This article begins with how future priests were taught. A seminary is a school for training priests, and in 1879 the pope wrote to the bishops of the world about what those schools should teach.
On August 4, 1879, Pope Leo XIII issued an encyclical, a formal letter from the pope to the bishops of the world, called Aeterni Patris ("Of the Eternal Father"), subtitled "On the Restoration of Christian Philosophy." He pointed to one writer above all others: St. Thomas Aquinas, a thirteenth-century Dominican friar. The Dominicans, founded by St. Dominic, are a religious order given especially to study and preaching. St. Thomas is also a "Doctor of the Church," a title given to saints whose teaching the Church holds in special regard. His great work, the Summa Theologiae, written in the 1260s and 1270s, is a vast summary of theology that became the classic classroom text.
Pope Leo asked the bishops "to restore the golden wisdom of St. Thomas, and to spread it far and wide for the defense and beauty of the Catholic faith" (Aeterni Patris, section 31).
Why St. Thomas, and why then? Pope Leo gave his reasons in the letter itself, and he gave them in his own words. False ideas, he wrote, had begun in the schools of philosophy and spread from there into public life: "false conclusions concerning divine and human things, which originated in the schools of philosophy, have now crept into all the orders of the State" (section 2). He traced the trouble to the sixteenth century, when "the struggling innovators" chose "to philosophize without any respect for faith." After that, "systems of philosophy multiplied beyond measure," and some Catholic teachers, "throwing aside the patrimony of ancient wisdom, chose rather to build up a new edifice than to strengthen and complete the old by aid of the new" (section 24). His remedy was aimed at future priests, who should be "nourished on the strong and robust food of doctrine," so they could "satisfy every one that asketh you a reason of that hope which is in you" (section 27).
Two points from the record show where the letter stood in its own time.
First, the idea was not new. Pope Leo's letter records that religious orders (he lists the Benedictines, Carmelites, Augustinians, Jesuits and Dominicans) had told their members to follow St. Thomas, that the universities of Paris, Salamanca, Louvain and Bologna had taught under him, and that earlier popes had directed particular universities to his teaching. He quotes Urban V telling the University of Toulouse: "It is our will, which We hereby enjoin upon you, that ye follow the teaching of Blessed Thomas as the true and Catholic doctrine" (sections 19 to 21).
Second, a revival was already under way. Oliver P. Rafferty, a Jesuit historian, writing in the journal Theological Studies in 2014, places the preparation about fifty years before 1879. By his account the Jesuits got the Roman College back in 1824, its rector Luigi Taparelli was a committed Thomist who taught the young Vincenzo Pecci (the future Pope Leo XIII), and the Jesuit writers Matteo Liberatore and Josef Kleutgen were among the most influential of the early revivers. He adds that the Roman College was not uniform, since some of its professors were indifferent to Thomism. This is one historian's account. Pope Leo himself wrote that men already working at "the practical reform of philosophy" had "aimed and aim at restoring the renowned teaching of Thomas Aquinas" (section 25). His first encyclical, Inscrutabili Dei consilio (April 21, 1878), had already asked the bishops to see that education was sound, "chiefly in philosophy, upon which the direction of other sciences in great measure depends" (section 13).
The First Vatican Council spoken to the underlying question in 1870: "there can never be any real disagreement between faith and reason" (Dei Filius, chapter 4).
The pope also set limits on his own recommendation. Anything the old scholastic teachers had put "with too great subtlety," or "too carelessly stated," or that "ill agrees with the discoveries of a later age," he wrote, "it does not enter Our mind to propose that for imitation to Our age" (section 31). In 1880 a brief called Cum hoc sit named St. Thomas Aquinas the patron of Catholic schools.
The same pope opened the past to inspection. In 1881 he opened the Vatican Secret Archives to scholars of all faiths and nations. ("Secret" here is the old sense of "private," as in "private archives.") In 1883, by the letter Saepenumero considerantes, he urged upright scholars to write history, with the Vatican Library's holdings open to them.
The revival produced a style of teaching called neo-scholasticism, a new form of the "scholastic" method of the medieval university teachers. Seminaries used standard textbooks called manuals, which set out doctrine in a fixed order of questions, with objections and answers. How uniform the teaching really was is a matter historians discuss. Later critics said the manuals were rigid, while defenders said they were clear and precise.
By the late nineteenth century, some Catholic scholars were applying new methods of historical and biblical study to the Church's teaching. Rome's concern with these questions did not begin in 1907. The dispute concerned certain Catholic writers' conclusions about Scripture, revelation and whether dogma could change its meaning over time. Two documents mark 1907: Lamentabili sane exitu, dated July 3, by which the Holy Office condemned 65 propositions concerning Scripture and doctrine, without naming their authors; and Pascendi Dominici Gregis, September 8, in which Pope St. Pius X described the teachings he called Modernism, examined their underlying principles, and ordered measures concerning teaching, publications and diocesan oversight. Historical and biblical study were not condemned simply for being historical or biblical: Pascendi itself commends using sound historical work in theology.
In 1863, after a congress of German Catholic scholars at Munich, Pope Pius IX wrote the letter Tuas libenter. It set out what binds Catholic scholars, including the doctrinal decisions of the Roman congregations (the Vatican's departments). The next year the Syllabus of Errors, attached to his encyclical Quanta Cura (December 8, 1864), condemned by name the claim that the scholastic method no longer suited the times (proposition 13). In 1893 Leo XIII's encyclical Providentissimus Deus, on the study of Scripture, encouraged historical work itself ("historical investigation should be made with the utmost care") and set a limit: no part of Scripture may be said to err.
On July 3, 1907, the Holy Office issued a decree called Lamentabili sane exitu. The Holy Office was the Vatican department that judged questions of doctrine. It had once been called the Inquisition, and today it is the Dicastery for the Doctrine of the Faith. The decree is a list of 65 condemned propositions, mostly about Scripture and the history of doctrine. It names no authors. When one reads the propositions beside the books of the previous years, many answer positions argued by the French priest and Scripture scholar Abbé Alfred Loisy, and others answer Dogme et critique by the French philosopher Édouard Le Roy. That pairing is a comparison of the texts. It is not something the Church itself declared.
On September 8, 1907, Pope St. Pius X followed with the encyclical Pascendi Dominici Gregis ("Feeding the Lord's Flock"), "On the Doctrines of the Modernists." Saint Pope Pius described one system of thought and gave it the name already in use: Modernism. He wrote of "the Modernists (as they are commonly and rightly called)" (section 4). The name was not his coinage. Reference works trace the word in Catholic print back to 1883, where it was used at first only by the Modernist movement's opponents.
He argued the system rested on a philosophy: "Modernists place the foundation of religious philosophy in that doctrine which is usually called Agnosticism" (section 6), meaning, in the encyclical's sense, the view that we can know nothing beyond what the senses and science reach. To set out the system he pictured a Modernist as seven men in one: "a philosopher, a believer, a theologian, an historian, a critic, an apologist, a reformer" (section 5), and examined each in turn.
He described the danger as lying "in her very bosom" and working "not from without but from within" (sections 2 and 3). Of the people he describes he wrote, "they lay the axe not to the branches and shoots, but to the very root, that is, to the faith and its deepest fibers" (section 3). He noted that their teachings were presented "in a scattered and disjointed manner" and that he was gathering them into one picture, which he called "the synthesis of all heresies" (section 39).
He named the schools as the battleground. The obstacles the Modernists attack, he wrote, are "the scholastic method of philosophy, the authority and tradition of the Fathers, and the magisterium of the Church" (section 42). ("The Fathers" are the early Christian writers, roughly the 2nd to 8th centuries, such as St. Augustine. The "magisterium" is the Church's teaching authority, the claim that the pope and bishops can settle what belongs to the faith.) "They seize upon professorships in the seminaries and universities," he wrote, "and gradually make of them chairs of pestilence" (section 43). His first remedy renewed Leo XIII: "We will and ordain that scholastic philosophy be made the basis of the sacred sciences," meaning "chiefly that which the Angelic Doctor has bequeathed to us" (section 45). ("Angelic Doctor" is St. Thomas's traditional title.) He added that Leo's earlier orders remained "fully in force" and told bishops to impose the rule where it was neglected.
Three cautions belong beside all this.
One: the encyclical does not condemn historical work as such. It praises scholars who "illustrate positive theology by throwing the light of true history upon it." It says "certainly more attention must be paid to positive theology than in the past, but this must be done without detriment to scholastic theology," and it disapproves as "of Modernist tendencies" those who exalt positive theology "in such a way as to seem to despise the scholastic" (section 46). In other words, the document itself allows history and sets the limit. It does not contrast history with Saint Thomas.
