Emeritus I

The tradition of popes serving for life has been a significant influence on the cardinals who gather in conclave. Another, perhaps less obvious factor, is the impact of modern medicine which contributes to longer lives. Currently, there are ninety-one cardinals over the age of 80, forty-four of them over than Benedict XVI, and fifteen who are in their 90’s.

In this context, Joseph A. Komonchak’s comments in Commonweal seem particularly to the point:

“There is potentially great significance in Benedict’s action, and it may be that his resignation will be his greatest contribution to ecclesiology. He has so subordinated his person to the office that he could renounce it. His frank admission that he no longer had the strength of mind and body needed for the Petrine ministry not only humanizes the pope himself but helps bring the papacy back within the church, down from what Hans Urs von Balthasar called its “pyramid-like isolation.” All those unique titles that seemed to place the papal office above and beyond all other offices and ministries in the church suddenly have to yield to what their occupants all have in common: a fragile, sinful, and mortal humanity. The pope—and not just this one—loses something of his sacral apartness. He rejoins the rest of us.

“Benedict’s action also suggests the thought that if a pope can resign for reasons of health or of age, he might resign for other reasons too. There could come a pope who agrees with what John Henry Newman wrote in 1870, during the longest pontificate in church history: “It is not good for a pope to live twenty years. It is anomaly and bears no good fruit; he becomes a god, has no one to contradict him, does not know facts, does cruel things without meaning it.” In other words, even though no term limits may be assigned to the papal office, a pope can have his own term limits in mind, and say to himself, and to the church, “Basta!” If papal resignations were to become something normal (that is, more frequent than every seven hundred years), then there might be less reluctance to elect someone younger and still energetic without worrying that he will fall victim to the tendency Newman feared.”

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Logistics

For the opening session of the Second Vatican Council, the entry procession of abbots general, superiors general, bishops, cardinals and patriarchs took a couple of hours. The Council was an immense project. Between 2100 and 2200 bishops met in the working session of Vatican II. In addition there were some 500 theologians, guests from other Christian Churches, secretaries, ushers, technicians, and assorted support staff. Seating, sound, coffee bars, toilets all had to be put in place. The cost, just for outfitting St. Peter’s Basilica was a million (1962) dollars.

However, the logistics were not simply physical. There was the challenge of organizing a decision making meeting of over 2000 members. By comparison the United Nations General Assembly has 193 members and the United States Congress, 435. The Vatican had no prior experience to call upon; the previous council was a hundred years prior and had a mere 750 participants.

Pope John had established a preparatory commission which had developed a set of documents for the bishops to consider and vote on. The expectation of those in Rome was that the bishops would accept what was presented to them and go home. The Roman Diocesan Synod that Pope John had called for at the same time that he announced the Council generally followed that pattern

If the Council fathers had followed this path, meeting logistics may not have become an issue. However, the morning the Council met for its first working session, it became clear that the gathered bishops intended to engage in serious and open debate.

Beginnings of Renewal

The renewal called for by the Liturgy by the Second Vatican Council was rooted in over a century of work, particularly in Europe and the United States.

Dom Prosper Guéranger, OSB, (1805-1875) is credited as the founder of the modern liturgical movement. He was ordained a diocesan priest in France. However, in 1831, when the old priory at Solesmes was announced for sale, he seized the opportunity to realize his desire to reestablish the Benedictine way of life in France, which had been destroyed in the French Revolution.

He purchased the monastery, and five priests joined him at the monastery, and in 1837, Guéranger was named abbot of the monastery head of the French Congregation of the Order of Saint Benedict.

The liturgical reforms of Trent had not been implemented in France where the liturgy was mainly under diocesan regulation. Through his influence and constant urging, Guéranger succeeded in restoring the Roman liturgy to the French dioceses.

