Vatican Program Notes

The concert in the Vatican's sleekly modern audience hall was decidedly ecumenical. On the podium was Leonard Bernstein, who recalled during rehearsals the "deeply touching" response accorded by Catholics to his controversial Mass. At last week's "unrefusable" appearance, he conducted the Harvard Glee Club and the Newark Boys Chorus in a program ranging from Bach's Magnificat to Bernstein's own Chichester Psalms, sung in Hebrew. The occasion was an annual concert that this year coincides with the tenth anniversary of Pope Paul VI's accession to the papacy.

But the Pope's anniversary was marked by other ecclesiastical notes as well. One was an extraordinary offer attributed to the Pope by a Vatican ecumenical adviser, the Rev. Antonio Javierre. Pope Paul, said Javierre in an interview with the Salesian News Agency, would be willing to move out of both his Vatican Palace and St. Peter's Basilica "if it were the price to be paid to achieve [Christian] unity." According to the priest, the Pontiff made the remark in a recent private conversation in response to Javierre's own questioning. The Pope reportedly added that he could take up residence in the Lateran Palace outside the Vatican, the nominal headquarters of Popes in their capacity as Bishops of Rome.

Presumably, Paul was indicating willingness to make a dramatic symbolic renunciation of the Vatican surroundings that emphasize his position as supreme head of the church. But it hardly seems probable that the Pope has any real intention of moving out of the Vatican. And in any case, he has said nothing about giving up the papacy's claim to infallible authority on matters of faith and morals, which many Protestant and Orthodox ecumenists consider a far greater obstacle to unification than the Pope's choice of homes.

Moreover, the Vatican conveniently provided an example of how such authority can operate within the church. While Javierre's report was circulating, the Sacred Congregation for Bishops issued a stern, 250-page directive to the 3,200 bishops of the church. It set forth stiff new standards for a bishop's lifestyle (he should be "internally and externally poor"; his house should be "modest") and cautioned bishops to avoid "authoritarianism" and to respect "liberty of opinion." But it left little room for dissenting opinion from bishops themselves. Their duty is to be "tuned in with the church." They should "exercise great caution" in discussing publicly the problems of the church, "even if urgent, still very complicated and difficult." Otherwise, the document warned, a bishop's statements could be reported widely, especially if they were "in contrast with the common opinion of the Pope and the [other] bishops"--in other words, if they made news.

Even as the directive came down, the Vatican was still reverberating from a 10,000-word blast recently issued by Dom Giovanni Franzoni, abbot of the famous Benedictine monastery of St. Paul's Outside the Walls in Rome. Dom Giovanni, who is also a bishop, distributed his angry document, entitled "The Earth Is God's," to journalists at the June meeting of Italy's bishops in Vatican City. In it, he charged that the church is involved in "capitalistic exploitations at the economic, social and ideological levels." As one effort to reverse that alliance, Dom Giovanni announced, he intends to leave his monastery--but not his capacity as a bishop--to labor among the impoverished shack dwellers of Rome's peripheral shantytowns--"the new desert, which we must make fruitful."

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