Pope John XXIII announces a General Council for Church reform

The Roman Catholic Church is organized as a strictly hierarchical monarchy. In 1962, Pope John XXIII assembled 2,300 bishops from all over the world in Rome. This was the largest committee in recorded world history to get together so far. 2,300 bishops is a lot of men, but rather than representing one billion Catholics they represented the territories where Catholics were living. The Pope is the sovereign of the Vatican State and enjoys absolutist legislative, executive and juridical power. This sovereign power of the Pope in 2013 still causes the separation of Protestant and Catholic Christians. 500 years after Luther’s Reformation the pope’s power had developed absolutist. A huge communication network helps the Pope, the state secretary, the cardinals and papal nuncios to govern the Catholic world church (Nuzzi, Gianluigi. 2012. Seine Heiligkeit. Die geheimen Briefe aus dem Schreibtisch von Papst Benedikt XVI. 268. München: Piper). Nuncios from papal embassies in 179 countries send information and receive instructions from the Pope or the cardinal State Secretary on pastoral, political and economic matters. In 1900 CE, there were only about 20 apostolic nunciatures, in 1978 CE, there were already 84 and in 2005 CE, there were 174. The number is still growing in order to secure the Vatican’s soft power influence on the geopolitical world stage. The nuncios are supposed of collecting detailed information on the local bishops and the men of their administration, on the state of the dioceses concerning loyalty to Rome, on the mood of the Catholics concerning new candidates for bishops in dioceses and on much more that is of interest for the Roman central government of the Church (ibid.).

Given the centralist structure of the government of the Roman Catholic Church, nobody expected in the 1950s that a pope would call for reform. In 1958, a head of the Catholic Church got elected by the Cardinals that surprised the world with his love for all people of the planet.  Angelo Giuseppe Roncalli was born on November 25, 1881, as the fourth of fourteen children to a family of sharecroppers that lived in a village in Lombardy. He followed a priestly vocation and In 1953 was created cardinal and named Patriarch of Venice (Schelkens, Karim, and Jürgen Mettepenningen. 2013. “Johannes XXIII.” In Personenlexikon zum Zweiten Vatikanischen Konzil, edited by Michael Quisinsky and Peter Walter, 143–45. 143. Freiburg im Breisgau: Herder). After eleven ballots, Roncalli was elected pope on October 28, 1958, at the age of 77 (Alberigo, Giuseppe. 1995b. “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. 21. Bologna: Società editrice il Mulino). As John XXIII, he was not a caretaker pope as the cardinals might have wanted him to be. Exercising his authority as absolutist monarch of the Roman Catholic Church, he called the historic Second Vatican Council (1962–1965) for Church reform (ibid.).

Giuseppe Alberigo, the historian of the transition phase that the Second Vatican Council marks, tells me that 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. 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. 9. Bologna: Società editrice il Mulino). What does this transition phase look like? I will try to describe some elements. We learn from the European Values Study[i]  (Denz, Hermann. 2000. „Postmodernisierung von Religion in Deutschland—Ost-West-Vergleich im europäischen Kontext“. In Religiöser und kirchlicher Wandel in Ostdeutschland 1989–1999, edited by Detlef Pollack and Gert Pickel, 70–86. 80-86. Opladen: Leske + Budrich). Especially in Europe and in North America the religious institution Roman Catholic Church is not any more an unquestioned authority for guiding the lives of the Catholic women, men and queer. Religion has gotten personalized, and the individual realizes freedom, dignity and the right to responsible social choices.

Today, there is a huge gap between the Catholic Church’s hierarchy and the believers, Catholic women, men and queer. From the point of view of this analysis, one can claim that Vatican II is the transition from the obedient Catholic congregation to the individual Catholic man and woman, heterosexual, homosexual, bisexual, transsexual, intersexual, lesbian and queer. Individual Catholics leave the Church but continue to live their beliefs and convictions as Christians, as believers, as individuals developing an individual spirituality. It is clear from my point of view and experiences with the European clergy that the white, male celibate priests are not willing and capable of adapting to their changing cultural environment. I observe also that many of the Catholic white men teaching at the Theological Faculties of State Universities in Austria and Germany are not following the transition. The Catholic academics do not think and write about the spiritually empowered individual Christian woman, man or queer. The male and female theologians who tried to join the transition and published on the importance of the individual, in the last 25 years were systematically denied teaching at Catholic Faculties by the central Church authorities in Rome. Writing on possibilities of divorcing, on married men and women priests, on an appreciation of lust and sexuality as mutual experience of intimacy, on gender questions and Human Rights within the Catholic Church led to censure, repression and the loss of the job in the Catholic institution. Alberigo describes the hard work of John XXIII to make the few Cardinals he was collaborating with in the preparation of the Council speak their minds and stop remaining in the passive mode of respectful obedience to the papal authority.

