A Remnant Book Review. . .

What Happened at Vatican II

By Fr. John O’Malley, S.J.

reviewed for The Remnant

by Vincent Chiarello

The Remnant reader may recall that at the end of my recent review of Fr.

John O’Malley’s book, an accounting of what transpired at the Council of Trent, I mentioned that, in the course of describing events, he made several critical comments of the council by noting the achievements of a later one, the Second Vatican Council. I added: "As a matter of comparison, I would be personally interested in his published work on the Second Vatican Council, but that is a task for another time." That time has arrived.

"I am certainly not alone in believing, moreover, that the best - indeed, the indispensable - approach to understanding Roman Catholicism today is through Vatican II. Study of the council is at the same time study of the much larger phenomenon."

Fr. John. W. O’Malley,

What Happened at Vatican II

Despite the abundance of books on what Fr. O’Malley calls, "the most important religious event of the twentieth century," he notes "...missing from the crowd of volumes on the library shelves is a basic book about the council." (N.B.: this book was published a decade ago.) Seeking to address that gap, Fr. O’Malley sets out his plan to erase that deficiency, and allow the reader to understand the importance and relevance of the Second Vatican Council (hereafter: Vatican II).

Fr. O’Malley addresses that problem in a three-fold approach: "provide a essential story line..." from the beginning to the end of the council; "set the issues that emerge in the narrative into their contexts..." and, finally, "provide some keys for grasping what the council hoped to accomplish." But there is also a personal dimension to the narrative which also should be included: Fr.

O’Malley was actually present during the sessions and conferences during the last two years of Vatican II. To begin at the beginning.

While gathering primary source material for his doctoral dissertation (from Harvard) on Giles (Egidio) of Viterbo, a reformer and Prior-General of the Augustinian Order during the first two decades of the 16th century, Fr. O’Malley received a Fellowship to the American Academy in Rome, about a mile from St. Peter’s, from 1963-65.

He attended two Public Sessions and a number of press briefings that took place during the sessions of Vatican II.

As a result, Fr. O’Malley claims he was given a deeper understanding of the similarities and differences between the 16th century (Trent) and that of the 20th (Vatican II). After leaving Rome, Fr.

O’Malley returned to the Weston Jesuit School of Theology, where he taught a course on "The Great Councils: Trent and Vatican II," and published his first article about Vatican II six years after leaving the American Academy.

From 1962 through 1965, Vatican II’s participants met in four separate sessions, each lasting about ten weeks, but Fr. O’Malley makes an important point about what happened while the Council was in the intersessions, i.e., when, during the remaining nine months, the council was not meeting: "...several bishops (in all, about 2200 attended the council) and theological non-voting "periti" (experts) determined the course of the council almost as much as did the actual debate on the floor of St. Peter’s."

Pope John XXIII had appointed 201 periti at the opening of the council; at its conclusion, there were over 500.

Among them were Karl Rahner, S.J.; Hans Kung, Henri de Lubac, S.J.; and the Dominican, Yves Congar, who is considered "the father and inspiration of Vatican II." All of these priests had been suspected of heterodoxy during the pontificate of Pope Pius XII, and removed from their teaching positions.

The influence of these periti would cause serious problems during the four sessions, especially with the more traditionally-minded clergy who attended. "The air of serenity these documents breathe obscures the fact that some of them were hotly, often bitterly, contested in the council and survived only by the skin of their teeth."

Some critics of the council would add "duplicity."

Continued on Page 12

What Happened at Vatican II

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What is not contested, however, is that Pope Paul VI promulgated 16 documents in his name and that of the council. "They are the council’s most authoritative and accessible legacy, and it is around them that study of Vatican II must turn." The highest rank were the 4 "constitutions;" followed in importance by 9 "decrees," and, finally, 3 "declarations," two of which, Nostra Aetate, which dealt with the Church and non-Christian Religions, mainly Judaism, and On Religious Liberty, have assumed much greater importance with the passage of time.

No "schema" (preliminary text) would have as many modifications and revisions as the decree on "Religious Liberty," the contribution of the American Jesuit and peritus, John Courtney Murray, who a decade earlier had been to forbidden to write on the subject of state-church relations.

Although finally approved after the Progressive wing at the council exerted its influence, its wording was deeply criticized by nine bishops, who after reading the schema, commented: "...

we no longer recognize Catholic theology." Hovering above the council was a palpable, but absent, figure whose influence would be seen in many of the documents that would emerge: Jacques Maritain, who insisted that the current Catholic teaching …"did not correspond to the reality of the Western democracies nor to the real beliefs of the Catholic politicians who led them."

The evolution of the schema on ecumenism, which was presented in five parts (chapters) in November 1963 during the Second Session, would eventually also include Nostra Aetate (In Our Age), an achievement Fr. O’Malley claims would never have been considered by a gathering of Catholic bishops five years earlier. And with reason, for "Arab opposition" to a positive statement on Jewry "weighed heavily" on the council. Was this declaration an indication that the Vatican was moving toward a recognition of the Zionist State? (N.B. The Vatican did recognize Israel in 1993, during the pontificate of John Paul II.) And what about the future of Christians in Moslem areas, a grave concern for the bishops assembled? The efforts of the late Augustin Cardinal Bea, a German Jesuit, were successful in bringing the subject to the floor for discussion after the head of the Central Preparatory Commission, Cardinal Cicognani, who had been Apostolic Nuncio to the U.S. for 25 years, removed the schema from the agenda. He was overruled by Pope John XXIII, who decided to move ahead with the discussion. To Fr. O’Malley, Cardinal Cicognani’s view of the situation was a parochial one: "...besides its other many faults, Roman theology amounted to an academic mind-game, irrelevant to life."

