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

[Stone]

THE THIRD SESSION
September 14 to November 21, 1964

INFORMATION PLEASE!

Acoustics at the First Vatican Council, which began on December 8, 1869, were notoriously bad. All General Congregations took place in a transept of St. Peter’s without the assistance of a public address system. At first not even the speakers who had powerful voices could be heard by all the Council Fathers, so the hall was reduced in size. But even then many of the seven hundred Fathers could still not hear everything that was said.

During the Second Vatican Council, thanks to the installation of a public address system which operated flawlessly, none of the more than two thousand Council Fathers ever had any difficulty hearing the speakers. Never once in the four sessions did the system fail, nor did it cause an interruption in a single meeting. The acoustical problems had been solved by the technicians of Vatican Radio, and the Latin which came over the loudspeakers was crystal clear.

In spite of the excellence of reproduction, however, many Council Fathers were disappointed that a simultaneous translation system had not been installed. Mr. Mauro Ercole, a Vatican Radio engineer, stated that the problem was not a technical one. Experiments had been carried out, and all technical problems had been solved. Nor was the problem a financial one, because Richard Cardinal Cushing of Boston had offered to finance a complete simultaneous translation system,

At a press conference on October 29, 1963, halfway through the second session. Archbishop John Krol of Philadelphia, an Undersecretary of the Council, said that there would be no simultaneous translation system operating during the Council “because of personnel problems.”

By the time the fourth session began, this was an idea long since forgotten. But two American priests, Father Daniel J. O’Hanlon, a Jesuit from Los Gatos, California, and Father Frank B. Norris, a Sulpician from Menlo Park, California, found simultaneous translation an absolute necessity for their work. The number of English-speaking observers and guests for whom they provided translations of Council interventions during the meetings had grown so large by the fourth session that it was no longer possible to reach all of them with the unaided human voice. Although the two priests had received no previous formal training, they began providing simultaneous translation services on September 30, 1965, and continued them until the end of the Council.

Some bishops noticing the system in operation listened in and expressed the wish to have something similar. Father O’Hanlon, Father Norris, and Mr. Ercole all said that it would have been a simple matter to hook up headphones to the same microphone for the benefit of all Council Fathers who understood English. This system could have been used also for the five other languages.

The chief reason why simultaneous translation was not introduced on a large scale, however, was the objection by some Council Fathers that their interventions might not be correctly translated. Since doctrinal matters were at issue, they feared that a completely wrong interpretation might be placed upon their words through the incorrect translation of a word or phrase, and they therefore preferred to address the general assembly directly in Latin.

Another factor contributing to the poor state of internal communications at the Council was the complete lack of any official public record of the oral and written interventions submitted each day. Although the members of every responsible legislative body around the world have the right to obtain the full text of all speeches, this was not true at the Second Vatican Council.

Some questioned the advisability and even the possibility of printing the complete text of the written and oral interventions and giving them to the Council Fathers. This would have amounted to more than a hundred pages each day. Although it would have been impossible for everyone to read each intervention, those among the Council Fathers or among the periti who were experts in the subjects under discussion would have appreciated being able to make a careful study of the interventions, which in turn would have aided them to be more precise in submitting or preparing proposals and amendments.

An ideal arrangement would have been to print the entire texts of all oral and written interventions, in the Latin original, together with a Latin introduction of some fifteen lines in which the author of the intervention summarized his own proposals. In this way each Council Father could have had a reliable written summary of all interventions, and could have carefully examined the complete text of those which particularly interested him. Also, if the Council Fathers had been informed that their written interventions were to be placed in the hands of every member of the assembly, there would have been less reason for so many wanting to speak in the Council hall.

The lack of any official daily record for the Council Fathers was one of the great weaknesses of Vatican II. In seeking substitutes, large numbers of bishops subscribed to L’Osservatore Romano, which, during the first session, carried brief summaries of each General Congregation in Italian, English, German, French, and Spanish. But from the second session onward only the Italian version was published.

Father William K. Leahy, faculty member of St. Charles Seminary at Overbrook, Philadelphia, was a student of Sacred Scripture in Rome when Vatican II began. Personally convinced that a great theological reawakening was taking place at the Council, and dismayed that American bishops apparently had not been caught up in this fast-moving stream of theological thought, he decided that the reason for this was a lack of information on the precise nature of the discussions which were taking place in the Council hall. He then got the idea of producing for the American bishops a daily summary in English of all interventions read on the Council floor. He called it the Council Digest and, with the help of a handful of young priests, prepared the daily synopses of the oral interventions. The first issue appeared on September 30, 1963, the date of the opening business meeting of the second session, and the bulletins continued uninterruptedly until the final business meeting of the fourth session.

Publication of the Council Digest had been authorized by the Administrative Board of the United States Episcopal Conference “for the information of the Bishops of the United States.” Since Father Leahy’s team consisted of skilled theologians who used the actual texts of the oral interventions, the Council Digest became the most authentic public report available to bishops. From the beginning two hundred copies were printed for the American bishops, and seventy copies for the Canadian bishops. But it soon became necessary to print a total of 750 copies because English-speaking bishops from more than twenty-five countries were anxious to receive these authentic summaries.

It was very strange that the Council Fathers, who were able to pass any bill they wished, and who at the end of the second session solemnly promulgated a decree on communications media in which they spoke about the right to information, were unable for lack of united effort to properly and officially inform themselves about their own Council.