Letter #26, 2021, Thursday, May 13: Two Councils

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Letter #26, 2021, Thursday, May 13: Two Councils

[2021-05-14]

[Engleză]

May 13, 2021

 Feast of the Ascension

 Feast of Our Lady of Fatima

 Letter #26, 2021, Thursday, May 13: Two Councils

 In 2004, a year before Pope John Paul II died (he died on April 2, 2005), and the same year that the icon of Our Lady of Kazan returned to Russia (August 28, 2004), in the Caffe San Pietro near the Vatican Press Office, I sat in the warm Rome sunshine for about two hours on via della Conciliazione with American writer Robert Blair Kaiser (1931-2015) for a friendly, wide-ranging conversation.

 Kaiser had not long before published his "tell-all" autobiographical book Clerical Error (published in 2002), which centers on Kaiser's experiences at the Second Vatican Council, which Kaiser covered for Time magazine.

 The cover of the book Clerical Error by the late Robert Blair Kaiser, an American writer who covered the Second Vatican Council in the 1960s, when he was in his early 30s, for Time magazine, arguably one of the most influential American publications of those years.

 Kaiser was also present in Los Angeles in the summer of 1968, and reported on the assassination of Senator Robert F. Kennedy. Kaiser was able to meet often with the accused assassin, Sirhan Sirhan, and on January 1, 1970, published his own book on the assassination, R.F.K Must Die!

 "Clerical Error is an unusual but compelling mix of public history and personal confession. Kaiser made his name as a journalist covering the Second Vatican Council of the Catholic Church (1962-65). The middle chapters of the book recount those years. They are full of wonderful anecdotes and personal misgivings regarding the primary actors at the Council, many of whom Kaiser and his wife hosted at weekly parties in their apartment..." —from a blurb on the back cover of the 2004 paperback edition of Kaiser's book Clerical Error (Continuum, New York), by Choice

 Shaping the "Council of the Journalists"

 Because Time was such an influential magazine at that time, Kaiser's coverage was amplified, like words in a megaphone. What he wrote mattered.

 What he wrote, in many ways, helped to create "the Council of the media" that Pope Benedict XVI would refer to in his important February 14, 2013 address to the priests of Rome (see below), when Benedict (who was still Pope at the time, with all of the magisterial authority that implies) said there were in reality two Second Vatican Councils, the Council as it truly was, and the Council as it was depicted by the world's media...

 “There was the Council of the Fathers – the real Council – but there was also the Council of the media. It was almost a Council apart, and the world perceived the Council through the latter, through the media. Thus, the Council that reached the people with immediate effect was that of the media, not that of the Fathers. And while the Council of the Fathers was conducted within the faith – it was a Council of faith seeking intellectus [understanding], seeking to understand itself and seeking to understand the signs of God at that time, seeking to respond to the challenge of God at that time and to find in the word of God a word for today and tomorrow – while all the Council, as I said, moved within the faith, as fides quaerens intellectum, the Council of the journalists, naturally, was not conducted within the faith, but within the categories of today's media, namely apart from faith, with a different hermeneutic. It was a political hermeneutic: for the media, the Council was a political struggle, a power struggle between different trends in the Church. It was obvious that the media would take the side of those who seemed to them more closely allied with their world.” —Pope Benedict XVI, February 14, 2013, Address to the Parish Priests and Clergy of Rome (link and link).

 Benedict gave this talk just three days after announcing, on February 11, 2013, that he would resign the papacy. Because this talk was precisely to the priest of Rome, and he was the Bishop of Rome, this talk takes on a very special importance. He was shepherding his Roman flock, confirming his brothers in the faith, giving his priest a lens or a frame to enable them to receive the fruits of the Second Vatican Council in accord with the mind of the Council Fathers.

 This talk lays out Benedict's important insight into what happened at the Second Vatican Council, and how what happened should be interpreted and understood.

 That this address was given when Benedict was still Pope means it has the full magisterial authority of the papacy. (Full text at the end of this letter)

 Seeking the True Vatican II

 Benedict said that the "Council of the journalists" was "naturally... not conducted within the faith."

 In other words, there was one "Council of the media" that was "not conducted within the faith," and one "Council of the Fathers" conducted within the faith...

 Clearly, understanding this double nature of "Vatican II" is critical to correctly evaluating how to remain faithful to "the Council of the Fathers, the real Council" and how to avoid embracing the so-called "Council of the journalists," which presented the Council as "a political struggle, a power struggle between different trends in the Church."

 Understanding this double nature of the Council is one way the Catholic Church today, and in decades to come, can come to a balanced, thoughtful, nuanced, reasoned yet heart-felt and united commitment to "the true Vatican II."

 This seems to me a potentially fruitful way overcome some of the divisions in the Church which have sprung up due to the complex, difficult reality that, as Benedict tells us, there were "two Councils."