Two: Pope Pius X was addressing teachings circulating inside the Church, not an outside enemy. Whether any particular scholar held any particular teaching has to be shown from that scholar's own writings. The encyclical names no one.
Three: two who felt accused answered in print, and their answers are on record. Loisy, a priest whose five books had been placed on the Index in 1903, wrote in Simples réflexions (1908): "In fact, the so-called modernist system is a compilation formed of bits and pieces, which could only be brought into a unity by artificial combinations," its parts attributed "not to this or that individual, but to all the modernists without distinction" (pp. 15 and 16; translated for this account). Fr. George Tyrrell, an English former Jesuit, replied in The Times: "When the encyclical tries to show the modernist that he is no Catholic, it mostly succeeds in showing him that he is no scholastic - which he knew." That line reaches this letter through a 2007 article by C. J. T. Talar in Theological Studies. These replies simply show what those men contested.
The encyclical also ordered closer oversight, and the orders are documented. Anyone "in any way found to be tainted with Modernism" was to be "excluded without compunction" from seminary and Catholic-university offices, "whether of government or of teaching," and those already in them "are to be removed" (section 48). Books and periodicals of the kind were not to be "permitted to seminarists or university students," with censors in every diocesan office (sections 50 to 52). No secular priest was to take on "the editorship of papers or periodicals" without his bishop's consent (section 53). And a "Council of Vigilance" in every diocese was to "watch most carefully for every trace and sign of Modernism both in publications and in teaching" (section 55). Three years later, on September 1, 1910, a motu proprio (a document the pope issues "of his own accord") called Sacrorum Antistitum renewed these rules and added more. Seminarians were barred from reading newspapers and periodicals, each professor's teaching text and theses went to the bishop every year, anyone found suspect was removed at once, and a set of named groups, including seminary professors, had to swear an oath against Modernism. Those are the measures on paper. How they were applied to individual men is a separate question, and the sections below follow it man by man.
On June 29, 1914, Pope Pius X issued a motu proprio called Doctoris Angelici. Its printed heading addresses it to Italy and the adjacent islands ("Pro Italia et insulis adiacentibus"). How far it was meant, or taken, to apply beyond them is an open question, and it is not settled here. In it Pope Pius sharpened his earlier words. His use of "particularly" (praecipue) in Pascendi had been read as leaving room for other Doctors against St. Thomas. "They were greatly deceived," he now wrote. The principles and "major pronouncements" of St. Thomas were to be observed religiously and inviolably, and not "placed in the category of opinions capable of being debated one way or another." For ordinary seminaries he allowed summarized textbooks drawn from St. Thomas, "provided suitable teachers are available." For institutions that held the Holy See's permission to grant degrees in theology he ordered, "it is Our will and We hereby order and command," that the Summa itself be the classroom text, taught in Latin. He named a penalty: no new degree-granting power without this, and institutions already holding it "shall be deprived" of it if after three years they had not complied. That is what the document provides. Whether, where, and how the penalty was ever applied is not documented in this account.
A few weeks later, on July 27, 1914, the Sacred Congregation of Studies, the Vatican office then overseeing Catholic schools, published a list of twenty-four short statements of metaphysics, usually called the "24 Thomistic theses." (Metaphysics is the branch of philosophy that asks what reality is at its most basic.) The theses had been put forward by teachers, examined by the Congregation and shown to the pope. The Congregation answered that they "plainly contain those principles and major pronouncements of the holy Doctor."
What the theses meant in practice is disputed. Some later writers read them as the Church's required philosophy, while others read the decree more narrowly.
Two years later, in 1916, the Sacred Congregation of Seminaries and Universities, which had replaced the Congregation of Studies, answered teachers who asked how to use the theses. It proposed them, in its own Latin, as "tutae normae directivae," translated here as "safe directive norms." It also said the Summa was to be used "una cum aliquo textu, qui ordinem logicum quaestionum indicet et partem positivam contineat," that is, together with a text that lays out the questions in logical order and contains the "positive part." The response was confirmed by Pope Benedict XV on March 7, 1916.
In 1917 the Church issued its first Code of Canon Law, in force from May 19, 1918. Canon 1366, section 2, made the matter standing law for the Latin Church. Professors were to treat the study of philosophy and theology, and the formation of their students, "according to the method, doctrine and principles of the Angelic Doctor, and hold them as sacred."
So by 1914, and fully by 1918, seminaries had an official reference point, fixed in stages. On paper, practice ran from the manuals Doctoris Angelici allows in ordinary seminaries to the Summa it requires where degrees are granted. How classrooms actually taught is a separate question the documents alone do not answer. Alongside this stood a papal condemnation of teachings called Modernism, an oath against those teachings, measures to prevent their spread, and twenty-four Thomistic theses put forward as a guide for teaching. The next generation of theologians grew up inside this system.
In the 1930s two Catholic houses of study became centers of a new current. A "house of study" is a school run by a religious order, where the order's own members are formed and teach.
The first was Le Saulchoir, the house of studies of the French Dominicans. It had been expelled from France in 1903, when the French government closed the religious orders' houses, and settled at Kain, near Tournai in Belgium, in 1904. It moved back to Étiolles, near Paris, in the late 1930s. Histories variously date the move to 1937, 1938 and 1939. Fr. Marie-Dominique Chenu was its rector, the head of the house, from 1932 to 1942. Fr. Yves Congar studied there from 1926 to 1931 and taught there in the 1930s.
The second was Fourvière, the Jesuit house of theology at Lyon. The Jesuits are a religious order founded in the sixteenth century. Fr. Henri de Lubac was appointed in September 1929 to the chair of fundamental theology in the Catholic University's Faculty of Theology at Lyon. (A "chair" is a permanent professorship, and "fundamental theology" examines the foundations of the faith, such as revelation.) Fr. Jean Daniélou and Fr. Claude Mondésert worked alongside him. Hans Urs von Balthasar came from Switzerland to study under him, and Fr. Henri Bouillard joined the faculty in 1941.
No founded school and no signed common program uniting these men is documented. Whether they should be seen as one movement with one method is an open question, and it is not assumed here.
Before the works themselves, one pattern is worth naming, because the rest of this letter tests it man by man. What these writers shared was an initial idea and a perceived flaw it answered. The perceived flaw, in their own criticisms, was a theology confined too much to later manuals and abstract systems, with too little attention to Scripture, the Fathers and historical context. The initial idea was a return to those sources: renew theology by renewed study of Scripture, the early Christian writers and the tradition itself. The French word for it is ressourcement. That the flaw was real is their diagnosis, not a defect this letter establishes; that they perceived it is what their works document. And each man applied the idea individually. A historical study of St. Thomas, a theology of Christian unity, and a new account of nature and grace are different remedies, and their connection does not establish that every man held every position.
Fr. Chenu. In 1937 he privately printed, in a run of several hundred copies, a short book called Une école de théologie: Le Saulchoir ("A School of Theology"). "Privately printed" means it was produced for circulation among colleagues. It grew out of a talk he gave in the house on St. Thomas's day, March 7, 1936, whose French text survives and was published in 1990. He described the school's theology as built "on two poles: on one side, first, the primacy of the revealed given... on the other, a categorical confidence in the value of intelligibility, of rational working-out." He closed by claiming St. Thomas himself for that freedom: "not out of good will or liberalism, but out of a vivid perception of the very laws of theological knowledge - the 'given' and the 'constructed' - we are progressive, conquering and free, after the example of our master St. Thomas." The same talk says every theological construction, Thomas's included, involves "a certain relativism, because the breadth of faith overflows theological constructions," so that assent "needs degrees." Both sentences stand in the record, his claim of fidelity to Aquinas and the sentence a critical reader would seize on. By the account of the scholarly literature, the 1937 book carried the description further: theology studied through history, and Aquinas read in the setting of the thirteenth century rather than through the later manuals. Whether its picture of the manuals was fair is disputed.
Fr. Congar. The same year he published Chrétiens désunis ("Disunited Christians"), the first volume of a new collection he founded at the Éditions du Cerf, a Catholic publishing house in Paris, called Unam Sanctam. It laid out principles for a Catholic approach to Christian unity. A scholarly account pins its content by page: a communion view of the Church, "elements of the Church" among separated Christians, and degrees of communion.
Fr. Louis Charlier. This Belgian Dominican of the same circle published Essai sur le problème théologique in 1938. He contested the reduction of theology to conclusions deduced by logic. In his statement of that position, "the true theological conclusion... is the one deduced from a major [premise] of faith and a minor of reason" (p. 31). Against it he claimed Aquinas himself, who "was more concerned to know the Church's thought and the contribution of its tradition than to venture into speculations without sufficient dogmatic foundation" (p. 150). A contemporary answer is on record. Fr. Rosaire Gagnebet of the Angelicum (the Dominican university in Rome) replied in 1939 and 1940 that Charlier had misread St. Thomas.
