Authors: David Yallop
He had the choice of living in a luxurious apartment in the city or a more spartan life in the Castle of San Martino. He chose the Castle.
For many bishops their life is a relatively remote one. There is an automatic gulf between them and their flock, accepted by both. The bishop is an elusive figure, seen only on special occasions. Albino Luciani took a different view of his role in Vittorio Veneto. He dressed as a simple priest and took the gospel to his people. With his priests he practised a form of democracy that was at that time extremely rare within the Church. His Presbyterial Council for example was elected entirely without nominations from the bishop.
When that same Council recommended the closure of a particular minor seminary despite the fact that he did not agree with the decision, he went to all his parishes and quietly talked over the issue with the parish priests. As soon as it became clear to him that the majority favoured the closure he authorized it. The pupils were sent on the instructions of this former seminarian to state schools. He later stated publicly that the majority view had been right and his own wrong.
No priest ever had to make an appointment to see his bishop. If one came, he was seen. Some considered his democracy a weakness. Others saw him differently and compared him to the man who had made him bishop.
It was like having your own personal Pope. It was as if Papa Roncalli [John XXIII] was here in this diocese working alongside
us. His table usually had two or three priests at it. He simply could not stop giving of himself. One moment he would be visiting the sick or the handicapped. They never knew at the hospitals when he was coming. He would just turn up on a bike or in his old car leaving his secretary to read outside while he wandered the wards. The next moment he would turn up in one of the mountain villages to discuss a particular problem with the local priest.
In the second week of January 1959, less than three weeks after he had ordained Bishop Luciani, Pope John was discussing world affairs with his pro-Secretary of State, Cardinal Domenico Tardini. They discussed the implications of what a young man named Fidel Castro was doing to the Batista regime in Cuba; of the fact that France had a new President, General Charles de Gaulle; of the Russian demonstration of advanced technology in sending a new rocket into orbit around the moon. They discussed the revolt in Algeria, the appalling poverty in many Latin American countries, the changing face of Africa with a new nation seemingly emerging each week. It seemed to John that the Roman Catholic Church was not coming to terms with the problems of the mid-twentieth century. It was a crucial point in history with a significant part of the world turning to things material and away from things spiritual. Unlike many in the Vatican the Pope considered that reform, like charity, should begin at home. Suddenly John had an idea. He was later to say it was an inspiration of the Holy Spirit. Wherever it came from it was an excellent one: ‘A Council’.
Thus did the idea for the Second Vatican Ecumenical Council emerge. The first in 1870 had resulted in giving the Church an infallible Pope. The effects of the second, many years after its conclusion, are still reverberating around the world.
On October 11th, 1962, 2,381 bishops gathered in Rome for the opening ceremony of this Second Vatican Council. Among them was Albino Luciani. As the Council meetings progressed Luciani made friendships that would endure for the rest of his life. Suenens of Belgium. Wojtyla and Wyszynski of Poland. Marty of France. Thiandoum of Dakar. Luciani also experienced during the Council his own road to Damascus. It was the Council’s declaration
On Religious Freedom.
Others were less impressed with this new way of looking at an old problem. Men like Cardinal Alfredo Ottaviani, who controlled the Holy Office, were determined to wreck not only the concept of
tolerance that was implicit in
On Religious Freedom,
they were fighting a bitter rearguard action against anything that smacked of what Pius X at the beginning of the century had termed ‘modernism’. This was the generation which had taught Luciani in the Belluno seminary that religious ‘freedom’ was confined to Roman Catholics. ‘Error has no rights.’ Luciani in turn had taught his own pupils this same appalling doctrine. Now at the Second Vatican Council he listened with growing wonder as bishop after bishop challenged the concept.
When Luciani considered the arguments for and against he was over fifty years of age. His response was typical of this prudent man of the mountains. He discussed the problem with others, he withdrew into thought, he concluded that the ‘error’ had been in the concept he had been taught.
It was also typical of the man that he subsequently published an article explaining how and why he had changed his mind. He began with a recommendation to his readers:
If you come across error, rather than uprooting it or knocking it down, see if you can trim it patiently, allowing the light to shine upon the nucleus of goodness and truth that usually is not missing even in erroneous opinions.
Other aspects of the various debates caused him less difficulty. When the principle of the poor church – a church lacking political, economic and ideological power – was extolled, the Council was merely seeking something in which Luciani already believed.
Before the Council opened Luciani had issued a pastoral letter, ‘Notes on the Council’, to prepare his congregations. Now with the Council still in session the changes he had already introduced into the Vittorio Diocese were accelerated. He urged his seminary teachers to read the new theological reviews and discard manuals that still looked back lovingly to the nineteenth century. He sent his teachers on courses to the principal theological universities of Europe. Not only the teachers but the pupils could now be found at his dinner table. He wrote weekly to all his priests, sharing his ideas and plans with them.
In August 1962, a few months before the opening of the Second Vatican Council, Luciani was confronted with an example of error of quite another kind. Two priests in the diocese had become involved with a smooth-talking sales representative who also speculated in property. The priest were tempted to join in. When one of them came
to Luciani he confessed that the amount of money missing, much of it belonging to small savers, was in excess of two billion lire.
Albino Luciani had very set ideas about wealth and money, particularly Church wealth. Some of his ideas stemmed from Rosmini; many directly from his own personal experience. He believed in a Roman Catholic Church of the poor, for the poor. The enforced absences of his father, the hunger and the cold, the wooden clogs with the extra nails banged into the soles so that they would not wear out, cutting grass on the mountain sides to augment the family dinners, the long spells in seminary without seeing a mother who could not afford to visit him, this environment produced in Luciani a deep compassion for the poor, a total indifference to the acquisition of personal wealth and a belief that the Church, his Church, should not only be materially poor but should be seen to be so.
