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

[Stone]

THE THIRD SESSION
September 14 to November 21, 1964

SEATING THE PATRIARCHS

No other Council document had so short a conciliar life span, from the time it was first discussed on the Council floor to its solemn promulgation, as the Decree on Eastern Catholic Churches. The general assembly discussed the schema at the third session, from October 15 to 20, 1964. Votes were taken on individual parts of the schema on October 21 and 22. The schema was then returned to the Commission for revision, and submitted to the general assembly for a further vote on November 20. On the following day, it was solemnly promulgated by Pope Paul VI, at the public session which concluded the third session. Thus its conciliar life span had been five weeks and two days.

The position of the Eastern-rite Churches to the Latin-rite Church was bluntly stated early in the second session by Coptic Archbishop Isaac Ghattas of Thebes, in Egypt, in connection with the schema on the Church. “It would seem,” he said, “that for many Council Fathers the Universal Church is the Latin Church, which through a separate schema concedes so-called privileges to a minority group, the Eastern Churches.” Many churchmen of the Latin Church, he said, looked upon the Eastern Churches, both Catholic and Orthodox, “as ecclesiastical oddities or exotic creations,” instead of “as sister Churches which together with the Latin-rite Church make up the Universal Church.” This attitude of the Latin-rite Church was resented, he said, and neither the Catholic nor the Orthodox Eastern Churches would or could accept the Latin Church’s tendency to act as though it alone were the Universal Church, dispensing privileges. In the course of his intervention, he pointed out that the schema on the Church made no mention of the different rites within the Church, or of the patriarchs.


Archbishop Ghattas spoke on Thursday, October 10, 1963. On the following Monday, October 14, a visible change was evident in the seating arrangements in the Council hall. Six patriarchs of the Eastern-rite Churches, who had formerly occupied places immediately after the cardinals, were now seated at a table of their own, directly across from the cardinals. Their table, like those of the Moderators and Presidents, was covered with a green cloth and draped in red. It was on a platform one step high. (That of the Moderators was two steps high and that of the Presidents three.) In the official announcements that day, the Secretary General drew attention to the fact that the patriarchs of the Eastern rites had been assigned new places in the Council hall.

The casual observer might have thought that this greater attention and eminence bestowed upon the patriarchs was a direct result of the fiery intervention of Archbishop Ghattas four days earlier. But the Church of Rome moves much too slowly for the cause to have been as recent as that! The cause went back not four days but four years, to a letter written to Pope John XXIII by Patriarch Maximos IV Saigh, Melchite Patriarch of Antioch, Lebanon.

In that letter, written on October 8, 1959, the Patriarch expressed his joy, and that of the Greek-Melchite-Catholic Church as a whole, at the Pope’s announcement of an Ecumenical Council. Despite his advanced age (he was eighty-one at the time of writing), he said that he wished to take part in the Council in person, because the Eastern Catholic Church represented the hope existing for reunion between the large numbers of Orthodox Christians and the Holy See in Rome. However, he said, there was “one preliminary difficulty” in the way of his personal and fruitful participation in the work of the Council, which he wished to explain “with simplicity and confidence.” It concerned the rank of the patriarchs in the Catholic hierarchy and at the Ecumenical Council.

He explained that this question had “occupied much of the attention of the bishops and superiors general of our Churches gathered for their annual synod, over which we presided, at Ain-Traz, in the second half of August 1959.” To that synod, he said, it had seemed illogical that the Council, while striving to break down the barriers between the Catholic and Orthodox Churches, should at the same time seat the patriarchs of the Eastern Catholic Churches after the cardinals. One of the most cherished rights which the patriarchs had always enjoyed was their precedence in rank. In earlier centuries, the patriarchs had always followed immediately after the Pope, who himself was still called Patriarch of the West.

