberigo, 177–380. Bologna: Società editrice il Mulino. 1995, 177). There followed many sermons and speeches, where John XXIII explained his great vision of the historic opportunity of the Council. On December 25, 1961, he convoked the Second Vatican Ecumenical Council with the Apostolic Constitution Humanae salutis (ibid.). All speech-acts of John XXIII in preparation for the Council testified to his faith in Christ and the Holy Spirit, and his conviction that this faith constitutes the foundation of a Church, that while witnessing a painful crisis in modern society, hears and feels the task of bringing the hope of the Gospel to the world and humanity. By learning to heed the rhythm of time John XXIII encourages us to follow the recommendation that Jesus gives in Mathew 16:4, where he speaks of the need to “discern the signs of the time” (ibid. 178).

Was John XXIII naïve to work for the realization of the “signs of the times” without considering an institutional reform of the Roman Catholic Church? Pope John XXIII was not naïve; he was a professional diplomat and helped his contemporaries cope with concrete life situations. He accepted dialogue when confronted with criticism of his intentions to hold a Second Vatican Council.

We know of such a dialogue between John XXIII and an important statesman and Catholic, French President General De Gaulle (1890-1970), who was skeptical about the Council that the Pope had announced. In De Gaulle’s memoirs we read what John XXIII during an audience on June 29, 1959, confided to him about his plans for the coming Council. De Gaulle recalls that the Pontifex Maximus - the President of the Grand French Nation chooses to call the pope by the title of the pagan High Priest of the Roman Empire - communicated what was on his mind and spoke with clear serenity and attempting to master his anxiety. The twentieth century had wrought enormous and radical social and political changes that brought much spiritual confusion to Christians. Among the people living under the oppressive yoke of Communist regimes in Europe and Asia, are Catholic communities that are cut off and isolated from Rome. In the liberal regimes of the free world, Pope John XXIII observes an eruption of diffuse challenges, not to religion itself but to its policies, norms, hierarchy and rites. Although this situation preoccupies the pope, John XXIII sees these challenges as but one more of the many crises that the Church lived up to and successfully overcame since the days of Jesus Christ. John XXIII believes that by realizing her values of inspiration and analysis, the Church will once again not fail to find her equilibrium. John XXIII assured De Gaulle of his determination to dedicate his pontificate to overcoming the crisis by practicing the values of inspiration and analysis (Fouilloux 1995, 75-76).

Again, I follow the historian to get some picture of the preparatory process for the Council. In order to supervise and coordinate the ten preparatory commissions John XXIII created a central preparatory commission that he would preside himself (Komonchak 1995, 182). This central preparatory commission also had to work out the rules for the Council’s procedures and management (ibid.). Pericle Felici was made secretary of this central preparatory commission and also secretary general for all preparations for the Council (ibid.). One year after its establishment by John XXIII the central preparatory commission met for the first time in June 1961 and a second time from November 7 to 12, 1961 (ibid.). Discussion of the texts that had been prepared by the preparatory commissions ended in June 1962 (ibid. 321). Since the preparatory commissions and their sub-commissions in general did not cooperate or inform each other about the topics they were working on and the progress they were making, their documents arrived at the central preparatory commission at different and completely unpredictable moments (ibid. 183). Already in May 1960 complaints about the lacking coordination of the preparatory work were expressed by the German cardinals Frings and Döpfner. The French bishops communicated these complaints to John XXIII (ibid. 184). The Pope did not react and only a year later, in the spring of 1962, would ask Cardinal Suenens to prepare an organic thematic plan for the Council (ibid. 379). At the first session of the central preparatory commission the two German cardinals demanded that lay Catholics be allowed to participate at the Council, a request that was denied by John XXIII (ibid. 377). When in November 1961 the central preparatory commission discussed the text on the sources of revelation that had been presented by the theological preparatory commission, substantial criticism was expressed by the cardinals König, Döpfner, Bea, Hurley and Alfrink (ibid. 327). Bea wanted Scripture to be seen as the principal source of revelation. Ottaviani identified tradition as an equally important source of revelation since the Church existed very well without the Holy Scriptures of the New Testament, but not without tradition (ibid. 328). This major doctrinal conflict was now evident and would have to be solved at the Second Vatican Council.