My doctorate students at the Faculty of Theology at Innsbruck University are Catholic priests coming from India, Indonesia, Nigeria, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Uganda, the Ukraine and China who show impressive efforts to respect their cultures, languages, rites and customs and to fight for basic Human Rights for the suppressed women and men they are living with and working for in their countries. These basic Human Rights concern Civil and Political Rights, Legal Rights, Economic, Social and Cultural Rights. Clothing, food, education, work, family and a life that is free of private, public or state violence are basic concerns of these young pastors. They fight for these basic Human Rights in the civil society but not within the Catholic Church and its institutions.

Without Alberigo’s life work, it would be impossible for me to comment on a description of this phase of transition (Alberigo, Giuseppe. Director. 1995–2001. Storia del Concilio Vaticano II. Bologna: Società Editrice il Mulino). Peace and unity were the elements John XXIII brought to the Council and the world; in unity with the people, he desired peace and some justice for the poor on this earth (Alberigo 1995b, 33). There was no word on freedom and liberty on his mind. I did not study Pope John’s writings systematically; therefore, I only want to present some disturbing facts. Pope John XXIII condemned the writings of Pierre Teilhard de Chardin on the compatibility of evolution and Christian faith (Fouilloux, Étienne. 1995. “La fase ante-preparatoria (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, 71–177. 90. Bologna: Società editrice il Mulino). This condemnation is a blow to the conciliation of science and faith. That Pope John insisted on Latin as official language of the Catholic Church documents his will to further maintain the rift between clergy and people. Questions over the ordination of women (whether diaconate, priesthood, or episcopate) were not on the mind of Pope John XXIII. He certainly was not thinking that in a few years Catholic lay women, men and queer would claim the priestly ordination of women, non-celibate men and gays, as well as the blessing of same-sex unions and marriages. I do not think that Pope John XXIII was familiar with the concepts of discrimination and the equal dignity, liberty and rights of all humans. He was a mild and severe patriarchal father with a high sense of responsibility that love, and peace would rein his family. He was aware that the last word was up to him, but he knew that peace demands many words before the last was lasting. Talking the other day on the phone to Annemarie Fenzl who for more than 50 years served Franz Cardinal König from Vienna as a private secretary, she told me about Pope John: He was able to listen to the people and give the impression that the people are heard. That was the surprising and healing quality of John XXIII.

Alberigo’s motivation for his work was to ease the controversy over the acceptance and reception of the Council (Alberigo 1995, 10). He wanted to lay the foundation to overcome wounding controversy he writes at the beginning of the five big volumes of his history of the Second Vatican Council (ibid). I am grateful for his methodical skills that insist on situating the texts within the spirit of the Second Vatican Council (ibid.). Alberigo describes this spirit as the inspired task of renovation of the Church by paying brotherly and sisterly attention to the lives of the people without discrimination of race, religion or life. Allow me to note that the discrimination of gender and the obligation to fight this injustice was not on the agenda of the Council. Nevertheless, the spirit of the Council again links the Church and the message of the Gospel. I am studying the Second Vatican Council in order to contribute with love to realizing the effective rule of Human Rights law within the Catholic Church.

The work of the historian consists first in the assessment of documents. Alberigo will study the sources, compare them and carefully use them as elements for the historic picture he constructs (Alberigo 1995, 10). John XXIII prepared the announcement of a general Council for January 25, 1959, by hand (Alberigo 1995b, 21). Stuck in the customs of the Codex of Canonic Law of 1917, the Vatican bureaucracy changed the expression “general” for the traditional “ecumenical”. The expression ecumenical refers to the unity or cooperation of Christians, “general” refers to the whole world. John XXIII announces a general Council reaching out to the men and women of all religions of this world. The cardinals of the Roman Catholic Church prayed in the Roman Basilica of Saint Paul Outside the Walls for the unity of the Christian Churches (bid. 19). John XXIII’s choice of the Basilica of the Apostle of the Gentiles for the announcement of a general council concerning the whole world is coherent with the foundational work of Saint Paul in the first Christian century (ibid.).