The return to the sources. The movement's practical work was a return to old texts, called ressourcement in French. In 1941 a group around Fr. de Lubac and Fr. Daniélou in Lyon decided to launch a collection of the early Church writers in new translations, Sources Chrétiennes ("Christian Sources"). Its first volume, Fr. Daniélou's edition of St. Gregory of Nyssa's Life of Moses, appeared in wartime. The collection's own sources differ on the season: one history says autumn 1942, the collection's own chronology lists 1943. Fr. Claude Mondésert belonged to the same circle as the editor of Clement of Alexandria in the collection. The collection put the program into print: the Fathers themselves, in new translations, alongside the manuals rather than only through them.
Fr. Bouillard. In 1944 he published Conversion et grâce chez saint Thomas d'Aquin, drawn from his 1941 doctoral thesis; it opened the Fourvière theology series. (Grace, in Christian teaching, is God's free help, given beyond anything human nature can claim by its own powers.) His preface states the method: since St. Thomas's own thought progressed, study his works "in chronological order," discern "the stages and the causes of his evolution," and "place the author in his time, grasp in what his notions and his problems differed from ours" (p. 13). A reviewer of the time, the philosopher Paul Vignaux, called it in 1946 "strictly a historical study," an analysis of St. Thomas's thought in its development, "freed from the interpretations conceived by the later 'Thomists.'" A 2021 retrospective states the book's concluding thesis as the relativity of theological systems and their dependence on the culture of their time, and names the resulting polemic the "affaire de Fourvière." His critic later quoted one sentence against him: "A theology that was not current would be a false theology" (p. 219). Whether the critic's reading was fair is disputed. One oversight event is documented before the critic's article: on October 17, 1945, the vigilance council of the Paris diocese, the watching-committee Pius X had ordered set up in every diocese in 1907, examined the book at the Holy Office's request and reported to Rome. That detail comes from a secondary study.
Fr. de Lubac. His proposed renewal runs through the argument of his books; the account of that argument here follows a Notre Dame journal's summary. Corpus Mysticum (1944) treated the Eucharist and the Church, tracing how the early Church saw the two as bound together. Surnaturel (1946) was a historical study of the idea of the supernatural, that is, of what lies beyond the powers of human nature, above all the life of grace. In his own sentences: "If there is in our nature a desire to see God, that can only be because God wills for us that supernatural end which consists in seeing him" (1946 edition, p. 486). He argued that the manual tradition's idea of a self-sufficient natural end for man was a later construction: man's ultimate end is not in himself but in God, an end he can reach only by grace, while a natural end is still affirmed. After St. Thomas had built "a bridge" between philosophy and faith "thanks to his doctrine of the 'natural desire,'" the sixteenth-century interpreters worked "to complete the rupture" (1991 edition, p. 132). His own stated aim, in a 1932 letter to the philosopher Maurice Blondel, was that his work on the supernatural "aims only at recovering the most traditional teaching." Whether his history is correct was contested at the time. Fr. Charles Boyer argued in 1947 that a nature without a proportionate natural end is a contradiction. Fr. Gagnebet argued in 1948 and 1949 that de Lubac had misread St. Thomas on natural love. Fr. Marie-Joseph Le Guillou corrected much of the book in 1950. It remains disputed among scholars. With Fr. Daniélou he co-directed Sources Chrétiennes.
Fr. Daniélou. His clearest statement of a program is an article of 1946, "Les orientations présentes de la pensée religieuse" ("The present orientations of religious thought"), in the journal Études. He set three directions in his own words: theology must be renewed from the deep sources of religious life, stay in contact with the currents of contemporary thought, and be apostolic, answering the needs of souls. For the third he quotes Karl Marx's theses on transforming the world. He also co-directed Sources Chrétiennes and wrote Origène (1948) and Sacramentum futuri (1950).
Fr. Karl Rahner, S.J. A 1949 article, "Die vielen Messen und das eine Opfer" ("The Many Masses and the One Sacrifice," reissued in book form with Fr. Angelus Häussling in 1966), raised concelebration - several priests offering the same Mass together - and questioned the multiplication of Masses. A concrete liturgical question, asked from within the accepted theology of the sacrifice. The measures taken against him are recorded in section IX.
Fr. Congar's reform book. In 1950 Fr. Congar published Vraie et fausse réforme dans l'Église ("True and False Reform in the Church"), a study of how the Church can reform without breaking. Its own table of contents sets four conditions for reform without schism: the primacy of charity and of pastoral concern; remaining in communion with the whole Church; patience with delays; and genuine renewal through a return to the principle of tradition, "not the forced introduction of novelty." Those are his stated conditions for true reform. This letter does not prejudge whether the later changes met them; it keeps the test where he published it, beside the record.
Fr. Hans Urs von Balthasar. In 1952 he published Schleifung der Bastionen (in English, Razing the Bastions: On the Church in This Age), which called on the Church to engage the world rather than stay barricaded against it. In My Work in Retrospect, dated 1965, the Council's closing year, he later looked back on the book; the retrospect is his own later commentary, and whether it preceded the Council's December 8 close is not established.
Fr. Joseph Ratzinger. His doctoral dissertation, Volk und Haus Gottes in Augustins Lehre von der Kirche ("People and House of God in Augustine's Teaching on the Church"), a study of Augustine's doctrine of the Church, was published in 1954. An encyclopedia biography describes him as an early proponent of the liturgical movement; that is the biography's description. The first proposal of his documented here is the joint 1961 volume described in section XI.
Fr. Hans Küng. His doctoral work, Rechtfertigung ("Justification," 1957), treated the doctrine of justification in engagement with the Protestant understanding of it.
Three things should be plain from this list. First, "reform" here meant different things: theological method, the understanding of the Church, Christian unity, the place of the laity (Congar's 1953 Jalons pour une théologie du laïcat argued a larger place in the Church for the laity, the members of the Church who are not clergy), and particular liturgical questions. It was not one proposal with one meaning. Second, the direct evidence is uneven: Daniélou's 1946 article and Congar's 1950 book state their programs in their own text, while other entries rest on reviews and later accounts. Third, the list is not closed. Fr. Féret and Fr. Mondésert belonged to these circles; their individual proposals are not documented in this account, and that absence is not a finding that they proposed nothing.
The label "new theology", Nouvelle Théologie, came from the other side. Fr. Pietro Parente had written of a "teologia nuova" in L'Osservatore Romano, the Vatican's daily newspaper, in 1942. That reference rests on a chain of citations and is marked here as unconfirmed.
The name was fixed in French by Fr. Réginald Garrigou-Lagrange, a leading Thomist of the Roman schools. (A Thomist follows the thought of St. Thomas.) In a 1946 article in the journal Angelicum, titled "La nouvelle théologie, où va-t-elle?" ("The new theology: where is it going?"), he named Fr. Bouillard and others, and ended with his question: where will this new theology go, "if not into the path of skepticism, of fantasy and of heresy?" He asked: "How can it be maintained that the real presence of the substance of the Body of Christ in the Eucharist requires transubstantiation, if these notions are essentially changeable? How can it be maintained that original sin in us depends on a voluntary fault of the first man, if the notion of original sin is essentially unstable?" He went to what he saw as the root, a new definition of truth drawn from the philosophy of action: "We see the danger of the new definition of truth, no longer the conformity of the intellect with reality, but the conformity of the mind with life." He recalled that the Holy Office had condemned twelve propositions drawn from that philosophy on December 1, 1924 (the reply names no person), and set beside it the formula condemned in 1907: "Truth is no more immutable than man himself, since it evolves with him, in him and through him." "This brings us singularly close to modernism," he wrote, and "Faith becomes a set of probable opinions." (The "philosophy of action" is a current in French philosophy associated with Blondel. That is the critic's characterization, given as his and not as a neutral summary.) Whether his comparison with Modernism was fair is disputed, then and now.
Criticism of the ideas behind the quarrel was older than the name. The philosophy of action had been answered before: Fr. Marie-Benoît Schwalm argued against Blondel's apologetics in 1896, and Fr. Joseph de Tonquédec against his philosophy in 1913. Those earlier answers belong to the background of this debate; the men of the 1940s were not named in them.
Another critic spoke more gently. Fr. Marie-Michel Labourdette was a Dominican of the province of Toulouse and editor of the Revue thomiste. In 1946 he published "La théologie et ses sources" ("Theology and its sources"), a review of the two collections the Lyon Jesuits had launched. By a 2000 study's account, he did not object to publishing the early Greek writers or to studying the history of doctrine. What he feared was a spirit of disapproval toward the scholastic achievement and a depreciation of the mind's search for abiding truth. He charged the new work with two "relativisms," one historical, treating truth as truth for a period, and one experiential, treating truth as measured by religious experience. He feared there might one day be "historians of the thought of St. Thomas, curators of a Thomist museum, but not actual disciples of Thomas," and held that "it is not enough to be an historical theologian, to know how problems were posed in the past. One must have an answer to them now." The same study records that his article asked for a peaceful but far-reaching debate and that he wanted dialogue, not condemnation. He did not claim that the new theology was Modernism reborn.