In the central preparatory commission, two blocks formed and during the Council became very apparent. The group of the progressive cardinals was composed of Alfrink, Döpfner, Frings, Koenig, Montini, Léger, Liénart, Maximos IV and Suenens (ibid. 325). The group that defended the prepared conservative texts was made up of the cardinals Browne, Lefebvre, Ottaviani, Ruffini and Siri. The great majority of the members of the central preparatory commission constituted persons that did not intervene as much and decided their vote on a case-to-case basis (ibid.). The historian indicates that the standpoint that Rome equals conservative, and the periphery equals progressive longing for reform, simply does not correspond to the facts (ibid.). There were non-Romans who decisively defended the Catholic Church’s centralized government. There were also Romans like Cardinal Confalonieri (1893-1986), who were strong critics of the Vatican’s centralism (ibid.). Confalonieri was tolerant and open-minded. He was born in Seveso, Northern Italy, and already in 1921 was made private secretary to Achille Cardinal Ratti, Archbishop of Milan, and later Pope Pius XI. In 1941 he was named Archbishop of Aquila and in 1950 Secretary of the Department for the Seminaries and Universities at the Vatican Curia; in 1958 he was made cardinal and 1961 named Secretary of the Congregation for the Bishops (Quisinsky and Walter 2013. 81). The pope appoints the bishops, but the Congregation for the Bishops exerts decisive influence on the world Church by submitting to the pope the nominees for the episcopate. The overwhelming majority of the members of the central preparatory commission, overall, about 200 people, voted according to the issues and not according to a conservative or progressive pattern. The votes floated, majorities changed regularly, and so did the alliances (Fouilloux 1995. 325).

The central preparatory commission on January 2, 1962, sent invitations to 2,851 persons (Wittstadt, Klaus. 1995. “Alla vivgilia del concilio.” In Il cattolicesimo verso una nuova stagione. L`annuncio e la preparazione gennaio 1959 – settembre 1962. Vol. 1 of Storia del concilio Vaticano II, directed by Giuseppe Alberigo, 429–518. Bologna: Società editrice il Mulino. 509-10). Invited were 85 cardinals, eight patriarchs, 533 archbishops, 2,131 bishops, 26 abbots, and 68 superiors of religious orders (ibid.). The bishops came together without having had any previous contact with each other and only came to know each other during the Council. Altogether, 400 bishops could not accept the invitation: 200 were not allowed to leave their Communist countries and 200 were too sick to travel to Rome (ibid.). The invited bishops came from 79 countries: 38% from Europe, 10% from the United States of America, 21% from Latin America, 21% from Asia and 10% from Africa (ibid.).

The Second Vatican Council was a product of middle aged and old celibate men. All these men and most of their theologians, passed by the same kind of formation, the Roman Catholic seminary, or passed by the even more restricted and disciplined formation of the religious orders. 30% of the bishops at the Council and many theologians belonged to religious orders (Grootaers 1996. 515).

There is a point at describing the seminary as disciplinary apparatus, because “the seminary emphasizes the elements of training, for the explicit production of ‘docile bodies’, that is, individuals who are shaped inside and outside according to the demands of the apparatus that is the Roman Catholic institutions. … A typical day in seminary follows this schedule: 5:30 – wake up call, 6:00 morning mass in the chapel, 7:00 breakfast, 8: school or university classes, 12:00 – lunch, 13:00 siesta, 14:00 school or classes, 16:00 leisure time, 17:30 – freshening/bath (personal hygiene), 18:00 study time, 19:00 – dinner, 19:30 – evening prayer, 20:00 – study time, 22:00 – lights out (Mendoza, Perseville, U. 2001. Foucault, Power, and Seminary Formation. Ateneo de Manila University.110. https://journals.ateneo.edu). Examinations, the regular evaluation, consultations, counselling sessions, etc., guarantee disciplinary control by the system. The overall director, the dean, spiritual director, etc. guarantee the socialization for the functioning of the seminarist according to the hierarchical nature of the seminary and the Roman Catholic Church itself (ibid. 123).

