On 9 October 1964, after concluding the discussion on atheism, the Coetus Internationalis Patrum presented a petition in which it was asked that “…after paragraph n. 19 of the schema The Church in the modern world, which deals with the problem of atheism, a new and suitable paragraph that deals expressly with the problem of Communism be added”.66
If Vatican II has an eminently pastoral character, the petition affirmed “what problem is more pastoral than this: to prevent the faithful from becoming atheists through Communism?” If the Council had remained silent on a problem of such importance, this silence, in the minds of the faithful, would have been the same “as a tacit abrogation of all that the last Supreme Pontiffs had said and written against Communism”. The existence of pronouncements of so many Popes is not a reason for ignoring the problem, because “greater force and effectiveness is given to the question by the solemn consensus of the whole Council”; nor “can it happen that the Christians of the Church of Silence have in the future greater sufferings than what they now endure”.67
The petition was delivered to the General Secretariat by Archbishop Geraldo de Proença Sigaud and by Archbishop Marcel Lefèbvre, into the hands of the Frenchman Mgr Glorieux. He, however, did not transmit it to the commission that was working on the schema, with the pretext of not wanting to hinder their work. The petition had been signed by all of 454 prelates of 86 countries who were astounded when, on Saturday 13 November, they received the new text in the hall without any mention of their requests. On the same day, Bishop Carli addressed a letter of protest to the Council, denouncing the licence of the commission that had ignored a document of such great importance. In spite of the protests, on 15 November, Mgr Garrone affirmed that the “way of proceeding” of the commission agreed with the “pastoral scope” of the Council, with the “expressed desire” of John XXIII and of Paul VI and with the level of discussions which had been held in the hall on this subject.68 Mgr Carli confirmed his appeal while the scandal exploded in the press.69
On 3 December, the Coetus Internationalis Patrum addressed a final appeal to the Council Fathers that they should vote against the schema as a whole, seeing how it was no longer possible to obtain partial amendments. In fact, 131 Fathers voted against the section on atheism while 75 voices pronounced themselves against the pastoral Constitution Gaudium et Spes, on the Church in the modern world. This Constitution, by reversing the position of the Syllabus, as Cardinal Ratzinger observed,70 wished to be a completely new definition of the relations between the Church and the world.
On 5 December, in the presence of Paul VI, an interconfessional prayer meeting took place, the first in which a Pontiff participated, during which representatives of all the religious confessions present recited passages from the Sacred Scripture.71 On the afternoon of Monday 6 December, “L’Osservatore Romano” published the decree that abolished the Index of forbidden books and changed the “Holy Office” into the “Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith”, affirming that “because charity excludes fear, the defence of the faith will now be better provided for by promoting its doctrine”.72 A public embrace between Paul
VI and the Greek-Schismatic Metropolitan Meliton of Heliopolis, who had come from Constantinople, ratified the cancellation by the Catholic Church of the excommunication of the “Orthodox” Church in 1054. In his homily Paul VI recalled that the Council had produced the encounter between “the religion of man” and the “religion of God”, not failing to cause “amazement and scandal”.73
On 7 December the last public session of Vatican Council II was held. In the presence of the Pope, the secretary general of the Council Mgr Pericle Felici proposed the first four documents for the approval of the Fathers: the pastoral Constitution Gaudium et Spes; the decrees Ad Gentes on the missionary activity of the Church and Presbyterorum Ordinis on priestly ministry, and the declaration Dignitatis Humanae on religious freedom.
Vatican Council II had closed without an explicit condemnation of Communism. The fact was of such importance as “to confirm the rumour of an explicit agreement between the Patriarchate of Moscow and the Holy See”.74 The Council’s silence on Communism did in fact constitute a dramatic omission by the historical assembly. The closing ceremony of the Council took place on 8 December 1965. It, recalls Hubert Jedin with a certain bitterness in his memoirs, “did not correspond to the concept that I had of the solemnity due to an Ecumenical Council. It was a show and as such a concession to the era of the masses and the media”.75
We can imagine the anxiety of Plinio Corrêa de Oliveira in face of the conclusions of the Council and, perhaps, his perplexity over the fact that the two Brazilian prelates close to him and Archbishop Lefèbvre himself had signed the group of Conciliar Acts, including the documents that they had opposed in the hall.76 What is certain is that he assumed an attitude of respectful silence, waiting for the facts to confirm what he already foresaw.