 This present letter is written as a contribution to that effort, which I will continue with our new Unity project – Unitas: "Come, Rebuild My Church."

Below is the story of our conversation.

 A view of the via della Conciliazione in Rome, with the Caffe San Pietro circled, and a map to show the caffe's location in relation to Vatican City

 Time's Man in Rome

 "It's a pleasure to meet you," Kaiser said to me, when we met in the Vatican Press Office. "Let's have a cup of coffee and talk."

 And so we left the Press Office and went to the Caffe San Pietro. 

 "I came to Rome just before the opening of the Council to cover the Second Vatican Council for Time magazine," Kaiser said to me. "My wife and I chose an apartment on the Janiculum Hill, in Monteverde Vecchio. It was at Via Quirico Filopanti #2...."

 "I know that area well," I said. "That's where my own apartment is."

 "The apartment was intentionally very large," Kaiser said. "Before I came to Rome, I had meetings with Clare Booth Luce. She and her husband, Henry Luce, hoped the residence of the Time journalist could become a place where ideas could be exchanged among Council participants, she told me. They gave me a generous Time magazine expense account – $20,000 each month during the Council sessions – to hold regular dinner parties in my large apartment," Kaiser continued. "My wife and I would often host 50 or 100 journalists and monsignors, priests and bishops and diplomats, sometimes during the week, sometimes on the weekend."

 I asked Kaiser to tell me more about those gatherings.

A view of St. Peter's Basilica from via della Conciliazione in Rome

A view of Caffe San Pietro on via della Conciliazione in Rome where I met Robert Kaiser in 2004

 The purpose of these gatherings was to share information and to provide a space where the agenda of a "more open Church" could be freely discussed, Kaiser said.

 So I understood that Kaiser had done more than report on the Second Vatican Council.

 He had been a key facilitator, a key promoter, of exchanges between dozens and dozens of the Council participants, exchanges which then played a role in the voting during the Council on various conciliar documents.

 We also spoke at length about Kaiser's personal life, his marriage, and his divorce from his wife in the mid-1960s.

 What he told me left me saddened, but I leave out that aspect of our conversation. It is dealt with from Kaiser's perspective at some length in Clerical Error.

 "Our specious apartment," Kaiser writes in Clerical Error (p. 125 — I cite these words from his book; he told me the same things during our conversation), "with its huge picture windows and sparkling marble floors, became something of a gathering place for conciliar progressive. Mary [Kaiser's wife; they also had one little daughter living with them, named Betsy] was often the only woman in the house, and she became an unflappable hostess. Practically every other night of the week, we'd have a small dinner party for eight. On Sunday night, Frank McCool, the vice-rector of the Biblicum, brought some extra, though uninvited, guests: Thurston David, Donald Campion and Robert Graham, all editors of America, the U.S. Jesuit weekly. Our sit-down supper became a buffet. That was such a success that we told our friends to invite their friends, every Sunday. We'd always have room for one more, we said, and the very next week the 'one more' turned into several score more. A kind of institution was born at Vatican II: the Kaisers' Sunday nights."

 "Roberts [Note: Kaiser is speaking Archbishop T.D. Roberts, S.J., of Bombay (1937 -1976), who had become his friend in the fall of 1962, link] blossomed. Far from being isolated in his resistance to the antediluvian minds of the Roman Curia, he found that his venturesome opinions were shared by many others, including some of the best prelates in Christendom. with him, they thought (and said out loud) that the Church was overloaded with excess baggage, myth, superstition, and nonsense. With him, they voted on all the important reforms of Vatican II, most of which tended to make the Church less Roman — and more Catholic... He and Betsy devised a little game. She'd sit on his lap and pull his bushy eyebrows... until he'd cry. But his tears weren't tears of pain, they were tears of joy from a love-starved old man who should have had a family of his own."

 The late Archbishop Thomas D'Esterre Roberts, S.J. (1893-1976), bishop of Bombay, India (1937-1950), son of a British consul descended from a long line of French Huguenots, outspoken defender of the importance of personal conscience and intelligent obedience, became one of Kaiser's closest friends during the Second Vatican Council. He was voting at the Council. (link, link, link)

 From the age of 18 to 28 (1949 to 1959), Robert Blair Kaiser trained as a Jesuit with the intention of becoming a Jesuit priest. Kaiser left the order to become a journalist and to marry.

 He came to Rome for Time magazine and quickly became one of the most influential journalists in the city. His coverage of the Second Vatican Council set a standard and tone and "line" — the "line" was that the Catholic Church was undergoing a revolution which would change the Church profoundly — which was very influential worldwide.