The bishops and theologians at the Second Vatican Council had passed this kind of formation and had become obedient subjects of the Roman Catholic Church. All of a sudden, the terror of aggressive war on the world by the German National Socialist Party’s dictatorship under Hitler made it impossible for many of Europe’s Catholic priests to follow the norms and discipline they had internalized during their formation. The priests were confronted with the sufferings, crimes, and atrocities of war, with the real needs of the orphans and widows, with the women left alone with their children, with the angst of the soldiers, with the wounded soldiers at the battlefield and with the terror regime of the Nazis. To survive and to help others to survive was the priority and not obedience to the Church hierarchy. The Nazis tried to suppress priestly pastoral work and the administration of the sacraments. The priests had to learn to disobey the Nazis and their superiors if they were sympathizing with Nazi ideology. Improvisation, responsibility, self-care, and courageous care for others changed the disciplined mind-set of many priests and members of religious orders in Europe. When later they became bishops, and attended the Second Vatican Council, they had not forgotten their wartime experiences. A cautious spark of personal responsibility, freedom of thought and religious dignity had started to glow in the minds of many European and North American Catholic clerics and was nurtured by the program of Pope John XXIII for Church reform and modernization. There are exceptions: The bishops from Eastern Europe tried to survive the suppression of the Church by communist totalitarianism and could not travel to Rome for the Council. In Spain general Francisco Franco won with the help of Hitler civil war and overthrew the Second Spanish Republic. From 1939 to his death in 1975 his brutal dictatorship turned Spain into a confessional state, where Roman Catholicism was the only legal religion. The authoritarian Catholic hierarchy willingly followed his national Catholicism that abolished religious liberty and suppressed religious tolerance (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Francisco_Franco). In Portugal the dictator António Salazar supported Franco in the Spanish Civil War but succeeded in keeping Portugal and Spain neutral during the Second World War. Salazar died in 1970 and his regime was overthrown by the Carnation Revolution in 1974 (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/António_de_Oliveria Salazar).

The Second Vatican Council edited three documents on the priests and catholic education:The Decree on the Ministry and life of priests, the Decree on the training of priests and the Declaration on Christian education. All three fell short of structural reform (Grootaers, Jan. 1996. “Il concilio si gioca nell’intervallo. La seconda preparazione e i suoi avversari.” In La formazione della coscienza conciliare. Il primo period e la prima intersessione ottobre 1962 – settembre 1963. Vol. 2 of Storia del concilio Vaticano II, directed by Giuseppe Alberigo, 385–558. Bologna: Società editrice il Mulino.: 520). These texts reemerged late on the Council’s agenda because the bishops were occupied with ecclesiology and the apostolate of the lay and forgot to assess the identity of the priests in depth. The bishops discovered very late that the priests were essential for getting the teachings of the Council to the people and that they would need a theological preparation for this pastoral work (ibid.: 524). The reform of the formation of the priests in the seminaries always was a top priority in the speeches of important cardinals like Döpfner, Suenens and Lercaro and pastoral-minded bishops like Charue, Garonne, Hurley and Weber; these speakers had large personal experience in the formation of priests as educators, instructors and confessors (ibid.: 525). The Council did not listen. The already visible crisis of priestly vocations in the West was not at all addressed. The experiences of the worker priests in France were not taken into consideration and their model of a Church that is close to the people of Go’d and not any more a clerical Church was not apprehended (Vilanova, Evangelista. 1998. “L´intersessione (1963–1964).” In Il concilio adulto.settembre 1963 – settembre 1964. Vol. 3 of Storia del concilio Vaticano II, directed by Giuseppe Alberigo, 367–512. Bologna: Società editrice il Mulino. 417).

At the end of September 1965, archbishop Darmojuwono, president of the Indonesian episcopal conference protested at the presidency of the Council that a minority of the commission on the priests insisted on the formation of priests according to the system of seminaries as the Council of Trent had established (Velati 2001 Velati, Mauro. 2001. “Il completamento dell’ agenda conciliare.” In Concilio di transizione settembre – dicembre 1965. Vol. 5 of Storia del concilio Vaticano II, directed by Giuseppe Alberigo, 197–284. Bologna: Società editrice il Mulino. 205.). Together with the fifty-two bishops from Indonesia, he claimed the possibility of other forms of formation such as formation houses attached to parishes in slum areas that enable a close pastoral contact with the poor. Already at the beginning of 1965, Archbishop Darmojuwono had brought up ecclesiastical celibacy and he insisted several times on discussing celibacy. The intervention of Paul VI on October 11, 1965 stopped him and the Council to further discuss celibacy. The Council fathers were exhausted anyways and were not willed to further discuss the matter (ibid.: 210). The positive vote on the documents for priestly formation on October 13, 1965, was not caused by a sudden consensus but was rather the effect of the general fatigue.

