On the morning of 11 October 1962 there were over 2,500 Council Fathers gathered in St Peter’s Basilica.25 The solemn ceremony was watched, thanks to television, by millions of people all over the world. In the overflowing Basilica, the choir sang the Credo and then the Magnificat, while the procession of the Fathers solemnly advanced. At the head were the superiors of the religious orders, the abbots general, and the prelates nullius; then the bishops, archbishops, the patriarchs, the cardinals and, in the gestatorial chair, lastly John XXIII.
The incomparable image of St Peter’s Basilica, the presence of the Vicar of Christ and of the successors of the Apostles, made that ceremony a majestic spectacle. Never as in this moment did the Church demonstrate its universal, hierarchical and anti-egalitarian character.
“The opening of the Second Vatican Council” commented Plinio Corrêa de Oliveira “provides us with the occasion to meditate with particular attention upon a truth which we see on a daily basis, but which, nevertheless, modern man, a son of the Revolution, refuses to acknowledge. Just and harmonic inequality is to such an extent at the core of the great works of God that Our Lord Jesus Christ, when founding the masterpiece of creation which is His Mystical Body, the Holy Catholic Church, made it an unequal society. This society has a monarch who is the Pope and who has total and direct jurisdiction over all the bishops and faithful. Each diocese has Spiritual Princes whose duty it is, in union and communion with the Pope, to govern the faithful. And there is the Clergy which, under the direction of the Bishops, rule over the various parishes of Christians.”26
The inaugural speech of the Pope, pronounced in Latin and transmitted live by the media world-wide was, as Father Wenger observes, was the key to understanding the Council.27
“The speech of 11 October was the true charter of the Council. More than an agenda, it established the spirit. More than a programme, it gave the orientation.”28 The novelty was not so much in the doctrine but in the psychological optimistic spirit with which relations between the Church and the world were set: sympathy and “openness”.
In his speech John XXIII criticized the “prophets of doom”29 and stressed how from the assembly “a Magisterium with a mainly pastoral character” would emerge. According to the Pontiff, the Council proposed to formulate the perennial teaching of the Church in language suitable to the new times. The aim, according to a term destined to become fashionable, was that of “aggiornamento” (modernization).30 If the Council of Trent passed into history as the Council of the Counter-Reformation, “it is likely that Vatican II will be known in the future as the Council of Aggiornamento”.31
The first session of the Council lasted from 11 October to 8 December 1962. On the eve of the opening of the Council, Plinio Corrêa de Oliveira arrived in Rome accompanied by a large group of friends and disciples of the Brazilian TFP.32 He stayed there until 21 December, following all the work of the session, which ended without reaching any decision. His feelings continued to be very different from the widespread optimism of the time. “This voyage” he wrote to his mother “is the fruit of long reflection. (…) I could never, under any point of view, give up rendering to the Church, to whom I have dedicated my life, this service at a point in history that is as sad as the Death of Our Lord.”33 In the same letter Plinio states that “never has the siege of the external enemies of the Church been so strong, and never has the action of its internal enemies been so generalized, so co-ordinated and so audacious.”
Plinio Corrêa de Oliveira, who had good knowledge of the revolutionary process, knew with what ease an organized minority can take over an assembly and impose their views on a passive and confused majority. It had happened during the French Revolution and it happened again during Vatican Council II, not by chance defined by some as “the Eighty-nine of the Church”. From the beginning, a limited group of bishops from Central Europe, among whom Cardinals Lercaro, Liénart, Frings, Koenig, Doepfner, Suenens, Alfrink, assisted by their “experts”,34 organized themselves into an efficient structure.35 It had its expression in the weekly meetings of the Domus Mariae, during which information was exchanged or initiatives were co-ordinated “and when necessary the pressures to be exercised on the assembly”.36 Only in a later period, when the progressivist minority in the Assembly became a majority, did the defenders of Tradition start to get organized.
The Brazilian prelates played an important role in Rome. If among the leaders of the progressivist group Archbishop Helder Câmara37 had distinguished himself, on the opposite front, arrayed in the front line were Bishop Antônio de Castro Mayer and Archbishop Geraldo de Proença Sigaud.
