Rev. Ralph Wiltgen: The Rhine Flows Into the Tiber: A History of Vatican II

[Stone]

THE THIRD SESSION

September 14 to November 21, 1964

ORGANIZED OPPOSITION

For a long time it appeared as though the European alliance would have undisputed control over the Council. This could have proved unfortunate, because power, be it financial, political, military, academic or theological, has a way of being abused when a near monopoly is obtained over it. As the Council progressed, however, at least half a dozen organized opposition groups came into being and performed yeoman service by forcing the majority to take a closer and more careful look at schemas before accepting them.

We have already seen how the Bishops’ Secretariat came into being to concentrate on texts concerning religious orders, and how it collaborated at all times with the Roman Union of Superiors General.

During the third session Archbishop Heenan of Westminster (formerly of Liverpool) founded the St. Paul’s Conference, an English-language group which placed the chief emphasis on matters of a practical nature. Its members were drawn from the British Commonwealth, principally, and also from Ireland and the United States.

Another opposition group, to be treated in detail in a later chapter, consisted of thirty-five cardinals and five superiors general, who concerned themselves especially with the problem of collegiality.

Archbishop Philip Hannan of New Orleans, Louisiana, founded an opposition group at the very end of the Council to give weight to certain amendments that he wished included in the war section of the schema on the Church in the modern world.

Cardinal Siri of Genoa, working in collaboration with Monsignor Luigi Rossi, faculty member of the Genoa major seminary, prepared and printed numerous qualifications and commentaries on schemas which were widely circulated among conservative elements in the Italian hierarchy and in the Spanish- and Portuguese-speaking hierarchies of Europe and Latin America.

Besides these six organized opposition groups, which were either ignored by the press or unknown, there was the International Group of Fathers (in Latin, Coetus Internationalis Patrum), which—together with the Roman Curia—was depicted as the epitome of conservatism, holding back the progressive elements in the Council. This group received much unfavorable publicity in newspapers, reviews, and books. Its founder and driving force was Archbishop Geraldo de Proenca Sigaud of Diamantina, Brazil, and the group was founded precisely to help gain a hearing for conservative minority views.

During the first and second sessions Archbishop Sigaud organized weekly conferences, but the Italian members left the group when it was rumored that Monsignor Loras Capovilla, the private secretary of Pope John XXIII, had stated that he would not consider attacks on the Roman Curia as an offense against the Pope. New impetus came from the number of votes against combining the schema on the Blessed Virgin Mary with the schema on the Church, since this proved, as Archbishop Sigaud said, that a very large number of Council Fathers were “trying to orientate the Council along doctrinal lines traditionally followed in the Church.” But no conservative cardinal bold enough could be found to give the organization the needed backing until September 29, 1964, during the third session, when Cardinal Santos of Manila agreed to serve as the organization’s vocal patron in the College of Cardinals.

This group then purchased a small offset press, installed it near the Vatican, and hired an office staff. Three days after the meeting with Cardinal Santos, Archbishop Sigaud issued a bulletin announcing that the International Group of Fathers would sponsor a conference every Tuesday evening open to all Council Fathers. The purpose of these meetings, the announcement said, was “to study the schemas of the Council—with the aid of theologians—in the light of the traditional doctrine of the Church and according to the teaching of the Sovereign Pontiffs.” Patrons of the meetings were Cardinals Santos, Ruffini, Siri, Larraona, and Browne.

Soon the International Group of Fathers became so active and influential that it aroused the indignation of the European alliance, and one of the alliance cardinals stated that Archbishop Sigaud ought to I be “shot to the moon.” Katholische Nachrichten Agentur, the Catholic news agency subsidized by the German bishops, called him an archconservative and depicted him and his group as working covertly against the aims of the Council. In spite of this, an almost endless flow of circular letters, commentaries on schemas, interventions, and qualifications flowed from his pen and those of the bishops and theologians whom he united through his group. Long before a schema came I up for discussion, a careful program had been worked out, indicating exactly what aspects of the schema should be supported or attacked in written or in oral interventions.

On November 9, 1963, during the second session, Bishop Carli, one of the group’s most active members, drafted a letter to Pope Paul VI in which he appealed to him “to ask the Cardinal Moderators to abstain completely from making public interventions in their own name, both inside and outside the Council hall.” In the eyes of all, he said, they appeared to be “interpreters of the mind of the Supreme Pontiff,” and there was suspicion that they had leanings “in a certain definite direction.” But Cardinal Ruffini advised against making this appeal, and it was dropped.

Father Ratzinger, the personal theologian of Cardinal Frings, while dining one day with a group, mentioned that the liberals had thought they would have a free hand at the Council after obtaining the majority in the Council commissions. But in the speeches and voting in the Council hall, he said, they began to notice some resistance to their proposals, and consequently commissions had to take this into consideration when revising the schemas. Unknown to Father Ratzinger, one of those seated nearby and within hearing distance was Archbishop Sigaud, who chuckled at this public admission by a representative of the European alliance.