“In fact,” the letter continued, “ecclesiastical tradition from the earliest centuries consistently lists the rank of the sees in the Universal Church in the following order: Rome, Constantinople, Alexandria, Antioch and Jerusalem. Ecclesiastical tradition is likewise unanimous in recognizing that those in office in those five patriarchal sees take precedence, in accordance with the rank of their respective sees, over all other ecclesiastical dignitaries. In conformity, then, with this ancient and unanimous tradition, the Sovereign Pontiff of Rome is followed immediately in the hierarchy of the Church by those who head these four other patriarchal apostolic sees.”

Patriarch Maximos explained that the cardinals gathered around the Pope were really his auxiliaries in so far as he was Bishop of Rome. Their dignity sprang from their participation in the dignity of the first see, which was Rome. But since this dignity was theirs only by participation, it was not logical that they should take precedence over the patriarchs of other patriarchal sees.

At the First Vatican Council, the patriarchs had been seated after the cardinals. This was the first time in history that such a thing had happened, and Patriarch Maximos described it as the result of “a regrettable anti-Eastern mentality which at the time dominated certain elements of the Roman Curia, a mentality comprehensible during a period of history when the West did not know the Eastern Church as it does in our day, and when the Eastern Catholics themselves . . . had a certain inferiority complex toward Europe, which was then at the height of its colonial power. But Your Holiness would certainly not approve of such a mentality.”

The members of the Orthodox Churches, he went on, “wish to see from our example what place the Roman Church would give to their patriarchs in case of reunion ” He closed the letter with an expression of confidence that Pope John would take the necessary steps to provide the “only just solution which our proposal merits.”

Patriarch Maximos never received a reply to this letter.

Undaunted, he wrote another letter in the same vein on September 20, 1962, three weeks before the opening of the Council. He addressed it to Archbishop Felici and explained that the annual synod of the Greek-Melchite-Catholic Church had begged him to make a further attempt to reach Pope John, and also the Council Presidency, through the Secretary General. The request was the same: that the patriarchs of the East should have reserved for them at the Council “the rank assigned to them by the canons of the earliest ecumenical councils, that is, the first place immediately after the Supreme Pontiff.” He pointed out that the decisions of the earliest ecumenical councils in this matter had been respected at the Council of Florence in 1439, where, by order of Pope Eugene IV, the Patriarch of Constantinople, Joseph II, had occupied the first place after the Pope and preceded the cardinals.”

Patriarch Maximos was making this appeal, he explained, because the patriarchs of the East knew that those responsible for protocol at the Vatican were preparing to give precedence to the cardinals over the patriarchs at the forthcoming Council. “The question is a grave one,” he warned, “and may constitute a nearly insurmountable obstacle to future union between the Orthodox Churches and the Catholic Church.” But for the fact that he might give scandal to his own people, he would prefer “not to appear at the forthcoming Council so as to avoid a diminution, in our person, of the honor due to the patriarchal sees of the East.” A week later he sent Archbishop Felici six copies of a memorandum “on the rank of the Eastern patriarchs in the Catholic Church.”

On October 4, Archbishop Felici acknowledged the receipt of the letter and memorandum. “I have attentively read the considerations presented on the question,” he wrote, “and shall submit them to the Holy Father.” But again there was no reply from Pope John. And when the Council opened ten days later, the patriarchs of the East were seated after the cardinals, just as they had been at Vatican I.

After the first session, another synod was held at the residence of Patriarch Maximos IV at Ain-Traz. Since no action had been taken by the Vatican on their previous requests, the patriarch and synod now decided to publish the entire correspondence on this matter as an open letter to the Council Fathers. This drastic measure seemed, however, to have no more effect than previous measures, since, at the opening of the second session, under Pope Paul VI, the patriarchs were still seated after the cardinals.

Ten days after the opening of the session, Archpriest Borovoy, one of the two observer delegates from the Moscow Patriarchate of the Russian Orthodox Church, told a reporter, “When I return to Russia, no one is going to ask me what the theologians said. But they will ask, Were some of the Eastern patriarchs there, and what places did they occupy?” Then he added, “I must tell you that the places which they occupy in St. Peter’s are not in fact conducive to ecumenical dialogue.” These remarks were published in the Paris Figaro of October 12, 1963.