During the first session of the Council, Plinio Corrêa de Oliveira installed a secretariat in Rome which actively followed the work of the assembly and offered a constant service especially to the Brazilian prelates closest to him. Around them, a group of conservative bishops and theologians soon formed, among whom Bishop Luigi Carli, Archbishop Marcel Lefèbvre, and a group of teachers from the Lateran University, such as Mgr Antonio Piolanti and Archbishop Dino Staffa. They met on Tuesday evenings at the General Curia of the Augustinians to examine, with the help of theologians, the schema presented each time in the assembly.
Later, on 22 October 1963, at a religious institute of via del S. Uffizio, the first meeting of the group that would take the name of Coetus Internationalis Patrum38 was held. The bishops taking part in the meeting, about thirty, decided that they would meet regularly. Archbishop Geraldo de Proença Sigaud was nominated secretary, and was in his turn assisted by the efficient office of the secretariat made available by the members of the TFP present in Rome.
Plinio Corrêa de Oliveira, who, after his return to São Paulo, daily followed the proceedings of the assembly, understood the depth of the change taking place, which was not only to be read between the lines of the theological language, but was also expressed in significant gestures, destined to have a profound impact on the people. The Council wanted to be pastoral and not dogmatic, but in the century of “heresy in action”, practice can have a revolutionary importance ideas may not have.
John XXIII died after four years of pontificate on 3 June 1963. Only eighteen days later, on 21 June, Cardinal Giovanni Battista Montini, archbishop of Milan, was elected Pope and took the name of Paul VI. In his first radiomessage, he assured that the main part of his pontificate would be dedicated to continuing the Vatican Ecumenical Council II.
Although worried about the likely course of events, Plinio Corrêa de Oliveira wished to demonstrate in Catolicismo “our unconditional adhesion, our limitless love, our entire obedience, not only to the Apostolic See, but also to the august Persons of he who occupied it yesterday and occupies it today”, not without recalling that the latter was the same prelate who in 1949 had sent him a kind commendation on behalf of Pius XII.39
On 30 June 1963, when the Pope, after the Pontifical Mass, put down his mitre and put on the tiara, for the last time after many centuries the solemn formula resounded: “Receive the tiara adorned with three crowns, and know that you are the father of princes and kings, the ruler of the world, the Vicar of our Saviour Jesus Christ, to whom be all honour and glory throughout the centuries.” Among Paul VI’s first decisions was, in fact, to abolish the flabelli, the baldacchino, the gestatorial chair and, with the tiara, the actual ceremony of Pontifical coronation.
The second session of the Council, which was from many aspects the most important, began on 29 September and ended on 4 December with the approval of the constitution Sacrosanctum Concilium on the liturgy. At the beginning of the second session, for the first time the question of Communism was presented in the assembly.40
Notes:
25. On Vatican Council the most recent and complete overall work is the Storia del Concilio Vaticano II, directed by Giuseppe Alberigo, (Bologna, Peeters-Il Mulino, 1995), of which up to now only one volume has been published. Among the abundant bibliography, Cf. also: René Laurentin, L’enjeu du Concile, 4 vols., Paris, Seuil, 1962-6; Antoine Wenger A.A., Vatican II, 4 vols., Paris, Editions du Centurion, 1963; Giovanni Caprile s.j., Il Concilio Vaticano II, 5 vols., Rome, Civiltà Cattolica, 1965-9; Gianfranco Svidercoschi, Storia del Concilio, Milan, Ancora, 1967; Henri Fesquet, Diario del Concilio, Milan, Mursia, 1967; Ralph M. Wiltgen S.V.D., Le Rhin se jette dans le Tibre: le Concile inconnu, Paris, Editions du Cèdre, 1976; La Chiesa del Vaticano II (1958-1978), in Storia della Chiesa, begun by Augustine Fliche and Victor Martin, then directed by Jean Baptiste Duroselle and E. Jarry, Cinisello Balsamo, Edizioni San Paolo, 1994, vol. XXV/1, with ample bibliography on sources and studies.