In a time when the spirituality of people was essentially individual, nourished by devotions, he set out to encourage intelligent participation on the part of the faithful in the liturgical life of the Church. To this end, he engaged in a serious study of the liturgy and its history. He authored The Liturgical Year, which covered every day of the Church's Liturgical Cycle in 15 volumes. He also wrote a three volume work on the history of liturgical traditions, describing the development of Western liturgical practice.

He was the first to use the term, liturgical movement, and the first modern author to use the term, paschal mystery. “His teaching upon the church as the Mystical Body, the centrality of the paschal mystery, the doctrinal character of the liturgy, and his insistence upon the need to study the text of the liturgy, all these ideas were absolutely original in the nineteenth century.” (Robert Taft)

The Problem of Liturgy

For the Church, divine worship is a matter of life and death. If it is no longer possible to bring the faithful to worship God, and in such a way that they themselves perform this worship, then the Church has failed in its task and can no longer justify its existence. but it was precisely on this point that a profound crisis occurred in the life of the Church. Its roots reach far back. In the late Middle Ages, awareness of the real essence of Christian worship increasingly vanished. Great importance was attached to externals, and these choked out essentials…


The main measure (of the Council of Trent) was to centralize all liturgical authority in the Sacred Congregation of Rites, the post-concilliar organ for the implementation of the liturgical ideas of Trent. This measure, however, proved to be two-edged. New overgrowths were in fact prevented, but the fate of liturgy in the West was now in the hands of a strictly centralized and purely bureaucratic authority. This authority completely lacked historical perspective; it viewed the liturgy solely in terms of ceremonial rubrics, treating it as a kind of proper court etiquette for sacred matters. This resulted in the complete archaizing of the liturgy, which now passed from the stage of living history, became embalmed in the status quo and was ultimately doomed to internal decay.
taken from: Theological Highlights of Vatican II by Joseph Ratzinger, Paulist Press, English Edition, 1966


One must ask whether fifty years after the opening of the Council, the present centralizing process does not risk producing similar results.

Problems facing the Church at Vatican Council II

It is perhaps fair to say that the first real task of the Council was to overcome the indolent, euphoric feeling that all was well with the Church, and to bring into the open the problems smoldering within.

In the fall of 1964, then, what concrete problems did the Council face? These problems may be crystallized into the following groups:

1. The problem of divine worship.

2. The problem of centralism in the Church.

3. The problem of relations with non-Catholic Christendom and the ecumenical movement.

4. The problem of new directions in the relations between Church and State, or what might somewhat imprecisely be labeled the end of the Middle Ages, or even the end of the Constantinian era.

5. The problem of faith and science, or, more specifically, the problem of faith and history, which had become a basic problem for faith through the triumph of the method of historical criticism.

6. The problem of the relation of Christianity to the modern ethic of work, to technology, and in general to the new moral problems posed by a technological society.

taken from: Theological Highlights of Vatican II by Joseph Ratzinger, Paulist Press, English Edition, 1966

One can fairly ask whether fifty years after the opening of the Council, these problems have been adequately addressed.

Pope John XXIII

This coming Sunday, September 28, is the 54th anniversary of the election of Angelo Roncalli as Pope John XXIII. Elected in 1958, at the age of 77, many expected him to be simply a “placeholder.”


However, just two months after his election, he became the first pope since 1870 to make pastoral visits in his Diocese of Rome. On Christmas day, he visited children infected with polio at the Bambino Gesù Hospital and then visited Santo Spirito Hospital. And the following day he visited Rome's Regina Coeli prison, where he told the inmates: "You could not come to me, so I came to you."

He wrote in his diary of: ...great astonishment in the Roman, Italian and international press. I was hemmed in on all sides: authorities, photographers, prisoners, wardens...”

