What Went Wrong?

This week the bishops attending the second session of the Vatican Council in Rome will end their deliberations and go home. Behind them they leave a great historical movement brought temporarily to a halt. From a council that promised to bring about a sweeping inner renewal of Roman Catholicism, Vatican II has become a parliament of stalemate, compromise and delay.

The change in pace of the council reflects the change in Roman Catholic leadership that took place between sessions. Vatican II was first summoned by that quiet revolutionary, Pope John XXIII, who intuitively felt the need for an aggiornamento--a modernization of the church. His instinct was dramatically proved right during the first session, when a majority of the prelates rejected the standpat schemata on liturgy, the sources of revelation and the nature of the church proposed by the conservative Roman Curia.

In vote after vote, the bishops made it clear that they wanted to address the world in decrees that would be free of what Belgian Bishop Emile Josef De Smedt called "triumphalism, clericalism, juridicism." Pope John stayed behind the scenes, but each time he was called upon to mediate a dispute between the progressives and the conservatives, he quietly but effectively sided with the forces for change. Last December, when the first session ended, no ecclesiastical legislation had been passed, but the progressives had cleared the way for action at the second.

All the while, Pope John was ill--which won sympathy for his vision. Then, last June, he died. His death created a vacuum of inspiration.

Liturgical Change. Superficially, there was much to applaud about the council's second session. In a decisive straw vote that concluded a meandering debate on whether bishops shared ruling authority over the church with the Pope, the prelates overwhelmingly approved the democratic notion of collegiality. They narrowly voted to discuss the Virgin Mary in the schema on the church rather than as a separate item; giving special emphasis to Mary is a pet cause of the conservatives, but any major Marian pronouncement will disturb ecumenical discussion between the church and Protestants.

Just before the session ended, they undertook a lively discussion on a schema concerning ecumenism that included chapters condemning anti-Semitism and favoring individual freedom of worship for all men. This week, in one of the last acts of the session, Pope Paul will formally promulgate an impressive decree on liturgical changes that authorizes greater use of the vernacular in the Mass and sacraments.

But it is in doubt whether many of the progressive sentiments expressed by the bishops in debate will ever be enacted into legislation. And the only other substantive measure passed at the session is as much a step backward as the liturgical decree is a step forward. Last week the council railroaded through without discussion a schema on communications that tolerates state censorship of mass media, suggesting civil authorities prevent "harm to the morals and progress of society through the bad use of these instruments."

Orders from Paul. Why did the session slow down? One reason seems to be the overconfidence of the progressive majority's leaders, who did not marshal their forces effectively in the debates. Another factor was council procedure, which proved tailor-made for inaction. Although four cardinal moderators were given executive mandate by Pope Paul, they soon found that they had little operable authority over the twelve council presidents or the six-man secretariat of the council. And in much the way that a committee chairman can bottle up a bill in the U.S. Congress, the Curia men in charge of the commissions stalled on the vital job of incorporating changes requested by the bishops into revised schemata. The important theological commission met so infrequently that Pope Paul formally requested it to get down to work.

But that order was one of the few clear-cut decisions made by Pope Paul, who seemed to justify John XXIII's description of him as "a Hamlet"--and who must bear a large share of the blame for the session's disappointing record. Like his predecessor, Paul VI preferred to stay out of sight so that the bishops could act in freedom; but he often failed to intervene when intervention was called for, and sometimes settled for half-measures when he did act. Fortnight ago, for example, he finally responded to petitions signed by a number of bishops, asking that the council commissions be allowed to elect their own presidents to replace the roadblocking Curia officials. Instead, the Pope chose to increase the number of commission members from 25 to 30, left the presidencies in Curia hands.

Rushing Toward Schism. In public, Pope Paul made unmistakably clear his admiration and friendship for such council progressives as Belgium's Leo Josef Cardinal Suenens, and even gave open praise to Fathers Yves Congar and Karl Rahner, two council theologians whose ideas are intensely disliked by the Curia. But the Pope also seems to have found himself more a prisoner of the Curia than John ever was--and he apparently decided that he cannot afford to alienate its powerful conservatives by acting strongly against them. As an administrator, Pope Paul proved to have a common failing of the intellectual: a desire to know more facts and viewpoints than are necessary to make a vital decision. Moreover, some Vatican observers believe that he regards the council as a check on his freedom to govern the church. "I fear that the bishops are rushing toward the brink of schism," he told a visitor recently.

At week's end the council secretariat announced that the third session would meet from Sept. 14 to Nov. 20 next year. Until then, the twelve council commissions will revise and boil down the remaining undiscussed schemata preparatory to final passage. How successfully these revisions will reflect the tone expected by the majority is problematical. Barring a last-minute change of heart by Pope Paul, the revisions will still be supervised by Curia cardinals. A case in point is the chapter favoring religious liberty, which was composed in part by U.S. Jesuit John Courtney Murray. In response to considerable pressure from Italian and Spanish bishops, Pope Paul intends to have it revised by the Theological Commission and its president, Alfredo Cardinal Ottaviani, who is dead set against Murray's ideas on liberty of conscience.

As Genoa's conservative Giuseppe Cardinal Siri put it: "The Pope and the bishops pass. The Curia remains."

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