Beginning of the Second Vatican Council

Preparations for Vatican II were time- and cost-intensive (Alberigo 1995. 519). This contrasts with the fact that when the Council opened on October 11, 1962, it seemed to start at zero. In retrospective, it looks like the preparation process was an enormous failure: Over 90 per cent of the prepared schemes finally were not even taken into consideration by the assembly (ibid.). It is also true that the great majority of the bishops rejected the prepared texts. Nonetheless, the historian Alberigo concludes that the easy euphoria that was generated by the unexpected success in confronting the almighty Curia at the beginning of the Council cannot mask that the Curia was jealous of the preferential relationship existing between the Pope and the Council and worked to become an active player again (ibid. 525). The century-old historic dialectic of the powers of the Pope and the Council now became a complex triangle of three parties, the Pope, the Council, and the Roman Curia (ibid. 526).

The Council was opened in a magnificently orchestrated event. In a festive procession 2,500 bishops solemnly preceded the Pope on this throne from the Apostolic Palace across Saint Peter’s Square to St. Peter’s Basilica, where Holy Mass was celebrated (Riccardi, Andrea. 1996. “La tumultuosa apertura dei lavori.” In La formazione della coscienza conciliare. Il primo period e la prima intersessione ottobre 1962 – settembre 1963. Vol. 2 of Storia del concilio Vaticano II, directed by Giuseppe Alberigo, 21–86. Bologna: Società editrice il Mulino.. 31). The enthusiasm of most of the bishops and the crowds outside Saint Peter’s contrasted sharply with the harsh criticism of some expert reformers of the liturgy and supporters of the liturgical movement that stayed away from St. Peter’s Basilica that day (ibid. 32).

On this October 11, 1962, everyone waited for the Pope to speak (Riccardi 1966, 34). Gaudet mater ecclesia, Mother Church is glad and rejoices, was the theme of John XXIII’s opening sermon. The Pope apparently enjoyed the talent to inspire men and women to listen to him with sympathy in a heartfelt manner. His message was that the modern world is to be seen positively and with optimism. Once again, John XXIII communicated his conviction that Christ is always at the center of the individual’s life, at the center of history as a whole (ibid. 35-37). John XXIII was not an arbitrator who would end the confusion and contradictions reigning in the upcoming Council (ibid. 34). His ambition was to inspire the Council to find its own clarity and take possession of its direction. John XXIII insisted on the validity of doctrine and the superiority of mercy and compassion over condemnation and threat (ibid.).

The second day of the Council lasted about 50 minutes and was terminated when the venerable 68-year-old Cardinal Liénart from Lille motioned that the Council be adjourned for several days (ibid. 47). The Council fathers were already busy poring over prepared lists to select bishops for the Council’s ten commissions. Liénart argued that the Council could not immediately vote on the 160 bishops and cardinals who were to participate in the Council’s various commissions (ibid.). Cardinal Frings, like Liénart one of the ten cardinals on the Council’s presidential board, took the floor after Liénart, seconded his motion, and informed the Council that also Döpfner and König wanted time to clarify whom they wanted to vote for the commissions (ibid.). The aula of the Council spontaneously applauded for a long time and the Dean of the College of Cardinals, Tisserant, granted his approval (ibid.). John XXIII told Liénart that he had done well (ibid. 51). This decision made clear that the Council would not be a simple continuation of the preparatory commissions. Liénart’s decision to take the floor was the beginning of the Council’s self-government. The bishops’ conferences began to produce lists of possible members for the Council’s commissions and the Council fathers would vote on the candidates in the aula of Saint Peter’s (ibid. 54). This was revolutionary compared with Vatican I (ibid.). Bishops who were not very attentive to what was going on at the Council suddenly became interested in taking a more active part in the goings-on (ibid.). John XXIII established the Secretariat for Extraordinary Affairs of the Council and the Secretary of State, Cardinal Cicognani was to be president of this new institution that would steer the Council in accordance with the mood of the bishops in the aula (ibid. 77). Since the presidents of the ten commissions of the Council were all members of the Roman Curia, John XXIII wanted to limit their influence on the Council with the help of relatively open-minded cardinals from the Secretariat for Extraordinary Affairs. Members of this Secretariat were the Cardinals Siri, Montini, Suenens, Döpfner, Confalonieri, Meyer from the United States and Cardinal Wyszynski from Poland, who was the only cardinal from the Communist East at the Council (ibid.).