The death of Pius XII and the election of John XXIII in October 1958 marked an historic turning-point. The pontificate of John inaugurated a new style of government, “completely unusual in carrying out the papal role in the last two centuries”.12 Among the first acts of his pontificate was to enlarge the college of cardinals by naming new ones, whose number had been fixed at seventy by Sixtus V. There was a certain amazement that the first on the list was the archbishop of Milan, Giovanni Battista Montini, whose banishment from Rome had been seen as a punishment for strong divergence of views with Pius XII.13
On 25 January 1959, in the Benedictine monastery of St Paul’s without the walls, John XXIII announced to the cardinals present and to the whole world his desire to convoke an ecumenical Council. The announcement “had the effect of a fanfare blast inside and perhaps even more outside the Church”.14
The next day, in a Message to the Ambrosian diocese, Cardinal Montini greeted the event with enthusiasm:
“This Council will be the greatest that the Church has ever celebrated in its twenty centuries of history, because of the spiritual and numerical confluence, in the total and peaceful unity of its hierarchy; it will be the greatest for the catholicity of its dimensions, truly involving the whole geographical and civil world. History unfolds with immense and timeless visions before our eyes.”15
Notes:
12. Daniele Menozzi, La Chiesa cattolica e la secolarizzazione, (Turin, Einaudi, 1993), p. 174.
13. Silvio Tramontin, Un secolo di storia della Chiesa, vol. II, p. 259. Mgr Hubert Jedin in his turn defines as “surprising” the nomination of Mgr Montini on 1 November 1954 to archbishop of Milan, as successor to Cardinal Schuster. Il Concilio Vaticano II, in HKG, It. tr., vol. X, 1, p. 123.
14. H. Jedin, Il Concilio Vaticano II, p. 108.
15. G. B. Montini, Discorsi e scritti sul Concilio (1959-1963), edited by A. Rimoldi, (Brescia-Rome, Quaderni dell’Istituto Paolo VI, 1983), p. 25.