Friday. Sept. 27, 1963
University Daily Kansan
Page 5
Church Modernization Is Goal of Vatican
ROME, (UPI) — Actions of far-reaching importance to the world's 500 million Roman Catholics — and to millions of non-Catholics who seek Christian unity — will be taken at the second session of the Vatican Ecumenical Council which convenes Sunday.
Among the major items on the Council's agenda are proposals to:
- Allow parts of the Mass to be said in English or other modern languages.
- Decentralize the administration of the Church.
- Encourage Catholic Biblical study.
- Give the laity a more important role in Catholic life.
- Place the Church unequivocally on record in favor of religious liberty for all men.
- Modify canon laws on mixed marriages.
BOTH CATHOLICS and Protestants are hopeful that the Council's labors will smooth the pathway toward eventual reunion of the divided Christian family. But the primary objective of the Council, proclaimed by the late pope John XXIII and forcefully reiterated by Pope Paul VI, is internal reform—the renewal and modernization of the Catholic Church itself.
This will not be achieved without a battle. The first session of the Council, which met at Pope John's call from Oct. 11 to Dec. 8 last year, managed to take up only four of the 70 items on its agenda, and did not complete action on any.
The slow pace of the first session resulted in part from the necessity of getting organized and working out rules of procedure.
BUT IT also reflected the sharp dissatisfaction of most Council fathers with the draft documents which were placed before them for debate. The commissions which prepared the drafts, or Schemata, were dominated by conservatives of the Roman Curia, who did not sympathize with Pope John's desire for renewal, and who opposed the holding of the Council in the first place.
The most significant accomplishment of the first session was to demonstrate that a very large majority of the 2,500 Council fathers were strongly in favor of Pope John's progressive policies.
During the nine months that the Council has been in recess, committees have been at work recasting the drafts which the fathers found too reactionary, and boiling down the 70 items of the original agenda to 17 documents which will be placed before the second session.
SINCE JUNE, this wholesale revision process has been carried out under the watchful eye of Pope Paul. who is possibly even more progressive, and certainly more impatient for action, than his saintly predecessor.
For these reasons, most Vatican observers are inclined to share the view of Joseph Cardinal Ritter of St. Louis that things will move much faster at the forthcoming session.
The first completed document to emerge from the Council may deal with liturgical reforms, including the long-awaited permission to use the language of the people rather than Latin in some portions of the mass. The Bishops spent three weeks debating this subject at the first session, and agreed almost unanimously on the basic principles which they wished to be incorporated in the document. A commission headed by Arcadio Cardinal Larraona has worked through the summer to draft the full document, and Cardinal Larraona says it is ready for the fathers to vote on as soon as they convene.
WHILE ITS contents are still officially secret, it is known that the liturgical document remains Latin for the central portions of the mass—the Offertory, Consecration and Communion—but grants wide latitude to National Episcopal Conferences to authorize use of modern languages in other portions of the service, including the Scripture lessons and many of the prayers and chants. There is no doubt that Bishops will be quick to take advantage of this permission, and it is probably only a matter of months before American Catholics will be able to participate in English, in large portions of their Sunday worship. Of less immediate popular interest, but far greater potential significance, is a proposal to decentralize the administration of the Church by vesting more discretionary powers in local Bishops and National Episcopal Conferences, such as the National Catholic Welfare Conference in the United States.
POPE PAUL has said that this is the most important proposal before the council, and has made plain his desire that his fellow Bishops be accorded substantially greater authority and prestige. The result could be a sharp reduction in the vast powers exercised in the name of the Pope by the ecclesiastical bureaucrats of the Curia.
Another major document likely to receive early attention is Schema No 1, dealing with divine revelation. The original version of this document was drafted by the Curia's holy office, the watchdog of orthodoxy, headed by the leader of the Council's conservatives, Alfredo Cardinal Ottaviani. It strongly reiterated the assertion — which is anathema to Protestants—that oral tradition is on a par with scripture as a source of Christian doctrine. It indirectly but unmistakably condemned the Biblical scholarship movement which has burgeoned in the Catholic church in recent years, and which has done more than any other thing to bring Catholics and Protestants into a fruitful doctrinal dialogue.
THE COUNCIL fathers rejected this document last fall by a vote of nearly two to one, and Pope John appointed a special commission to draft a new, more acceptable document. Augustin Cardinal Bea, S. J., head of the Secretariat for Christian Unity and a noted Catholic Bible scholar, is co-chairman (with Cardinal Ottaviani) of the new commission. What the special commission will bring forth is still secret, but it seems certain that it will be far
more Biblical in emphasis than the original.
Progressive influence on the committee work done during the Council recess is evident in the fact that one of the 17 Schemata deals exclusively with the lay apostolate — that is, the rights and duties of laity in the overall mission of the church.
Although every Pope since Pius XII has laid great stress on the laity, there has been no official definition of their place in Catholic life. The proposed council statement will be of particular interest to lay Catholics in America, who have been taking, or at least trying to take, an increasingly active part in Church affairs during recent years. Some of them have found their initiative welcomed by the clergy, but others have encountered enough rejection and frustration to cause a leading Catholic scholar, Msgr. John Tracy Ellis, to warn that anticlerical feeling is building up among long-docile American laymen.
Also of particular concern to American Catholics is a declaration on religious liberty which will be placed before the Council by Cardinal Bea. It will place the Catholic church officially on record, for the first time, as holding that every human being has an inviolable right to worship God according to the dictates of his own conscience and that every government (including the governments of predominantly Catholic countries) should recognize and protect religious liberty.
When 149 American Catholic Bishops met at Chicago last month to review issues that will come before the Council, this proposal received warm and widespread support.
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It also will have the prayerful backing of the 40 non-voting Protestant members of the Council. Protestant leaders say there are few things the Council could do which would have a more healthful effect on interfaith relations than to disavow once and for all any idea that Catholicism should be forced upon people in countries where Catholics have the political power to hobble other faiths.
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