The accused answered. Late in 1946 the Jesuit journal Recherches de Science Religieuse carried an unsigned reply defending de Lubac, Daniélou, Bouillard, Fr. Gaston Fessard and Balthasar against the charge of relativism, and charging certain scholastic theology in return with insensitivity to history. It said: "If the evil days of Modernism are now, thank God, far from us, the evil days of integralism may be coming back." (Integralism, in that reply's usage, was a defensive cast of mind that treats every received opinion of the schools as untouchable. It is that reply's word for its opponents, not a neutral description of them.) The author was hidden at the time. The 2000 study reports that Fr. de Lubac admitted in a letter of 1988 that he wrote it with help from the others. In March 1947 Fr. Bouillard wrote privately of his critic: "Fr. Garrigou-Lagrange enjoys an authority that far exceeds his competence." In April 1947 Mgr. Bruno de Solages, rector of the Catholic Institute of Toulouse, answered publicly with an article titled "Fr. Garrigou-Lagrange's misreadings." The substance of those replies, that the critic misread the accused, is the other side of a question still disputed.
On September 17, 1946, Pope Pius XII spoke to the Jesuits' General Congregation, the worldwide assembly of the order's leading members. He criticized a "new theology" that, in his words, "with all things forever changing, must change along with them, always on the way, never arriving," and asked what would become of unchangeable dogmas and the unity and stability of the faith. (A dogma is a truth the Church holds as certainly revealed by God.) The text is in the Acta Apostolicae Sedis, the Vatican's official record of papal acts.
By the end of 1946, then, the Nouvelle Théologie movement had its books, its critics' name, and its first public opponents.
Rome's attention had come early. In February 1938, months after his little book appeared, Fr. Chenu was required to sign a list of ten propositions touching its teaching; among them, by an Oxford University Press preview's account, propositions affirming the ahistorical and unchanging character of dogma. Historians of the affair note that the authority behind that document is unclear. In January 1939 the Dominican Master General, the order's worldwide head, sent Fr. Chenu a further list of five erroneous propositions then in circulation. The fifth was widely read as aimed at Congar's Chrétiens désunis, though that is the historians' reading, not a statement in the document. A private warning from the Holy Office to Fr. Congar in the same month is reported by a 2021 study based on the opened Pius XII archives.
On February 4, 1942, the Holy Office condemned both Chenu's Une école de théologie and Charlier's Essai and ordered them onto the Index of Forbidden Books. (The Index was a list of books Catholics were forbidden to read without permission, kept by the Holy Office and abolished in 1966.) On March 26, 1942, it notified that both men "laudabiliter se subiecerunt," that is, had commendably submitted. Fr. Chenu was removed as rector of Le Saulchoir the same year. Historians commonly date the public beginning of the "nouvelle théologie" affair to these condemnations.
In June 1950 five Jesuit theologians of Lyon-Fourvière were removed from teaching. A 2025 review in the Nouvelle Revue Théologique names them: Fr. de Lubac, Fr. Bouillard, Fr. Pierre Ganne, Fr. Émile Delaye and Fr. Alexandre Durand. Fr. Daniélou is not among them; the accounts used here record no personal disciplinary measure against him. The order came from the Jesuit Superior General after years of reports about the "new theology" reaching Rome, and some of their books were withdrawn from Jesuit libraries. This was two months before the encyclical that followed, so it was not an answer to it. In de Lubac's case the documented acts were his order's: he was asked to leave his Fourvière teaching, moved to Paris, and forbidden theological publication. He later recalled that neither Pope Pius XII "nor any other legitimate authority of the Church ever took any action against me" (his recollection, quoted by a Notre Dame journal). Whether Roman pressure stood behind the order's decision is not settled, and the often-repeated claim that his books were placed on the Index is not supported by the documented record. Cardinal Gerlier of Lyon made him his advisor in 1951, and limited teaching resumed in 1953.
On August 12, 1950, Pius XII issued the encyclical Humani Generis. It named no person and no school. It warned against theologians who would "reduce to a minimum the meaning of dogmas; and to free dogma itself from terminology long established in the Church and from philosophical concepts held by Catholic teachers" (section 14). It said of the new tendencies that "these advocates of novelty easily pass from despising scholastic theology to the neglect of and even contempt for the Teaching Authority of the Church itself" (section 18). It also allowed a return to the sources of revelation, while holding that such study "cannot be on a par with merely historical science," since the Church holds a living teaching authority over the deposit of faith (section 21). The text is firm. Whom it targeted is disputed. Many historians read it as aimed at the men described above, and the timing of the Fourvière removals supports a link, but the text itself names no one, and it is not decided here.
Fr. Congar had kept writing. His Vraie et fausse réforme appeared in 1950. In 1952 Rome forbade the book and all translations of it; by the book's reception history, the Holy Office ordered that it not be translated or republished. From 1947 to 1956 his writing was under restriction. On March 1, 1954, at Rome's request, the French worker-priest experiment was officially closed. (Worker-priests were French priests who, from 1943, took factory jobs to reach workers who had left the Church.) Several Dominicans had supported it, Fr. Chenu among them.
In early February 1954 the Dominican Master General, Fr. Emmanuel Suarez, carried out what Fr. Congar's diary calls the "great purge." Four friars of the French province were disciplined. Congar and Fr. Henri-Marie Féret, a fellow Dominican of the house, were removed from the teaching body of Le Saulchoir, and Chenu was sent away from it to Rouen. Congar was dismissed from teaching and had to leave France. After years abroad he was assigned to Strasbourg.
Fr. Rahner's case ran on a separate track, in his order and at the Holy Office's files rather than in public condemnations. His superiors forbade him to discuss the concelebration question his 1949 article had raised, per a Theological Studies article; a secondary account adds that Pope Pius XII contradicted part of the article without naming him, in a 1954 talk (attributed as such). A Mariology manuscript was refused publication in 1951, after the 1950 definition of the Assumption. A 2024 archival study reconstructs Holy Office scrutiny of him from 1953 to 1957, says he received only a monitum (a formal warning), and records stricter internal pre-censorship by his Jesuit order from 1956. These were restrictions on what he could publish and discuss, not a public judgment.
Fr. Küng's name entered the Holy Office's heresiology card file in 1957, protocol 399/57/i, over his doctoral work. That was a file entry, not yet a public condemnation.
Through the same decade Rome itself was changing practice. Pius XII authorized the restored Easter Vigil in 1951 (decree Dominicae Resurrectionis of the Sacred Congregation of Rites, February 9, 1951, AAS 43 [1951] 128-137, at first optional and experimental), evening Mass and changes to the Eucharistic fast in 1953 (his apostolic constitution Christus Dominus, January 6, 1953, AAS 45 [1953] 15-24), and a restored order of Holy Week in 1955 (decree Maxima redemptionis nostrae mysteria, November 16, 1955, AAS 47 [1955] 838-847, in force from Holy Week 1956). So proposing a change in discipline or worship was not, by itself, outside the accepted discussion. That is not the same as proposing changes in doctrine, or a general program for reforming the Church; the distinction matters for reading what the measures were aimed at.
Man by man, the documented measures are these. Fr. Chenu: his book on the Index, the rectorate lost in 1942, his place at Le Saulchoir lost in 1954. Fr. Charlier: his book on the Index. Fr. Congar: writing restrictions from 1947, his 1950 book forbidden in 1952, removal from teaching and a posting abroad in 1954. Fr. Féret: removed from Le Saulchoir's teaching body in the same 1954 purge. Fr. de Lubac and Fr. Bouillard: removed from teaching at Fourvière in 1950. Fr. Rahner: barred from discussing concelebration, a manuscript refused, and by the mid-1950s under his order's pre-censorship. Fr. Daniélou kept his Paris post, and the 2000 study records that his most-discussed article was among writings withdrawn from the open shelves of Jesuit libraries.
None of these measures was a heresy trial, and none was a public judgment charging a named man with heresy. They were not, however, one kind of act. The 1942 condemnations of Fr. Chenu's and Fr. Charlier's books were doctrinal acts of the Holy Office against two books, placed on the Index after judgment. Humani Generis was a doctrinal encyclical that named no one. The Fourvière and Le Saulchoir removals of 1950 and 1954 were administrative acts of the men's religious orders. Fr. Rahner's monitum was a formal warning and his pre-censorship an order's internal control; Fr. Küng's 1957 entry was a note in a file. What doctrinal assessment stood behind the order-level acts is exactly what the record leaves open, and this letter leaves it open. Nor were the cases identical: one man lost two posts, another kept his post while his order withdrew books, another was only warned, another only filed.
