Time and again throughout the Second Vatican Council, a few conservative officials of the Roman Curia have tried to block the bishops' ambitious efforts to reform and renew the Catholic Church. Time and again, the progressive-minded majority has suffered these tactics in silence and indecision. Last week, goaded by the most serious curial threat so far to the spirit of Vatican II, the bishops openly rebelled.
The latest curial maneuver came to light in a letter that Augustin Cardinal Bea gloomily read out to the bishops and theologians who serve on the Secretariat for Promoting Christian Unity. Signed by Archbishop Pericle Felici, the council's secretary, the letter proposed that the somewhat lackluster declaration on anti-Semitism (TIME, Oct. 9), which a majority of bishops wishes to strengthen, should be reduced to a short chapter in the schema, De Ecclesia (On the Church). Felici also urged that a declaration on religious liberty be rewritten by a special committee of four bishops—three of them conservatives who had already spoken out against the declaration at the council.
Ominous Title. Felici's ambiguously phrased letter implied that these directions had come directly from Pope Paul VI himself. Actually, as Bea and his secretariat soon discovered, the letter did not have papal approval. The suggestions had come from Amleto Cardinal Cicognani, who had no authority of his own to give the orders, despite his important roles as Vatican Secretary of State and president of the Council's Coordinating Commission.
When this became known, seven progressive cardinals, among them Albert Meyer of Chicago and Joseph Ritter of St. Louis, met at the Roman residence of Cologne's Joseph Cardinal Frings to draft a memo to the Pope ominously entitled Cum Magno Dolore (With Great Sorrow). It protested Felici's directives on the two declarations, as well as two other recent and repressive curial moves: a threat to end the council at the end of the current third session and an attempt to water down the passage in De Ecclesia defining the authority of the bishops over the church.
Cardinal Frings himself saw to it that the Pope got the memo, which was signed by 15 prelates. "You can be sure that it didn't go through the Secretary of State," said one priest. "There are other ways to get to the Pope—not many, but a few." One way that the cardinals had not counted on was a press leak. Acting on his own, Chilean Journalist Gaston Cruzat, head of the Latin American bishops' press panel, released the memo's contents to Rome reporters.
The bishops' letter apparently proved effective. In interviews with Bea and Frings, Paul VI agreed that the Christian Unity office would bear the major responsibility for revising the two declarations, said also that the bishops themselves could decide whether a fourth session was necessary. Nonetheless, some Roman observers feared that there might be further attempts to render the declarations ineffective.