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

[Stone]

THE FOURTH SESSION
September 14 to December 8, 1965


THE CHURCH’S MISSIONARY ACTIVITY

After the rejection of the propositions on the missions at the third session, the task of preparing a new schema was assigned to a five-man subcommission of the Missions Commission, chosen by secret ballot. Father John Schutte, Superior General of the Divine Word Missionaries, who had received the most votes, was named chairman. The subcommission selected their own periti: Father Ratzinger, personal theologian to Cardinal Frings of Cologne, and Father Yves Congar, who were to prepare the theological groundwork of the schema.

The subcommission met from January 12 to 28, 1965, in the newly built house of the Divine Word Society overlooking Lake Nemi, south of Rome, and completed a fresh draft which was circulated to all the members and periti of the Commission on the Missions. Copies were also sent to Cardinals Dopfner and Konig for their comments, because of their great influence on the Coordinating and Theological Commissions.

A plenary session of the Commission on the Missions was held, again at Nemi, during the week beginning Monday, March 29. In the interval, a total of 131 pages of comment on the new schema had been submitted to the Commission’s secretariat, including four pages each from Cardinals Dopfner and Konig. There was also a page of comment from Pope Paul VI, who pointed out that every conceivable requirement of a missionary had been indicated save that of obedience. The daily meetings lasted from 9:00 until 1:00, and again from 4:15 until 7:30.

According to the schedule of work for the fourth session, the schema on the missions was to be treated in the third place, after the schemas on religious freedom and the Church in the modern world. That meant that little time would be left for the Commission to put its text into final form before the end of the Council. Consequently the aim at Nemi was to produce a schema which would prove readily acceptable to the Council Fathers. Such excellent accord was reached by the Commission that, before the week was over, each of the five chapters and the schema as a whole were approved unanimously by secret ballot.

Father Schutte requested Bishop Adolf Bolte of Fulda, one of the Commission members, to win Cardinal Dopfner’s support for the new schema. This he did, and the schema passed through the Coordinating Commission without difficulty. By mid-June 1965, it was on its way to the Council Fathers around the world. Cardinal Dopfner remarked later that even a man “as critical as Father Rahner” had expressed himself emphatically as in favor of the text.

Bishop Bolte had become a member of the Commission on the Missions in an unusual way. This Commission was the only one to which no German Council Father had been elected or appointed in the first days of the Council. Archbishop Corrado Baffle, Apostolic Nuncio to Germany, expressed his disappointment, stating that representation on this Commission was owed to the German hierarchy in recognition for all that it had done for the missionary work of the Church through its charitable agencies, Misereor and Adveniat. Then in June 1963, before the second session, Archbishop Luciano Perez Platero of Burgos, Spain, died and his seat on the Commission was quietly given to Bishop Bolte. It almost seemed that Council leadership was being forced on Cardinal Frings, whose archdiocese was on the banks of the Rhine.

Pope Paul in making this appointment went counter to the usual procedure, because the replacement for Archbishop Perez Platero, an elected member, should have been the Council Father next in line, according to the highest number of votes received in the original election. Bishop Bolte, however, had been on no list of candidates and had received no votes. In this way the first German member was added to the Commission on the Missions; the second was Father Schutte, elected to office at the end of the second session.

When the schema came up for discussion in the Council hall on October 7,1965, the introductory report was read by Father Schutte, who called attention to the chapter on the planning of missionary activity. Here it was stated that the Sacred Congregation for the Propagation of the Faith, which was a Curial office to direct and coordinate missionary work throughout the world, must no longer be merely an administrative agency, but also an agency of dynamic direction, using scientific methods and means suited to the conditions of modern times. The future members of this Curial office, said Father Schutte, should be drawn from those who actually took part in missionary work: cardinals, patriarchs, bishops, heads of missionary orders and directors of pontifical mission aid societies. According to the schema, “these representatives will be called together at fixed times and collegially will exercise supreme control of all mission work, under the authority of the Supreme Pontiff.” Father Schutte stressed the fact that each chapter of the schema had been unanimously approved by the Commission on the Missions.

At the end of his printed report, however, there appeared an amendment which was said to have originated with the Missions Commission, but which had in fact been forced upon the Commission by the Pontifical Commission for the Reorganization of the Roman Curia. According to this amendment, the aforementioned representatives would not be members of the dynamic directive body governing all missionary activity, but would instead “participate” in its deliberations. Since participation could mean giving advice without voting, this amendment represented a drastic weakening of the original text.

Surprisingly enough, the amendment imposed by the Curia went unchallenged on the Council floor. Many Council Fathers were apparently deceived into thinking that the amendment had originated with the Commission on the Missions, and therefore raised no objections. Archbishop D’Souza of Bhopal, India, said privately, however, that the whole force of the schema hinged on the paragraph which was attacked by the amendment; “if that paragraph falls,” he said, “the entire schema will disappear into thin air as so many pious exhortations.”

The debate was closed on October 12. On the following day, however, ten additional speakers who had obtained seventy signatures apiece addressed the assembly. Bishop Herman Westermann of Sambalpur, India, had decided to speak strongly against the weakening amendment, but his list of signatures was presented too late, and he had to submit his paper in writing.

By a vote of 2070 to 15, the Council Fathers showed their satisfaction with the schema as a working basis for the final document. Once again the five-man subcommission, assisted this time by ten periti, met at Nemi to study the 193 oral and written interventions and revise the text. Their revision was then examined by the Commission on the Missions in Rome on October 27, and again unanimously approved.

When the new version was distributed, it became evident that over 300 Council Fathers had opposed the Curia’s amendment in writing, and that the Commission had therefore been in a strong enough position virtually to ignore it. While the text did not use the explicit term “members” in referring to the epresentatives to be added to the directive body, it stated that they would exercise “an active and decisive role in the direction” of the Curial office for the Propagation of the Faith, “in ways and under conditions to be determined by the Roman Pontiff.” There was thus no longer any doubt as to the kind of authority which these “representatives” were to enjoy, and the revision was regarded as a defeat for the Pontifical Commission for the Reorganization of the Roman Curia, headed by Cardinal Roberti.

Twenty ballots were taken on the new schema between November 10 and 12, and the negative votes on the individual chapters ranged only from 6 to 13. However, a vast number of qualifications were submitted with affirmative votes, with the result that considerable revision was apparently again required. Chapter 5 on the planning of missionary activity alone received 712 qualified affirmative votes, which meant that it fell 8 votes short of the necessary two-thirds majority required for adoption. An examination of the qualifications showed that the task of revision would not be so difficult as the total number of qualifications had seemed to indicate, since hundreds of them were identical printed copies submitted by large numbers of Council Fathers.

On November 30, further balloting took place on the manner of the Commission’s handling of the qualifications submitted, and the vote was favorable, 2162 to 18. The text was then forwarded to His Holiness for his private study, and presented by him for the final formal vote at the public session of December 7, where it was adopted by 2394 votes to 5. This was the largest number of affirmative votes ever to be cast on a Council document.