Council on the Move

The second session of Vatican Council II got off dead center at last. By an overwhelming majority, the 2,300 Roman Catholic prelates gathered in St. Peter's Basilica voted in favor of the proposition that bishops collectively share with the Pope, by divine right, "full and supreme power" over the church. The vote did not challenge papal supremacy, but it did indicate that the council will eventually provide Catholic bishops with more rights and authority than they now have--and it marked the first sign of real progress since the session began. Said Pittsburgh's Bishop John Wright: "This marks the turning point of the council."

Until last week the council had been characterized more by illusory busyness than by substantial action. Nearly every day the bishops made a bit of news by ratifying some new chapter of the long schema (draft proposal) on liturgy. For example, they authorized greater use of the vernacular in the Mass and the sacraments, and the setting of a fixed date for Easter if secular governments and other Christian bodies agreed. In reality, most of these votes simply rubber-stamped ideas that had been approved in principle at the 1962 session. The rest of the time, the bishops listened to a repetitious debate on the first item on the session's agenda, the schema De Ecclesia (On the Church). Few of the fathers could follow the Latin debates, and there was a significant upsurge of business at St. Peter's coffee bars. Richard Cardinal Gushing went home to his $7,000-a-day charity fund-raising in Boston.

Overlapping Authority. It was Pope Paul's intention to make the Vatican Council as democratic as possible; as it happened, he provided it with a cumbersome machinery that seemed to have more overlapping authority than the U.S. space program. In theory, executive mandate to guide the debates was given to four cardinals, called moderators, three of them with strong progressive leanings. But the jurisdiction of this quartet was limited by twelve cardinal presidents, who acted as a kind of Supreme Court for the council. And the moderators also had no real authority over the important theological commission, governed by Alfredo Cardinal Ottaviani of the Holy Office. This commission was charged with rewriting the schema De Ecclesia; but it soon became clear that Ottaviani was violently opposed to incorporating in it an idea supported by a majority of the bishops: the notion of collegiality.

That word covers the question of whether the church as a whole is governed by the Pope and Curia alone, or whether the college of bishops shares in this authority, and if so to what extent. Council progressives believed, as one American theologian put it, that "this council was called to abolish papolatry." But to council conservatives, collegiality means a sharp loss of power. Archbishop Dino Staffa, an official of the Roman Curia, contended that "supreme power over the entire flock of the faithful was entrusted to Peter and Peter alone." The implication is that such power was also entrusted to the Curia, which is responsible to the Pope and not to the bishops.

The debate on collegiality lasted nearly two weeks. Finally Belgium's Leo Josef Cardinal Suenens, one of four supervising moderators of the council and a leader of the progressive forces, proposed that the prelates be allowed to take a straw vote on the four key propositions of the schema. Up popped the council's secretary-general, Archbishop Pericle Felici of the Curia, to argue that there was no provision in the rules of order for any such poll.

Siding with Suenens. Felici's point of order set off a flurry of behind-the-scenes politicking. At a closed-door meeting in the library of the Vatican Secretary of State, the 15 council presidents and members of a coordinating commission that is responsible for presenting the agenda spent three hours arguing whether Suenens had any right to propose the floor vote. They voted eleven to nine against him. Both Suenens and Ottaviani had a series of interviews with Pope Paul. Although reluctant to interfere with the debate, the Pope had already received complaints from several bishops about the slow pace. At length he sided with Suenens.

The Pope's decision broke the deadlock. The bishops approved Suenens' proposals in favor of collegiality. They turned down a Curia-sponsored move to make the Virgin Mary a major subject of debate, and passed a Curia-opposed proposal to revive the order of deacons in the church. With Munich's Julius Cardinal Dopfner, one of the four moderators, gaveling them onward, the bishops quickly approved a chapter in the liturgical schema on sacred art that approved "modern" art but condemned extreme abstractionism. This week they moved on to debate a second key schema that pinpoints the division of rights and duties of the bishops and the Roman Curia.

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