I cannot leave this subject without a word about Fr. O’Malley’s belief that the stage production of "The Deputy" was a factor, perhaps a major one, in the pope’s acceptance of the Cardinal Bea’s recommendation. The play, which premiered in Berlin three months after the opening of Vatican II, and which I later saw in New York City, accused Pope Pius XII of "silence" during the Holocaust. None of these charges has ever been corroborated! In reviewing Ralph McInerney’s

The Defamation of Pope Pius XII in The Remnant, I wrote: "In 2007, the former head of the Romanian secret police, Gen. Ion Mihai Pacepa, who had defected to the West in 1978, revealed the existence of Operation Seat 12, a disinformation campaign of communist propaganda during the Cold War which targeted the Vatican because of its outspoken anti-communism. The motto of "Operation Seat 12," which may have been an oblique reference to the dozen apostles, was "Dead men cannot defend themselves;" Pius XII had died in 1958.

Pacepa claimed that General Ivan Agayants, chief of the KGB’s Disinformation Department, created the outline for what was to become The Deputy, which portrayed the Pope as a Nazi sympathizer, and that the basic research was done not by its claimed author, the German communist Rolf Hochhuth, but by KGB agents.

Yuri Andropov, former head of the KGB, admitted that had the Soviets known in 1963 what they knew in 1974 due to newly released information that Hitler was hostile to, and plotted against, Pius XII, they never would have attacked the pope."

Another issue dealt with at Vatican II was the delicate handling of the relationship between Scripture and Tradition. The controversy arose with the voting on the many amendments to the text that would ultimately be called Dei Verbum, the Word of God. For one year, primarily behind closed doors, the arguments in favor of and against the schema had reached a fever pitch during the closing session of Vatican II. The "Traditionalists," who always seemed to be the "minority" in Fr. O’Malley’s descriptions, found the relationship was "far too weak," and held the position that "Tradition found truths not found in Scripture, and an essential part of Catholic dogma," citing the decisions of the Council of Trent. After a request by Pope Paul VI, which was withheld in some of the commissions debating the schema, a temporary compromise statement was reached: "the whole of Catholic doctrine cannot be proved from Scripture alone

directly," the last word at the request of the pope, and "vehemently opposed" by Fr. Karl Rahner S.J. The final statement, written into the text of Dei Verbum, and agreed to by the pope, was: "The church does not draw her certainty for all revealed truths from Scripture alone."

There is more - much more - about the discussions and internal squabbles that took place during the council, but my task was to attempt to compare, to the extent possible, the two councils from the Good Padre’s books on the subjects.

It should be obvious to the reader that there is no doubt Fr. O’Malley’s sympathies lie with the "most important religious event of the 20th century."

But why? Early on, Fr. O’Malley cites Vatican II thus: it was "extraordinary and set apart from its predecessors almost as a different kind of entity." He believes that "the council’s massive proportions, remarkable international breadth, and the scope and variety of the issues it addressed," were key factors, but that is only the "tip of the iceberg."

For this American Jesuit, the key to his embrace of Vatican II is his steadfast belief that it was "unique in the annals of ecumenical councils" in that 'the organizers allowed the deliberations of council members to be reviewed by scholars and churchmen who did not share many of the basic assumptions upon which Catholic doctrine and practice were based." By council’s end, 182 observers had been present, and several Protestant clergymen among them, which has often led to the question: were they, although non- voters, able to influence those who did vote? Add to that mix, the ability of radio and television organizations to transmit images around the world as a result of leaked information by the Vatican Press Office, despite an imposed secrecy of the proceedings approved before the opening of the council by Pope John XXIII, and his popularity: Time Magazine named Pope John XXIII, "Man of the Year" in 1962.

Perhaps the true key to decipher Fr.

O’Malley's admiration of the council, and, I believe, the primary source of his approval, is to examine his core belief about the Council: "... the emerging possibility of changes in posture and practice that just a few months ago had seemed set in stone.

The Catholic Church had presented itself internally and to the world as the church that does not change." (emphasis mine) Vatican II had now provided a means of doing so. "All at once, the church had a new image."

Some historians of the council are not as sanguine. In his

History of The Second Vatican Council, published two years after Fr. O’Malley’s book, Church Historian Roberto de Mattei, who occasionally cites Fr. O’Malley’s comments, raises a question about the decrees of Vatican II. De Mattei states that the Council Fathers insisted that the emerging documents be read in the "hermeneutic of continuity" (interpreting them in a traditional way), but if that is true, then something happened at Vatican II that had never happened in the aftermath of any other council: differing interpretations of texts "quarreled" (Pope Paul’s word) with each other.

As a result,

"none of its doctrines, unless ascribable to previous conciliar definitions, are infallible or unchangeable, nor are they even binding..." (Emphasis mine)

Hmmm.

Despite his noticeable "tilt" to a more "modern" interpretation of the fruits of Vatican II, this book is the result of a prodigious amount of research, with details about the council meetings that will hold the reader’s attention throughout. As I wrote in my review of the Padre’s book on Trent, his writing style makes for easy reading. In the end, you may not agree with some, or most, of Fr. O’Malley’s conclusions about Vatican II, especially in light of the current crisis within the Church, but you will walk away better informed. ■

During the December 1965 session of the Second Vatican Council, Pope Paul VI hands Orthodox Metropolitan Meliton of Heliopolis a decree canceling Orthodox excommunications nine centuries before.