When the patriarchs of the Eastern Catholic Churches walked into the Council hall on Monday, October 14, they found waiting for them new places of honor opposite the cardinals. The significant gesture had been ordered by Pope Paul VI. But did it mean that they were above the cardinals in rank? Most people thought so.

A year later, at the third session, the schema on the Eastern Catholic Churches came up for discussion.

Archbishop Ghattas proposed on October 16, 1964, that the schema should be suppressed and its contents inserted in other schemas, where the treatment of the subject more properly belonged. Since the Eastern Catholic Churches were parts of the one Catholic Church, he said, there should not be a separate schema on them.

Patriarch Maximos said that the weakest chapter of the schema was “indubitably the one devoted to the patriarchs.” He called it “inadmissible” in its existing form. “In the first place, it is false to present the patriarchate as an institution proper to the East,” he said. “The first patriarch in the Catholic Church is the Pope, the Bishop of Rome, who is described in the Annuario Ponlificio itself as ‘Patriarch of the West’.”

He also objected to the “infinite number of times” that patriarchs were obliged to have recourse to the Sacred Congregations of the Roman Curia. The patriarch and his synod, he said, “without prejudicing the prerogatives of the successor of Peter,” should normally be the highest authority for all affairs concerning the patriarchate.

Maronite Bishop Doumith of Sarba, Lebanon, told the assembly that the great hopes stirred in the Eastern Churches by the Second Vatican Council had “almost completely vanished after an examination of this schema.” Apart from the praise which was usually given the Eastern Churches in any discussion of the subject, he said, “there is nothing of momentous importance in the schema: prejudices are not corrected, useless things are repeated, special problems are not always resolved in the best manner and, finally, the more serious matters which ought to be treated are avoided.”

The most serious problem of all, he said, that of having bishops of different Eastern Catholic rites in the same see, with jurisdiction over the same territory, was passed over. In so doing, he maintained, “the Council seems to be neglecting forever a unique occasion for bringing about a necessary reform. At least it should be stated that reform is necessary, even if it cannot be carried out at once." After pointing out that little would remain if matters which were better handled in other schemas were omitted, he requested the assembly to “reject the entire schema in all tranquillity, inserting certain points in other schemas, and referring other points to the code of canon law.”

Auxiliary Bishop Gerald McDevitt of Philadelphia pointed out that the schema obliged converts throughout the world to retain their rite on becoming Catholics. This was contrary to the entire spirit of the Second Vatican Council, he said, which had so much to say on liberty of conscience and the pastoral and ecumenical spirit. Recalling his ten years of service in the apostolic delegation in Washington, D.C., he said, “I worked almost daily on petitions requesting transferral to another rite, and I know well how much time is required to prepare these petitions for the Holy See . . . Ordinarily six months and often a full year are required before such petitions are processed and a decision reached.’ In his opinion it was “quite surprising, not to say cruel,” to make it compulsory for persons who became Catholics to apply to the Holy See for permission to transfer from one rite to another.

Discussion of the text on the Eastern Catholic Churches ended on October 20. Since 88 per cent of the assembly asked for an immediate vote, the voting took place on October 21 and 22. On each of the seven ballots, an average of 91 negative votes and 235 qualified affirmative votes were cast. On the second ballot, on the section covering the point stressed by Bishop McDevitt, there were 719 qualified affirmative votes and 73 negative votes. This meant that only 63 per cent of the assembly was satisfied with the text as it stood, and that the text must therefore be revised.

A total of 607 Council Fathers had submitted qualifications which in substance favored the proposal made by Bishop McDevitt. The Commission on the Eastern Churches, however, divided up the qualifications on the basis of wording and not of meaning, and then reported back to the assembly that a majority in the Commission had decided against the adoption of the suggested changes. This meant that less than thirty Council Fathers on the Commission on the Eastern Churches were powerful enough to overrule the wishes expressed by ballots of 607 Council Fathers.