Talk of reforming the Church did not begin with these men, and it did not mean one thing. Established movements concerned with the liturgy, with Scripture, with Christian unity and with the early Christian sources had made renewal a regular topic in particular circles for decades. How far that talk reached among ordinary priests and Catholics is a question the accounts gathered here do not measure: books, series and journal exchanges show an active network, and the restrictions show that Rome and the orders were watching, but neither counts readers or supporters.
The word also covered different kinds of change, which the rest of this letter keeps separate: changes in discipline or worship, which authority itself was then making; changes in theological method, the road the men above were taking; and changes in doctrine, which is where their critics said the road led. Which kind each man proposed, and what became of each proposal, is the thread the rest of the letter follows.
One more current belongs in this inventory, because the Council years bring it back. Joseph Cardijn, a Belgian priest later made cardinal, founded the Young Christian Workers - the JOC, from its French initials - and formed it around a method his movement called "see, judge, act." His own formation was the seminary at Malines and a year at Louvain; no pupil-to-teacher tie to Le Saulchoir or Fourvière is documented. A Cardijn researcher, Stefan Gigacz, reports that as a seminarian Cardijn was formed partly by the Sillon, a French lay movement condemned by Pope St. Pius X in 1910, and that Fr. Chenu and Fr. Congar later worked with the JOC through its retreats and chaplains. That is one researcher's reported lead: the underlying originals are not yet independently checked, and even if confirmed, contact and formation would not by themselves establish that the Sillon's condemned teachings passed into anyone's theology or into the Council's documents. What is documented is the method's standing by 1961. Cardijn's 1960 memoranda argued that lay people have a "proper and irreplaceable apostolate" of their own, and Pope John XXIII's encyclical Mater et Magistra of May 15, 1961 expressly recommends the "see, judge, act" method (sections 236-237) without naming him. His documented work with Fr. Chenu and Fr. Congar belongs to the Council years below; the influence may have run both ways.
Pope Pius XII died on October 9, 1958. The conclave ran from October 25 to 28, with fifty-one cardinals participating, and on the third voting day, the eleventh ballot, it elected Cardinal Angelo Roncalli, Patriarch of Venice. The next day's newspaper already reported the eleven ballots, so that detail is not merely later recollection. Roncalli's own diary says his name "returned to the top" on the ninth and eleventh ballots, which cautions against accounts of a simple, steady rise. He took the name John, unused by a pope for more than five hundred years. He was seventy-six.
Who made that majority is less firmly documented than the result. The French ambassador, Roland de Margerie, campaigned for Roncalli, according to a study of the French diplomatic archives; that is an ambassador's campaign, not the support of the French cardinals, whom the same study describes as divided, with the five French residential cardinals considering an initial vote for Cardinal Montini. The study identifies Cardinals Grente and Roques as having rallied to Roncalli during the conclave, on Grente's own journal and audience notes, and calls that conclusion tentative; it describes Cardinals Feltin, Liénart and Gerlier as remaining cool. Time's contemporary account placed the French with Cardinal Lercaro. Later accounts describe a disciplined French bloc holding for Roncalli; the often-repeated story that Cardinal Gerlier openly named Roncalli as his choice reaches this letter through Fr. Küng's 2002 memoir, a later recollection. Cardinal Elia Dalla Costa of Florence is recorded, through a later biography, as encouraging Roncalli before the conclave. These are reported supporters and encouragers, not a verified list of ballots, and the conclave's ballots were secret.
He had been the papal nuncio in Paris from December 1944 into 1953, the very years when the measures against the new theology described above were taken. One reported tie to those years is worth recording with its limits. Congar recounted that a missionary had found Roncalli at the Paris nunciature in 1952 reading and marking up Vraie et fausse réforme. That is the missionary's account, passed on by Congar: a reported encounter with the book, not a meeting between the two men, and not proof that the book shaped any later decision.
There is also a documented fact on the other side of the usual telling: wanting a council did not belong to one party. Fr. Joseph Komonchak's study, citing the earlier history by Fr. Giovanni Caprile, reports that Cardinal Ottaviani discussed a council with Pope Pius XII in March 1948. His concerns included errors in philosophy, theology and morals, communism, Church discipline and revision of Canon Law; a definition of the Assumption was among the proposed subjects. Pius XII authorized preparatory work within the Holy Office, and Ottaviani chaired a meeting of consultors that month. That earlier program emphasized doctrinal definitions, correction of errors and discipline; it does not establish that Ottaviani wanted the Council that eventually met, or its results. Ottaviani's own later claim that he and Cardinal Ruffini approached Roncalli during the 1958 conclave about holding a council is participant testimony from a later interview.
At the Basilica of St. Paul Outside the Walls, before seventeen cardinals, John XXIII announced a three-part program: a diocesan synod for Rome, an ecumenical council, and the updating of the Code of Canon Law, the collected law of the Latin Church issued in 1917. The announcement spoke of the good of souls, Rome's growth, weakened discipline and the errors that had produced religious division. Its proposed response was a return to ancient forms of doctrinal affirmation and wise discipline that had borne fruit in earlier renewals.
"all'auspicato e atteso aggiornamento del Codice di Diritto Canonico" - "the hoped-for and awaited updating of the Code of Canon Law." In this source, aggiornamento names revision, not the abolition of canon law.
The announcement came eighty-nine days after his election. The appointments that brought the restricted men back toward official work came after it, not before it, as the dated steps below show.
In Humanae salutis, the document formally summoning the Council, John described a society making material progress without a matching moral advance, and he named militant atheism and materialist ideologies. He also saw grounds for confidence: the lessons of war, a desire for peace, growing cooperation and renewed apostolic energies. The Council was to join the sanctification of the Church's members, the spread of revealed truth, stronger structures and Christian unity. It was not organized around a single heresy to condemn, but that absence does not by itself establish the absence of a theological purpose.
An ante-preparatory survey of the world's bishops began in May 1959. In June 1960 John established ten preparatory commissions, most chaired by the heads of the Roman Curial departments. Doctrine was drafted by the theological commission attached to the Holy Office under Cardinal Alfredo Ottaviani. A Secretariat for Christian Unity, created June 5, 1960 under Cardinal Augustin Bea, would invite the non-Catholic observers. Sources consulted describe the liturgy and Unity drafts as leaning toward renewal and several others as restating the manual theology of the seminary textbooks; that characterization belongs to those sources.
One organizing episode outside Rome belongs to these preparatory years. Fr. Ralph Wiltgen, an American Divine Word missionary who reported the Council for his order's news service and published a detailed account of it in 1967, records that after seventeen Dutch bishops met to discuss the first schemas, an anonymous commentary was prepared criticizing the first four dogmatic drafts, favoring the liturgy as the first subject for debate, and raising the possibility of complete rewriting; nearly 1,500 copies were printed in Latin, English and French for international circulation. Wiltgen attributes the commentary to Fr. Edward Schillebeeckx, a Dominican of the Dutch province (pp. 22-24). This is the first of several places where this letter draws on his account; the attribution and the page references are his, and his reporting is still to be checked against the Council's official proceedings.
The road back differed man by man, and it began before the announcement. Fr. Congar had returned to France in 1956, under Pius XII, and from 1957 he resided at Strasbourg; a return is not by itself the end of every restriction. Fr. de Lubac also returned to Lyon in 1956; sources differ on when his teaching restriction fully ended, one giving 1958, another 1959, which leaves its timing relative to John's election unresolved. A French granular source records the restoration of Chenu's master-in-theology privileges in 1959 and his reassignment to Saint-Jacques in Paris in 1962.
Then the appointments. Fr. Congar was named a consultor to the Preparatory Theological Commission in July 1960, per the account in L'Osservatore Romano; Fr. de Lubac's appointment, from Pope John XXIII, is dated August 1960 by the Nouvelle Revue Théologique's panorama. Congar attended its first meeting and criticized the initial work on the Church and revelation drafts; by Fouilloux's account he was not invited to the second meeting in February 1961, then had a voice again at the last preparatory meeting in 1962. On March 22, 1961, John XXIII appointed Rahner a consultor to the preparatory Commission on the Sacraments. These were expert appointments, not reinstatements to teaching posts and not leadership.