“Presided over by John XXIII and later by Paul VI” he wrote in 1990 “the Vatican Ecumenical Council II was the largest in the history of the Church. It was agreed that all the major topics of the day related to the Catholic cause would be discussed. That the attitude of the Church toward Her greatest adversary at that time be among these topics was essential—absolutely essential! In Her nearly two-thousand-year history, the Church had never encountered such a powerful, brutal and cunning adversary, so completely opposed to Her doctrine. A discussion of contemporary problems facing religion that fails to deal with communism would be as flawed as a world medical conference convened to study today’s major diseases that omits any reference to AIDs…
“This is what Vatican Ostpolitik accepted from the Kremlin.”77
Notes:
66. On the whole business Cf. A. Wenger, Vatican Chronique de la quatrième session, pp. 147-73; R. Wiltgen, Le Rhin se jette dans le Tibre, pp. 272-8; V. Carbone, Schemi e discussioni, pp. 45-68. The text of the petition in Acta Synodalia, vol. IV, pars II, pp. 898-900. Cf. also P. Levillain, La mécanique politique de Vatican II, pp. 343-60.
67. The text of the proposal may be found in the study Il comunismo e il Concilio Vaticano II, by Bishop Luigi Carli, in the book by Don Giovanni Scantamburlo, Perché il Concilio non ha condannato il comunismo? Storia di un discusso atteggiamento, (Rome, L’Appennino, 1967), pp. 177-240. Cf. also G. F. Svidercoschi, Storia del Concilio, pp. 604-05.
68. Ibid, p. 607.
69. The controversy came to the attention of Paul VI who did not deem it necessary to intervene with his weight to rectify the serious irregularities. On 26 November, in the study of the Pope on the third floor of the Apostolic Palace, Cardinals Tisserant and Cicognani met with Monsignors Garrone, Felici and Dell’Acqua. Before the meeting began, Cardinal Tisserant had delivered to the Pope a letter in which among other things he declared: “Anathemas have never converted anyone and even if they were useful at the time of the Council of Trent, when princes could force their subjects to pass over to Protestantism, they are of no use today when each one has the sense of his own independence. As I already told your Holiness, a Conciliar condemnation of Communism would be considered by most people as a political move, and this would bring immense damage to the authority of the Council and of the Church itself. in V. Carbone, Schemi e discussioni, p. 58.
70. Cardinal Ratzinger defines Gaudium et Spes as “a revision of the Syllabus of Pius IX, a sort of counter-syllabus (…) to the extent that it represents an attempt at an official reconciliation of the Church with the world that evolved after 1789”, Les principes de la Théologie catholique, (Paris, Téqui, 1982), pp. 425-427. “This constitution — comments Mgr Jedin in his turn — was greeted with enthusiasm but its later history has already demonstrated that, at the time, its significance and importance had been widely overestimated and it had not been understood how deeply that ‘world’ it was wished to gain for Christ had penetrated into the Church”, Il Concilio Vaticano II, p. 151.
71. Cf. G. Caprile, Il Concilio Vaticano II, vol. V, pp. 453-7.
72. AAS, vol. 57, 1965, pp. 952-5.
73. A. Wenger, Les trois Rome, (Paris 1991), p. 190. The text of the homily in Acta synodalia, vol. IV, pars VII, pp. 654-62; It. tr. in G. Caprile, Il Concilio Vaticano II, vol. V, pp. 501-05.
74. A. Riccardi, Il Vaticano e Mosca, p. 281.
75. Mgr Jedin, Storia della mia vita, it. tr., (Brescia, Morcelliana, 1987), p. 321.
76. At first Archbishop Lefèbvre seemed to deny that he had signed these documents (Itinéraires, April 1977, pp. 224, 231). His signature is however shown by the Acta synodalia, vol. IV, pars VII, p. 809, 823. Mgr Carbone, in charge of the historical Archives of Vatican II, checked that the authentic signature is shown on the originals (D. Menozzi, La Chiesa cattolica e la secolarizzazione, p. 224). The importance of the signature is underlined by the magazine Sedes Sapientiae 131, winter 1990, pp. 41-2 and no. 35, winter 1991, and by abbot Georges de Nantes, “Situation tragique de l’Eglise”, La Contre-Réforme Catholique au XXe. siècle, no. 266, July 1990, and nos. 280, 281, 282, February-March, April, May 1992.
77. P. Corrêa de Oliveira, Communism and AntiCommunism on the Threshold of the Millennium’s Last Decade.