In the amended text which the Commission presented for a vote on November 20, 1964, merely a word here and a phrase there had been changed. That was the only evidence of four days of debate on the Council floor and of 1920 qualifications submitted. When the Council Fathers were asked to signify their approval or disapproval of the manner in which the Commission had handled the qualifications, a total of 471 negative votes were cast on two separate ballots. But when the schema was voted upon as a whole, the negative votes dropped to 135. And on November 21, when a vote was taken in public session in the presence of Pope Paul VI, 2110 affirmative votes were cast and 39 negative votes. The Pope then promulgated the Decree on Eastern Catholic Churches.

The official recognition which Pope Paul had given to the rank of patriarchs at the Council removed one of the obstacles to unity with the Orthodox Churches, those Eastern-rite Churches which do not accept the principle of the primacy of Rome. Several schisms between those churches and the Church of Rome had led to a final break in 1054, when Patriarch Michael Caerularius of Constantinople and his adherents were excommunicated by a legation of the Roman see under the leadership of Cardinal Humbertus. The Patriarch and Synod of Constantinople thereupon pronounced excommunication of the legates, and the Patriarchs of Antioch, Alexandria and Jerusalem followed the Patriarch of Constantinople into schism. Temporary reunions were effected by the second Ecumenical Council at Lyons in 1274, and the Ecumenical Council of Florence in 1439. But in 1472 all union was repudiated by a Synod called by Patriarch Dionysius I of Constantinople.

In an effort to remove these and other obstacles to union, Pope Paul VI at the beginning of 1964 personally visited Patriarch Athenagoras I of Constantinople, successor to Patriarch Michael Caerularius, to exchange a fraternal embrace and to discuss inter-Church relations. The resulting improvement was so great that, on December 7, 1965, the day before the closing of Vatican II, the Pope and the Patriarch simultaneously lifted the excommunications dating back to 1054.

On that same December 7, the recently consecrated Bishop Willebrands of the Secretariat for Promoting Christian Unity read a declaration in the presence of the Pope and the Council Fathers. He said that, after their meeting in the Holy Land, Pope Paul VI and Patriarch Athenagoras I had determined to omit nothing “which charity might inspire and which might facilitate the development of the fraternal relations thus initiated between the Roman Catholic and the Orthodox Church of Constantinople. They are persuaded that, by this action, they are responding to the call of that divine grace which today is leading the Roman Catholic Church and the Orthodox Church, as well as all Christians, to overcome their differences in order to be again ‘one,’ as the Lord Jesus asked of his Father for them.” The reading of the declaration drew thunderous applause from the Council Fathers.

While this statement was being read in the Vatican, it was also being issued by the Patriarch of Constantinople at Istanbul, where Cardinal Shehan of Baltimore had been sent by Pope Paul as leader of a special mission. The ceremony took place in the patriarchal cathedral of Fanaro. After the excommunications had been mutually lifted, Patriarch Athenagoras I and Cardinal Shehan embraced, while the bells of the cathedral rang out. News of this act of charity, which brought the two Churches closer together, was then formally communicated by the Patriarch of Constantinople to the Orthodox Patriarchs of Alexandria, Antioch, Jerusalem, Moscow, Belgrade, Bucharest and Sofia, and to the Orthodox Churches of Greece, Poland, Czechoslovakia, Azerbaijan and Cyprus.

Pope Paul VI and Patriarch Athenagoras I, with his Synod, said in their joint declaration that they hoped that “the whole Christian world, especially the entire Roman Catholic Church and the Orthodox Church, will appreciate this gesture.” It was intended “as an expression of a common and sincere desire for reconciliation.” It was also to be considered “as an invitation to continue in a spirit of trust, esteem and mutual charity the dialogue which, with God’s help, will lead, for the greater good of souls and the coming of the Kingdom of God, to that living together again in the full communion of faith, fraternal accord and sacramental life which existed during the first thousand years of the life of the Church.”

The apparent precedence enjoyed by the patriarchs during the Council was short-lived, because the Annuario Pontificio (Pontifical Yearbook) for 1966 once again listed them behind the cardinals, unless they happened to be cardinals themselves.