Two of the works now called preparatory appeared in these years, after the announcement. Fr. Küng's Konzil und Wiedervereinigung (1960; in English, The Council, Reform and Reunion) argued his thesis, Church renewal as the road to Christian reunion; its table of contents includes "The ecumenical task of the church" and "The framework for Catholic renewal," and its dust jacket says it "discusses the idea of church reform first introduced by Pope John XXIII." In 1961 Fr. Rahner and Fr. Ratzinger published a joint volume, "The Episcopate and the Primacy," whose title essay - Rahner's - argued for holding together the papal primacy and the episcopal college as both of divine right, against a merely "monarchical" picture of the Church (summary per a Theological Studies article). Fr. Ratzinger's own contribution to the volume is not separately documented. Both works answer the announcement; neither is a pre-announcement proposal.
The Council opened in St. Peter's on October 11, 1962. The opening address, Gaudet Mater Ecclesia, states the Council's chief concern: to guard the sacred deposit of Christian doctrine and to present it more effectively. John wanted the doctrine transmitted whole, without diminution or distortion, and he distinguished the received doctrine from its presentation.
"Est enim aliud ipsum depositum Fidei ... aliud modus, quo eaedem enuntiantur, eodem tamen sensu eademque sententia." - "The deposit of faith itself is one thing ... the manner in which those truths are stated is another, yet with the same sense and the same meaning." The qualification about sense and meaning belongs to the sentence. The same address preferred the "medicine of mercy" to the "weapons of severity," while adding that this was not because false doctrines and dangers were absent. These statements supply a documentary standard against which later changes can be examined; they do not settle in advance whether every later change met it.
On October 13, the first working day, Cardinal Achille Liénart of Lille and Cardinal Josef Frings of Cologne proposed postponing the election of the conciliar commissions so that the bishops could learn who their colleagues were. The proposal was carried with acclamation. Canon Bernard Pawley, the Archbishop of Canterbury's representative in Rome, explained in his confidential reports why the postponement mattered; that explanation is an eyewitness's judgment, attributed to him.
Wiltgen's account adds the preparation behind the postponement: German bishops had discussed candidates at Cardinal Frings's residence, Frings and Liénart had agreed on the opening procedure beforehand, and Frings seconded the request; Wiltgen then traces a German-Austrian candidate list into a wider international list of 109 names (pp. 15-18). He also records that on October 16 the Council Presidency announced that the liturgy schema would be treated first, a choice Cardinals Frings, Liénart and Alfrink strongly supported - noting himself that the order of business had not previously been fixed, so the choice lay within the Presidency's existing authority (pp. 23-24). When the liturgy debate opened, Frings, as its first speaker, asked that the Fathers receive the fuller preparatory text, including the explanatory declarations removed before circulation; Wiltgen reports that requests continued, that the responsible subcommission acknowledged making the changes, and that most of the deleted passages were eventually restored (pp. 25-26, 29). Presiding on October 30, Cardinal Alfrink enforced the agreed speaking-time limit during Cardinal Ottaviani's overlong speech (pp. 28-29).
By the opening, most of the men of section VI held some place around the Council's work. The appointments are dated, and they differ in kind.
Fr. Congar, who before learning of any official appointment had asked Archbishop Weber of Strasbourg to make him his private theologian, became in autumn 1962 an official Council expert assigned to the Doctrinal Commission. Pope John XXIII appointed Fr. Daniélou a Council expert in September 1962. Fr. Rahner came under a cloud that lifted only in part: after his address "Do Not Stifle the Spirit" at the Salzburg Catholic Day on June 1, 1962, a Roman preliminary censorship of his writings followed that summer; Cardinals Döpfner, König and Frings intervened, and a memorial volume records that John XXIII distanced himself from Cardinal Ottaviani's action. Cardinal König of Vienna nevertheless made Fr. Rahner his Council adviser. When exactly the censorship was lifted the sources do not agree: one says John XXIII rehabilitated him shortly before the Council, another that the censorship was reversed in 1963. Fr. Ratzinger came as Cardinal Frings's theological adviser, appointed peritus on November 30, 1962 by one scholarly account; the distinction between assisting a cardinal and being an official Council peritus is preserved in the sources rather than harmonized. Pope John XXIII appointed Fr. Küng an official theological Council adviser.
Two men came without official status. Bishop Claude Rolland of Antsirabé brought Fr. Chenu as a private expert. Bishop Claude Flusin asked Fr. Féret to serve as council theologian; he was in Rome from the second session without the status of a Council peritus, and a later study records statement and intervention drafting, network work, and at least one entry into the hall by arrangement. Fr. Bouillard had no documented Council role; Fr. von Balthasar did not participate - he had submitted a statement to Cardinal Döpfner in March 1959, fallen ill that May, and received no appointment when commission members were called from July 1960.
Beyond the restricted men stood the cardinals and bishops whose Council work ran partly through theological advisers. The appointment record and Wiltgen's account together give five more names a place in this letter. Cardinal Frings, a member of the Council Presidency, relied on Fr. Ratzinger as a drafter; a Vatican introduction to Frings's collected interventions ties Ratzinger's work to all nineteen of his interventions on systematic theology. Cardinal Franz König of Vienna, a member of the Doctrinal Commission, had personally recruited Fr. Rahner as his adviser, and the two often discussed his interventions beforehand. Cardinal Alfrink, also on the Council Presidency, used Fr. Schillebeeckx as an unofficial theological adviser. Of the men named here, Fr. Schillebeeckx brings the school tie of section V: he had studied at Le Saulchoir and attended Fr. Chenu's and Fr. Congar's lectures. Fr. Jérôme Hamer, also a Dominican, held a senior academic post at Le Saulchoir from 1956 to 1962 and served the Council as an expert of the Secretariat for Christian Unity. Wiltgen also records that the German-language group met weekly at Frings's residence to determine policy (pp. 41-42). A post, or an adviser relationship, does not by itself establish agreement with Chenu or Congar; each connection in this letter is recorded with the actual proposal or text involved. Wiltgen's account names no episode for Fr. Hamer - a limit of that source, not a finding that he was inactive.
One early drafting episode shows both his presence and its limits. Fr. Chenu drafted a project for the Council's opening Message to the World, issued October 20, 1962. A source-citing secondary chronicle records that conciliar bishops judged the draft too much based on natural morality - Archbishop Emile Guerry recalled that it made no mention of the Saviour - and that Cardinal Liénart, Guerry, Archbishop Garrone of Toulouse and Lyon auxiliary bishop Alfred Ancel reworked it into the adopted text. Fr. Chenu criticized the result for its division between nature and grace; Fr. Congar found the adopted message more dogmatic than the draft. On that account the adopted message is a redraft by those bishops, not an unchanged adoption of Chenu's project, and how much of his wording survived has not been established.
The liturgy schema was debated first, from October 22, 1962, and it became the Council's first final text. The preparatory draft's article 24 began: "Latinae linguae usus in Liturgia occidentali servetur," "The use of the Latin language is to be preserved in the Western liturgy." The same draft already gave a wider place to the vernacular, the language spoken by the people, especially in readings and instructions, and it assigned episcopal conferences the task of proposing to the Holy See the limits and manner of admitting it. The argument that followed was not whether any vernacular could be admitted, but how much, in which parts and by whose decision.
Source: Preparatory schema, Series prima (1962), pp. 167 and 176, articles 24 and 41.
On October 22, Cardinal Giovanni Battista Montini, Archbishop of Milan, approved the schema's substance while wanting Latin firmly retained in the sacramental and properly priestly parts and the people's difficulty with the didactic parts removed. On October 23, Melkite Patriarch Maximos IV Saigh addressed the Council in French. He judged the Latin-preservation principle too absolute and asked that episcopal conferences be able to decide, subject to the Holy See's approval, rather than merely propose.
"Les conférences épiscopales ne doivent pas pouvoir seulement proposer, mais décider, sous réserve de l'approbation du Saint-Siège." - "Episcopal conferences should not be able merely to propose, but to decide, subject to the approval of the Holy See." The later text moved toward this decision-making arrangement; it did not adopt his suggested replacement for the Latin-preservation rule.
Source: Acta Synodalia I/1, pp. 313-316 (Montini) and pp. 377-379 (Maximos IV).
The doctrinal schema on revelation, De fontibus revelationis, reached the floor in November 1962. Its chapter title was "De duplici fonte revelationis," on the twofold source of revelation, and its fourth section said revelation was contained "not in Scripture alone, but in Scripture and tradition, as in a twofold source."
Source: Acta Synodalia I/3, printed pp. 14-26 (draft), especially p. 15.
On November 14, 1962, Patriarch Maximos IV asked what pastoral purpose was served by treating revelation from a "narrow, negative, and polemical angle," and proposed a positive, pastoral exposition. On November 17, Archbishop George Hakim of St. John of Acre objected that the doctrinal schemas were foreign to Eastern tradition "in their wording, in their structure, in their perspective, and in their conceptualization," including the separation, or appearance of separation, between Scripture and tradition. These are participants' public interventions, quoted from the Melkite patriarchate's English collection.