 The Position of Pope Francis

“The catechesis inspired by the Council is continually listening to the heart of the man, always with an attentive ear, always seeking to renew itself. This is the Magisterium. The Council is the Magisterium of the Church. Either you are with the Church and therefore you follow the Council, and if you don't follow the Council or you interpret it in your own way, as you desire, you do not stand with the Church. I ask that there be no concessions to those who seek to present a catechesis that does not agree with the Magisterium of the Church.” —Pope Francis, in a January 30, 2021 address to members of Italy's National Catechetical Office (link). The words were widely interpreted as a criticism of Archbishop Viganň and his public writings raising questions about Vatican II (link)

 Considering the call of Pope Francis on January 30, 2021 to adhere faithfully to the "teaching" and "magisterium" of the Second Vatican Council, it seems useful now to recount some of the testimony of Kaiser, and others, about what happened at Vatican II, in the hope of having a more complete picture of the Council.

 We urgently need a more full and accurate understanding of what happened at Vatican II in order to continue the task of receiving the Council and interpreting it in the light of the perennial doctrine of the Church, handed down from the beginning.

 (To be continued)

 

 The cover of the prize-winning book on the Second Vatican Council written by the late Robert Blair Kaiser (1931-2015), who was the correspondent for Time magazine at the Council

 Kaiser was arguably one of the most important shapers — indeed, perhaps even the single most important shaper — of what Pope Benedict XVI referred to as "the Council of the media" in his important address to the priests of Rome on February 14, 2013.

 The late Robert Blair Kaiser (1931-2015), an American writer who was the influential correspondent for Time magazine in the first two years of the Second Vatican Council (1962-1965), when Kaiser was just 31 and 32 years old. He won a prize for his journalism, which appeared regularly in Time over two years, and was extremely influential in America and also around the world. Kaiser died in 2015 at the age of 84. He was an important witness to what happened at the Second Vatican Council, and his papers may contain information that is valuable and should be investigated. I met with Kaiser in Rome in 2004 and spoke with him at length.

 A young Father Joseph Ratzinger at the time of the Council in the mid-1960s. He was about 35 years old.

 The Two Councils

 Here is the complete text of Pope Benedict XVI's February 14 address to the priests of Rome. (link)

 MEETING WITH THE PARISH PRIESTS AND THE CLERGY OF ROME

 ADDRESS OF HIS HOLINESS POPE BENEDICT XVI

 Paul VI Audience Hall

 Thursday, 14 February 2013

 By Pope Benedict XVI

 Your Eminence,

 Dear Brother Bishops and Priests,

 For me it is a particular gift of Providence that, before leaving the Petrine ministry, I can once more see my clergy, the clergy of Rome.

 It is always a great joy to see the living Church, to see how the Church in Rome is alive; there are shepherds here who guide the Lord’s flock in the spirit of the supreme Shepherd.

 It is a body of clergy that is truly Catholic, universal, in accordance with the essence of the Church of Rome: to bear within itself the universality, the catholicity of all nations, all races, all cultures.

 At the same time, I am very grateful to the Cardinal Vicar who helps to reawaken, to rediscover vocations in Rome itself, because if Rome, on the one hand, has to be the city of universality, it must also be a city with a strong and robust faith of its own, from which vocations are also born.

 And I am convinced that, with the Lord’s help, we can find the vocations that he himself gives us, we can guide them, help them to mature, so as to be of service for work in the Lord’s vineyard.

 Today you have professed the Creed before the tomb of Saint Peter: in the Year of Faith, this seems to me to be a most appropriate act, a necessary one, perhaps, that the clergy of Rome should gather around the tomb of the Apostle to whom the Lord said: "To you I entrust my Church. Upon you I will build my Church" (cf. Mt 16:18-19).

 Before the Lord, together with Peter, you have professed: "You are the Christ, the Son of the living God" (Mt 16:16).

 Thus the Church grows: together with Peter, professing Christ, following Christ. And we do this always.

 I am very grateful for your prayers, which I have sensed, as I said on Wednesday – almost palpably. And although I am about to withdraw, I remain close to all of you in prayer, and I am sure that you too will be close to me, even if I am hidden from the world.

 For today, given the conditions brought on by my age, I have not been able to prepare an extended discourse, as might have been expected; but rather what I have in mind are a few thoughts on the Second Vatican Council, as I saw it.

 I shall begin with an anecdote: in 1959 I was appointed a professor at the University of Bonn, where the students included the seminarians of the diocese of Cologne and the other dioceses in the area. Thus I came into contact with the Cardinal Archbishop of Cologne, Cardinal Frings. Cardinal Siri of Genoa, in 1961 if I remember rightly, had organized a series of talks on the Council given by various European Cardinals, and he had invited the Archbishop of Cologne to give one of them, entitled: the Council and the world of modern thought.

 The Cardinal asked me – the youngest of the professors – to write a draft for him. He liked the draft, and to the people in Genoa he delivered the text just as I had written it.

Sursa: www.InsideTheVatican.com

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