Conscious of the damage the scandal would do he went directly to the editor of the Venice newspaper
Il Gazzettino.
He asked the editor not to treat the story in a lurid manner with sensational headlines.
Back in his diocese he called together his 400 priests. Normal practice would have been to have claimed ecclesiastic immunity. To do so would ensure that the Church would not pay a penny. Speaking quietly Luciani told his priests:
It is true that two of us have done wrong. I believe the diocese must pay. I also believe that the law must run its due course. We must not hide behind any immunity. In this scandal there is a lesson for us all. It is that we must be a poor Church. I intend to sell ecclesiastical treasure. I further intend to sell one of our buildings. The money will be used to repay every single lira that these priests owe. I ask for your agreement.
Albino Luciani obtained their agreement. His morality prevailed. Some who were present at that meeting admired the man and his morality. Some almost ruefully observed that they considered Luciani was too moral in such matters. The property speculator who had involved the two priests was obviously one who considered the Bishop ‘too moral’. Before his trial he committed suicide. One of the priests served a one-year prison sentence and the other was acquitted.
Others among the priesthood were less than enchanted with the manner in which Luciani wholeheartedly embraced the spirit of the Vatican Council. Like Luciani their thinking had been shaped in the early, more repressive, years. Unlike him they were not prepared to have
that thinking reshaped. This aspect was constantly to occupy Luciani’s work during the remainder of his time at Vittorio Veneto. With the same hunger with which he had read book after book in his youth he now, in the words of Monsiguor Ghizzo who worked with him, ‘totally absorbed Vatican Council II. He had the Council in his blood. He knew the documents by heart. Further, he implemented the documents.’
He twinned Vittorio Veneto with Kiremba, a small township in Burundi, formerly part of German East Africa. In the mid-1960s when he visited Kiremba he was brought face to face with the Third World. Nearly 70 per cent of the country’s three-and-a-quarter million people were Roman Catholics. The faith was flourishing, but so were poverty, disease, a high infant mortality rate and civil war. Churches were full, bellies were empty. It was realities like this that had inspired Pope John to summon the Second Vatican Council, as an attempt to drag the Church into the twentieth century. While the old Curial Palace Guard in Rome were being blinded by the Second Council, Luciani and others like him were being illuminated by it.
John literally gave his life to ensure that the Council he had conceived should not be stillborn. Advised that he was seriously ill, he declined the operation his specialists were insisting upon. They told him that such an operation would prolong his life. He retorted that to leave the Vatican Council at the mercy of the reactionary element within the Vatican during the early delicate stages would be to ensure a theological disaster. He preferred to remain in the Vatican helping the child he had created to grow. In doing so he calmly and with extraordinary courage signed his own death warrant. When he died on June 3rd, 1963, the Roman Catholic Church, through the Second Vatican Ecumenical Council, was finally attempting to come to terms with the world as it was rather than how it would like it to be.
With John dead, replaced by Pope Paul VI, the Church inched its way nearer to one specific reality, to one particular decision, the most important the Roman Catholic Church has taken this century. In the 1960s the question was being asked with increasing urgency; what was the Church’s position on artificial birth control?
In 1962 Pope John had set up a Pontifical Commission on the family. Birth control was one of the major issues it was directed to study. Pope Paul enlarged the Commission until its membership reached sixty-eight. He then created a considerable number of ‘consultants’ to advise and monitor the Commission. While hundreds of millions of Roman Catholics around the world waited and wondered, speculation that a change in the Church’s position was
imminent grew ever larger. Many began using the Pill or other forms of artificial contraception. While the ‘experts’ in Rome debated the significance of Genesis 38:7–10 and a man called Onan, everyday life had to go on.
It is ironic that the confusion which prevailed in the Catholic world on this issue was exactly mirrored by the Pope’s thinking on the problem. He did not know what to do.
During the first week of October 1965, Pope Paul granted a unique interview to Italian journalist Alberto Cavallari. They discussed many problems facing the Church. Cavallari later observed that he did not raise the issue of artificial birth control because he was aware of the potential embarrassment. His fears were unfounded. Paul raised the subject himself. It should be remembered that this was an era when the Papacy still clung to Royal illusions; personal pronouns were not Paul’s style.
Take birth control for example. The world asks what we think and we find ourselves trying to give an answer. But what answer. We can’t keep silent. And yet to speak is a real problem. The Church hasn’t had to deal with such things for centuries. And it is a somewhat foreign and even humanly embarrassing subject for men of the Church. So, the commissions meet, the reports pile up, the studies are published. Oh, they study a lot, you know. But then we still have to make the final decisions. And in deciding, we are all alone. Deciding is not as easy as studying. We have to say something. But what? God will simply have to enlighten us.
While the Pope waited for God’s enlightenment on sexual intercourse his Commission toiled on. While the 68 laboured, their efforts were closely watched by the smaller commission of approximately twenty cardinals and bishops. For any liberalizing recommendation from the group of 68 to reach the Pope it had to pass through this smaller group, which was headed by a man who was the epitome of the reactionary element within the Church, Cardinal Ottaviani. Many considered him the leader of that element.
A crucial moment in the Commission’s history came on April 23rd, 1966. By that date the Commission had conducted an exhaustive and exhausting examination of the birth control issue. Those who had maintained their opposition to a change in the Church’s position were by now reduced to four priests who stated that they were irretrievably committed to maintaining a position forbidding any form of artificial
birth control. Pushed by the other members of the Commission, the four admitted that they could not prove the correctness of their position on the grounds of natural law. Neither could they cite the scriptures or divine revelation to justify their view. They argued that various Papal utterances over the years had all condemned artificial contraception. Their reasoning would appear to be ‘once in error, always in error’.