26. P. Corrêa de Oliveira, “O Concilio e o igualitarismo moderno”, Catolicismo, no. 142, October 1962, p. 7.
27. A. Wenger, Vatican II, vol. I, p. 39.
28. Ibid., p. 38.
29. Documentation Catholique, 4 November 1962, col. 1380.
30. John XXIII, speeches of 11 September 1960 and 28 June 1961.
31. Christopher Butler S.B., L’aggiornamento del Concilio Vaticano II, in La teologia dopo il Vaticano II, edited by John M. Miller C.S.C., (Brescia, Morcelliana, 1967), p. 3, pp. 3-16. “Aggiornamento”, according to Dom Butler means, even etymologically, “modernization”: “La chiesa doveva essere modernizzata” (ibid).
32. Among those who came to Rome were: Fernando Furquim de Almeida, the young prince Bertrand of Orléans-Braganza, Luiz Nazareno da Asumpção, Paulo Brito, Fabio Xavier da Silveira, Carlos Alberto Soares Corrêa, Sergio Brotero. The latter had travelled earlier by ship bringing with him twenty trunks of Catholic propaganda material, which included copies in various languages of Revolution and Counter-Revolution by Dr Plinio and On the Problems of Modern Apostolate by Bishop de Castro Mayer.
33. Cit. In J.S.C. Dias, Dona Lucilia, vol. III, p. 117.
34. The activity of the Council Fathers was flanked by that of the “experts”: the official ones or “periti”, who assisted at the general congregations without the right to vote, and the private ones, sent by some bishops as advisers. Among the latter were theologians such as Fathers Chenu, Congar, Daniélou, De Lubac, Häring, Küng, Rahner, Ratzinger, Schillebeeckx, who would carry out roles of great influence. Cf. J. F. Kobler, “Were theologians the engineers of Vatican II? “ Gregorianum, vol. LXX, 1989, pp. 233-50.
35. “The reality of the Council — according to Cardinal Siri — is this: it was the struggle between the Horatii and Curiatii. They were three and three, in the Council four and four. On that side: Frings, Liénart, Suenens, Lercaro. On this side: Ottaviani, Ruffini, Browne and myself” (Benny Lai, Il Papa non eletto. Giuseppe Siri, cardinale di Santa Romana Chiesa, (Rome-Bari, Laterza, 1993), p. 233). On the origins of what Father Wiltgen calls “the World Alliance” (Le Rhin se jette dans le Tibre, cit., p. 128), Cf. also Dom Helder Câmara, Les conversions d’un évêque, pp. 152-3.
36. R. Aubert, Organizzazione e funzionamento dell’assemblea, in La Chiesa del Vaticano II, p. 177.
37. “This man — recalls Cardinal Suenens — carried out a fundamental role behind the scenes, even if he never spoke during the Conciliar sessions”. Léon J. Suenens, Ricordi e speranze, (Cinisello Balsamo, Edizioni Paoline, 1993), p. 220.
38. On the Coetus Internationalis: M. Wiltgen, Le Rhin se jette dans le Tibre, pp. 147-8; R. Laurentin, Bilan de la troisième session, in L’enjeu du Concile, vol. III, p. 291; R. Aubert, Organizzazione e funzionamento dell’assemblea, pp. 177-9; V. A. Berto, Notre-Dame de joie. Correspondance de l’abbé Berto, prêtre. 1900-1968, (Paris, Editions du Cèdre, 1974), pp. 290-5; ID., Pour la Sainte Eglise Romaine. Textes et documents, Paris, Editions du Cèdre, 1976.
39. P. Corrêa de Oliveira, “… E sobre ti está edificada a Igreja”, Catolicismo, no. 151, July 1963.
40. On the relations between the Church and Communism during the Council Cf. R. M. Wiltgen S.V.D., Council News Service, 2 vols., Rome, Divine Word News Service, 1963; , Le Rhin se jette dans le Tibre, pp. 269-74; A. Wenger, Vatican II, vol. I, pp. 187-346; vol. II, pp. 297-316; G. F. Svidercoschi, Storia del Concilio; Philippe Levillain, La mécanique politique de Vatican II, (Paris, Beauchesne, 1975), pp. 361-439; V. Carbone, Schemi e discussioni sull’ateismo e sul marxismo; Andrea Riccardi, Il Vaticano e Mosca 1940-1990, (Rome-Bari, Laterza, 1993), pp. 217-304.