On November 20 the Fathers voted on whether discussion of the schema should be interrupted. The official tally was 1,368 placet to interrupt, 822 non placet to continue, and 19 invalid. The required two-thirds threshold was 1,473, so the motion did not pass. This was neither a promulgation vote nor a direct doctrinal rejection. On November 21 the Secretary General, Archbishop Pericle Felici, announced the Pope's decision to entrust the subject to a special commission joining members of the theological commission and the Secretariat for Christian Unity, to amend, shorten and improve the schema. The same announcement says discussion of the schema's first chapter proceeded that day; "the Pope withdrew it" is too compressed if it suggests discussion instantly ceased.
Wiltgen's account names further critics of the withdrawn schema on the majority side: Cardinals Frings, König and Alfrink were among the leading speakers dissatisfied with it (p. 47), while Fr. Schillebeeckx and the Dutch bishops appear as organizers of the opposition outside the Council hall rather than as speakers in it (p. 46). After the withdrawal, Frings was among the cardinals added to the mixed revision commission under Cardinals Ottaviani and Bea (pp. 47, 51).
Source: Acta Synodalia I/3, p. 255 (vote) and p. 259 (announcement).
The questions that would form the fourth constitution reached the Council in separate preparatory drafts, among them a text on the Christian moral order and one on marriage and the family. Fr. Joseph Ratzinger's report on the last session, written in 1966, recounts what followed the rejection of the revelation draft: the idea took hold of preparing a single comprehensive document treating the Christian relation to the world, and Cardinal Leo Jozef Suenens of Malines-Brussels, with Cardinal Montini concurring, drafted a new overall program in which the Council would treat first the Church's own life and then its relation to the world outside. This origin is recounted from Ratzinger's report.
The longest argument of the Council concerned the constitution on the Church, Lumen gentium, and within it the question of collegiality: how the body of bishops, always including the Pope as its head, possesses and exercises authority over the whole Church.
The De Ecclesia schema debated from December 1, 1962 already had an article 16 headed "College of Bishops." It described that college, with its head the Roman Pontiff and never without him, as one subject of full and supreme power over the universal Church, while adding that this power could be legitimately exercised only in an extraordinary manner and in devoted subordination to the Pope, when, how and as far as he judged suitable. A claim that the Council moved from "no college" to "a college" would miss its actual starting point.
Source: Acta Synodalia I/4, p. 27, articles 15-16.
The revised text keeps the Latin rule, now for the "Latin rites" with particular law remaining in force, and expressly names Mass and the administration of the sacraments when describing possible vernacular use. The change in authority is the heart of the revision: instead of proposing limits to Rome, the competent territorial ecclesiastical authority is to decide on the use and manner of the vernacular within the constitution's norms, its acts being approved or confirmed by the Apostolic See. Bishop Charles-Justin Calewaert of Ghent, presenting the commission's explanation, described a middle course: a principal place for Latin and some place for the vernacular, with defined limits on the territorial faculty.
Source: Acta Synodalia I/4, parallel text p. 273; commission explanation pp. 285-288.
The mixed commission's replacement schema, dated April 22, 1963 in Notre Dame's archival inventory, says Scripture and tradition flow "from the same wellspring," join in a certain way and tend toward the same end, and that neither is foreign to the other. The shared-wellspring formula therefore predates the final 1965 text.
Source: Notre Dame holdings inventory: De divina revelatione.
In spring 1963 Fr. Congar was called into the rewriting of De Ecclesia, the draft on the Church whose first version he had criticized as a preparatory consultor. The man removed from teaching in 1954 was now at work on the Council's central text. That is a documented drafting role; which sentences are his the record does not say.
Pope John XXIII died on June 3, 1963, and by Church law the Council stood suspended. The conclave opened June 19 with eighty cardinals, and on June 21 it elected Cardinal Montini, the Archbishop of Milan, who took the name Paul VI. He had entered as a leading candidate: Time's report, published within days, quoted an unnamed cardinal saying Montini had "a very long lead" from the start, and before the conclave Montini had publicly pledged to continue John XXIII's line. After his election he announced that the Council would resume on September 29. The ballot count itself differs between sources - Treccani's scholarly biography says the fifth ballot, Time says the sixth - so no exact vote table is presented here. Later accounts describe a meeting at Frascati before the conclave at which Cardinals Frings, Liénart, Alfrink, Léger, König and Suenens agreed to support Montini, and describe Cardinal Gustavo Testa urging resistance to Montini to end; those are later reconstructions, not a verified record of anyone's ballot. He confirmed the Council and reconvened it that September.
Between the sessions, in August 1963, the German-speaking bishops met at Fulda. Wiltgen records Cardinal Frings presiding and Cardinal Alfrink attending for the Netherlands, with the advisers at work beside them: Fr. Ratzinger as Frings's consultant, Fr. Rahner as König's, and Rahner's analyses reviewed by Ratzinger, Fr. Alois Grillmeier and Fr. Otto Semmelroth before circulation. He also records Frings's public rejection of press claims that Fulda was a conspiracy, with Frings stating that the meeting's observations had been submitted openly to the proper Roman authorities (pp. 79-84).
During the Council, Fr. Küng's Strukturen der Kirche ("Structures of the Church," 1962, dated only by year) triggered a Holy Office teaching procedure. The Graz biographical account says Cardinal Bea's moderating influence helped stop that procedure. This is the one checked disciplinary proceeding of his that falls within the Council period.
For Mass with the people, article 54 now says a suitable place for the vernacular may be granted, especially in readings and the common prayer and, according to local conditions, in parts belonging to the people. It adds that the faithful should also be able to say or sing together in Latin the parts of the Ordinary, the recurring texts such as the Creed and Sanctus, that belong to them. Wider vernacular use must follow article 40, a controlled route in which territorial authorities submit proposals and the Apostolic See's consent governs. Bishop Jesús Enciso Viana of Mallorca explained that the commission changed "let it be granted" to "may be granted" so that neither side could impose its choice on the other.
Source: Acta Synodalia II/2, parallel text p. 285; oral report pp. 290-291.
In the debate on the draft's chapter II, Archbishop Marcel Lefebvre, Superior General of the Holy Ghost Fathers, warned that retaining the collegiality sections as written would put the Council's pastoral purpose in grave danger: he feared that an international senate or national episcopal bodies could displace the personal government of the Pope and of individual bishops. His distinction is explicit: assemblies founded on "moral collegiality, in fraternal charity and mutual assistance" could greatly help the apostolate; he opposed their replacing bishops through juridical collegiality. He submitted replacement wording, and the printed list names eight others agreeing with that amendment, evidence of joint support for this submission, not of a permanent alliance on every subject.
Bishop Luigi Bettazzi of Ivrea spoke in the same congregation. He began by affirming Vatican I's teaching on the primacy, argued that episcopal consecration conferred the bishop's powers and membership of the episcopal body, and defended the college's authority as a college with Peter, not a college acting independently of the Pope. His phrase is "non est quiddam inventum gallicanum vel antiromanum": this is not a Gallican or anti-Roman invention. Both men appealed to received tradition; the contrast between them is real and documented, and neither speech settles the other questions later raised about either man.
Source: Acta Synodalia II/2, pp. 471-472 (Lefebvre), pp. 484-487 (Bettazzi).
The revised schema presented at the second session developed the scriptural and historical presentation, linked Peter and the other Apostles to the Pope and bishops, and called Pope and bishops together an "undivided subject" of supreme power. On October 29, five questions were distributed for voting the next day. The introduction expressly said the votes approved or rejected no text; they were to show the commission the assembly's inclination. On October 30 the affirmative and negative counts on the five questions were 2,123 to 34; 2,049 to 104; 1,808 to 336; 1,717 to 408; and 1,588 to 525. The questions concerned episcopal consecration as the highest degree of Holy Orders, membership through consecration and communion, the college succeeding the Apostles and possessing supreme power with its head, that power belonging to the college by divine right, and the restoration of a permanent diaconate. These were large affirmative majorities, not the final approval of the constitution and not a roll-call of named voters.
Wiltgen's account adds named interventions from the autumn 1963 debates on the Church. Speaking for the Dutch bishops, Cardinal Alfrink argued that if collegiality was of divine right, the episcopal college took precedence over the Curia, which should not stand between the bishops and the Pope; he presented the point as theological and juridical, without denying the respect owed to the Curia (p. 112). Cardinal König proposed periodic meetings - once or twice a year - of episcopal-conference presidents and other bishops with the Pope, to assist in governing and to improve communication (p. 112). Cardinal Frings insisted that the commissions serve the assembly and take its indicative votes seriously, and he called for a distinction between the Holy Office's administrative and judicial functions, with an accused person given the opportunity to be heard and to correct a publication or action; Wiltgen records Cardinal Ottaviani's response disputing Frings's description of Holy Office procedure (pp. 115-119). The intervention and the response both belong to the record.