The political context of the announcement of the surprising Council was the Cold War and the end of national colonialism. The world was split into 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 get the sympathy of the Third World for their organization of social life. The United States of America and Western Europe tried the same. The Mass Media began to demonstrate their growing influence on shaping and making public opinion, the industrialization accelerated, and the agricultural sector declined. Still communication possibilities were far from the computer age that began some 15 years later, the World Wide Web was not yet working. The people of the so-called Third World did not yet speak internationally, the people of the so-called First World were preparing to live the sexual revolution, Woodstock, and the Hippies strive for liberty and communication criticized the restrictions of individual freedom by the institutions of society. The Catholics behind the Iron Curtain, as all women, men and queer of the so-called Second World under Soviet communism, were silenced and kept in social, cultural and economic isolation. Regardless of these inhuman limitations and restrictions on individuals and their social, economic, cultural and spiritual life, John XXIII announced a General Council working for peace and justice in the whole world (ibid. 22).

The euphoria that was produced by this Second Vatican Council in the Roman Catholic Church for me as a child in the Catholic countryside of Austria was rather disturbing and strange. I did not understand why and about what the engaged and active Catholics, the young priests and the nuns and monks were excited. Apparently, something very special was happening to them so that they gave the impression to be on a trip of happy making drugs. My mother told me of the later Franz Cardinal König’s struggle to resist the Nazis. As a young parish priest in the Diosese of Lower Austria, during World War II he formed the consciences of Catholic youth, ignited the spirit for a Christian life and encouraged the dreams for a life in freedom of the young boys and girls like my mother and her brother suffering in Nazi Austria. This small but influential underground Church was preparing young Christians for a fundamental change of traditional Catholic life. According to my mother, this change would include the construction of new cities, new communities, tolerance, freedom and loving solidarity of the sisters and brothers in the Church. They would educate their children for an even better future. My personal experience with the institutional Church as a child and youth contrasted with these utopian descriptions and dreams. Nevertheless, I heard of alternative Christian models and communities.

The reasons he gave in the announcement of the Council for the need of a Council were his authentic convictions; he wanted to care for his diocese as a pope and bishop of Rome. In the ten years from 1904 to 1914 as secretary of the bishop Giacomo Radini Tedeschi in Bergamo, Italy, the later John XXIII (1881–1963) was formed by the bishop’s pastoral commitment, that is by his concern and caring for the individual’s well-being in the Diocese according to the traditional Catholic conception of private and public life. The young priest Roncalli learned from his bishop Radini that it is possible to organize, hold and manage a Diocesan Synod in order 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, 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. 400 years later, the young Roncalli got a scholarship to study theology at the Roman Seminary. As Pope John XXIII did, many of his cardinals had studied in the Grand Pontifical Roman Seminary near the Lateran Basilica in Rome, too. 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. As Pope John XXIII Roncalli will return to his Seminary and the Lateran Basilica where in 1904 he was ordained a priest by the then bishop of Rome. He was taking his pastoral obligations for the diocese of Rome seriously.  His predecessors neglected this spiritual source for their papacy (ibid. 21). From his papal basilica Saint Peter, John XXIII walked over to Saint John Lateran and took possession of his patriarchal basilica as bishop of Rome; he walked to the prisons and visited the sick in the hospitals.

As Shepherd of the Universal Church, on January 25, 1959, John XXIII announced in the

Roman Basilica of Saint Paul Outside the Walls a General Council. The General Council for the bonum animarum that is the wellbeing of the people was his idea (Alberigo 1995b, 20). The idea to complete the Council with the aggiornamento of the Roman Catholic Church’s Canon Law and the announcement of a Roman Synod John XXIII received from advisers in the first three months of his papacy (ibid, 21). The pastoral context of Tedeschi and 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 1995b, 26).

His announcement of the Council also invited the faithful of the separated Churches to participate in this symposium of grace and fraternity. It sounds to me like an invitation to an ecumenical party in freedom and consensus. The bureaucracy of the Vatican, like the majority of the bishops all over the continents, did not understand Pope John’s universal care for peace and justice, and mutilated the official announcement. The bureaucrats called the separated Churches not Churches but communities and thus discriminated their status of equal brothers and sisters; they were not invited to participate, as Pope John wanted, but were admonished to follow the Roman lead. The cardinals elected John XXIII as a transitional pope and not as the pope of transition from a closed Roman Catholic society to a Roman Catholic Church that opens to the cultures of the world outside the walls of the feudal and autocratic structures of the Vatican (ibid, 30). The public greeted the announcement of a General Council with enthusiasm and interest (ibid. 48). On July 4, 1959, Pope John XXIII wrote down the name of the Council to come. On July 14, 1959, he communicated the name Vatican II for the Council to his Secretary of State Cardinal Tardini. Four days later he informed members of the theological faculties in Rome of his decision (ibid. 66).

[i] https://europeanvaluesstudy.eu/ (accessed July 20, 2020).