Roncalli, who came from a poor peasant background, described himself as a "prisoner of opulence" in the Vatican. "I have nothing against these good noble guards," the pope confided, "but so much bowing, such formality, so much pomp, so much parading make me suffer, believe me. When I go down [to the basilica] and see myself preceded by so many guards, I feel like a prisoner, a criminal; and instead I would like to be the 'bonus pastor' for all, close to the people. [...] The pope is not a sovereign of this world. “

He recounted how much he disliked at the beginning being carried on the sede gestatoria through the rooms, preceded by cardinals often more elderly and decrepit than himself, confessing that this was not very reassuring for him, “because ultimately one is always teetering a bit."

In January of 1959, he announced his intend of convening an ecumenical council. The cardinals gathered in St. Paul's Outside the Walls greeting his words with stunned silence. And L’Osservatore Romano did not think the announcement worthy of its front page.

In 1959, Fr. Roberto Tucci was appointed director of the Roman magazine of the Jesuits, "La Civiltà Cattolica". He met with Pope John at Castel Gandolfo and noted in his diary: "Striking simplicity and affability of manners that dispel any embarrassment and are very touching. Welcome at the door and accompaniment almost back to the threshold again."

When the Council opened on October 11, 1962 (fifty years ago) and the 2540 bishops had taken their places in St. Peter’s, Pope John dismounted the sedia gestitoria at the entrance to St. Peter’s and walked down the central aisle. Like his brother bishops, he wore a miter. He addressed the assembled Council, beginning “Gaudet Mater Ecclesia,” Mother Church rejoices today. He told them that “in the current conditions of human society, (some) can see nothing but betrayal and destruction. They say that in comparison with the past our age has done nothing but decline and deteriorate. And they behave as if they had learned nothing from history, which is the teacher of life, and as if in the times of the earlier Councils the Christian idea and Christian life, morals, and the just freedom of the Church had done nothing but blossom and triumph.”

He went on, “but we have to decisively contradict these prophets of doom who keep on predicting nothing but disaster, as if the world was about to end.”
Less than two months before he died, Pope John issued an encyclical letter, Pacem in Terris, addressed “to all men of good will.” Darius Milhaud composed a choral symphony with that title for the dedication of the new Parisian radio building, making John’s encyclical the only one ever set to music.
John XXIII died on June 3, 1963 and, later that year, on December 3rd, President Lyndon B. Johnson posthumously awarded him the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the United States' highest civilian award, in recognition of the good relationship between Pope John and the United States.
And in 2000, Pope John Paul II proclaimed Pope John XXIII blessed. His feast day is June 11, the anniversary of the opening of the Second Vatican Council.

Trent

How did a company of women committed to apostolic service of the poor end up as cloistered nuns? Between the death of St. Ursula and the approval of her rule, the Council of Trent met and issued the following directive for religious women:

The holy council, renewing the constitution of Boniface VIII*, which begins, “Periculoso,” commands all bishops by the judgment of God to which it appeals and under threat of eternal malediction, they make it their special care that in all monasteries subject to them by their own authority and in others by the authority of the Apostolic See, the enclosure of nuns be restored wherever it has been violated and that it be preserved where it has not bee violated; restraining with ecclesiastical censures and other penalties, every appeal being ser aside, the disobedient and gainsayers, even summoning for this purpose, if need be, the aid of the secular arm. The holy council exhorts all Christian princes to furnish this aid, and binds thereto under penalty of excommunication to be incurred ipso facto all civil magistrates. No nun shall after her profession be permitted to go out of the monastery, even for a brief period under any pretext whatever, except for a lawful reason to be approved by the bishop; any indults and privileges whatsoever notwithstanding. Neither shall anyone, of whatever birth or condition, sex or age, be permitted, under penalty of excommunication to be incurred ipso facto, to enter the enclosure of a monastery without the written permission of the bishop or superior.
Twenty-fifth Session, Chapter V

*In 1298 Boniface VIII promulgated his celebrated Constitution "Periculoso” in which he imposed the cloister on all nuns. According to this law all egress was forbidden to them. In 1566 Pope St. Pius V urged the following of Boniface's law and imposed the cloister even on the third orders.