Source: Acta Synodalia II/1, pp. 235-236 (1963 article 16), pp. 253-254 (explanation). Acta Synodalia II/3, pp. 573-575 (questions and their stated limits), p. 670 (results).
The same day the questions were distributed, the Council voted to place the Marian text within the constitution on the Church rather than give it a separate document. Fr. Congar, whose journal entries record the theological commission's discussions, called it "a great and important meeting" and spoke of "a mariology cured of its maximalist canker"; those are his evaluative words. Fr. Victor-Alain Berto, Lefebvre's theological adviser, wrote in a letter dated October 29 at 3 p.m., after the decision: "Notre chagrin est extrême, au-delà de toute parole," our grief is extreme, beyond all words. The two reactions are contrasting responses to the same stage of the text, each in its writer's own hand; Berto's letter comes through a later publication of his dated letters, and Congar's entry through a published excerpt.
Wiltgen's account adds the organized support behind the placement decision: on September 30, 1963, Cardinal Frings had advocated including the Marian material in the Church schema, speaking with the support of sixty-five German-speaking and Scandinavian Fathers, and Cardinal König presented the same case in the formal debate of October 24 (pp. 93-95).
By the second session the project existed as the Council's seventeenth schema, on the presence of the Church in the world. Cardinal Suenens described it at a press conference, the first information made public about it, and cautioned that specific answers on peace, social progress and family life would have to mature through consultation, especially with lay leaders. The schema was not debated that session. In the closing days Cardinal Valerian Gracias of Bombay asked that it be placed first on the next session's agenda.
Source: Council Daybook, second session: Suenens' press conference and Gracias' petition.
The commission's responses to proposed amendments show requests from different directions. Six Fathers objected to any vernacular in the Mass; the commission answered that this contradicted the already approved article 36. One Father proposed vernacular throughout the Mass; the commission judged this too broad. Twenty-two Fathers asked that "except the Canon," the central Eucharistic prayer of the Roman Mass of this period, be added after the reference to wider vernacular use. The commission declined: "Sed non videtur opportunum a Concilio formaliter excludi quod in casibus particularibus ab Apostolica Sede concedi possit, uti iam concessum est." - "It does not seem appropriate for the Council formally to exclude what might be granted by the Apostolic See in particular cases, as has already been granted." This establishes why an explicit exclusion was not inserted. It does not establish an unrestricted general authorization for vernacular in the Canon.
Source: Acta Synodalia II/5, introduction pp. 573-575; responses pp. 585-586.
At the third public session, the constitution on the liturgy, Sacrosanctum Concilium, received 2,147 favorable votes and four opposing votes, and the record notes applause. Pope Paul VI approved and promulgated it with the Council Fathers. Article 36 preserves Latin in the Latin rites while allowing extensions of vernacular use under stated norms; article 54 retains the permissive wording, the people's Latin Ordinary and the article-40 route for wider use. The Acta record a vacation of the law until February 16, 1964: the provisions did not take effect at once. The narrow conclusion is that the Council changed language policy and the distribution of decisions while preserving a Latin rule and Roman oversight. Whether later implementation met these provisions is a separate question, to be answered from the implementing documents.
The same constitution ordered two later revisions. Article 50 says the rite of the Mass is to be revised so that the nature and purpose of its parts, and their connection, may be more clearly shown and the faithful's participation made easier. Article 76 says both the ceremonies and the texts of the ordination rites are to be revised. And its article 57 "has seemed good to the Council to extend permission for concelebration" to named cases, noting that concelebration "has remained in use to this day in the Church both in the east and in the west." The revised rites were produced after the period this account covers.
Source: Acta Synodalia II/6, p. 407: final vote and promulgation; p. 408: vacation of the law. Sacrosanctum Concilium, articles 36, 40, 50, 54, 57 and 76.
The third-session record prints the 1963 text and the revised article 22 in parallel. Membership now expressly depends on sacramental consecration and communion with the college's head and members. The revised text also strengthens its statement of papal freedom: the Pope has full, supreme and universal power by virtue of his office and can always exercise it freely, and the college's power cannot be exercised independently of him. The commission explains why "undivided" was removed: the word could wrongly suggest that the Pope could not exercise his full power without the bishops' action. The explanation records papal suggestions, accepted with some changes. The text therefore combines a developed account of the bishops' corporate authority with express protection of independent papal action; neither half should disappear from the history.
The official report names the collegiality subcommission: Bishops Pietro Parente, Ermenegildo Florit, Joseph Schröffer and Hermann Volk, later joined by Luis Henríquez and Jozef Heuschen, with Umberto Betti as general reporter. More specifically, it records that Edouard Dhanis and Gustave Thils composed the report on the former article 16, that Joseph Ratzinger composed the report on the former article 17, and that Joaquín Salaverri, Vincenzo Maccarrone, Karl Rahner, Ratzinger, Thils and Dhanis jointly prepared a report on collegiality itself. These are evidenced assignments. They do not make every named man the author of every sentence or the member of one uniform theological party. Note the name Pietro Parente on the subcommission: the man credited with the first "teologia nuova" jab in 1942 now sat drafting the Church constitution's collegiality chapter.
Source: Acta Synodalia III/1, pp. 215-217 (parallel texts), pp. 241-246 (reasons), pp. 269-270 (working sequence and named roles).
The next revision added "divine" to the common wellspring and removed the "not foreign" phrase. The commission's report says the removed phrase could sound polemical or favor the position that everything in tradition is somehow contained in Scripture, and that "divine" guards against treating tradition as merely ecclesiastical. Its preliminary explanation deliberately avoids settling the disputed question whether tradition transmits revealed truths absent from Scripture. These are the commission's stated reasons.
Source: Acta Synodalia III/3, printed p. 80 (parallel text), pp. 82, 86-88 (explanations).
The year also left dated traces of the section VI men. Fr. de Lubac attended the Theological Commission regularly, advised the archbishop of Tananarive, and collaborated with Karol Wojtyła, the archbishop of Kraków and a future pope, on atheism texts for the future Gaudium et spes. A Cardijn study records Fr. Congar and Fr. Féret assisting Cardinal Cardijn in drafting five conciliar interventions; the association ran back through the JOC's retreats and chaplains, and the influence may have run both ways. In September 1964 Fr. Congar brought Fr. Chenu into the subcommission on the "signs of the times" for the future pastoral constitution - the category Chenu's modern readers associate with him, which had already entered the conciliar record through John XXIII's Humanae salutis of December 25, 1961. And for the missions schema, a study drawing on the Divine Word archives names Fr. Congar and Fr. Ratzinger among the experts who supplied proposals for the theological foundations in December 1964.
Two debates of this session belong to documents this letter does not trace in full. In the debate on the declaration on religious freedom, on the day after its opening discussion of September 23, 1964, Cardinal König called the declaration altogether acceptable as it stood, while maintaining that it should not keep silent about the countries where no religious freedom was enjoyed (pp. 165-166). In the debate on the declaration concerning the Jews and other non-Christian religions, at the general congregation of September 25, 1964, he considered the text good while asking for greater accuracy in certain sections; Cardinal Frings was among those urging that the text be retained and improved (p. 173).
Wiltgen's account supplies further dated interventions from this session. On October 15, 1964, Cardinal Alfrink called for a new text on priests in place of the compressed propositions before the Fathers, saying their publication as they stood would disappoint priests (pp. 191-193). On November 7, 1964, Cardinal Frings argued that the missions required a complete schema rather than a few propositions, and Cardinal Alfrink agreed; Pope Paul VI had spoken favorably of the propositions while allowing improvements, a sequence preserved here without inferring personal opposition to the Pope (pp. 194-197). On the Marian chapter, Wiltgen reports that Frings, at Fr. Balić's request, urged acceptance of the compromise wording rather than risk its failure, and that Balić credited the intervention with helping its passage - an attributed assessment of effect, not a measurable allocation of votes (pp. 156-158). Cardinal Alfrink spoke for 124 Fathers in favor of the compromise approach, while resisting insistence on the title "Mediatrix" because of the difficulties it caused (p. 157).
On September 30 the chapter was voted in two parts. Articles 18-23 received 1,624 placet, 42 non placet and 572 placet iuxta modum; articles 24-29 received 1,704, 53 and 481. Conditional approval meant the proposed changes still had to be examined. The November responses show both accepted safeguards and refused restrictions. One accepted amendment changed the comparison of Peter and the Apostles to the Pope and the bishops so that it expressed proportionality of structure, not perfect identity; another retained sacramental consecration as a condition of membership and added "hierarchical" to communion. A proposal to say the college is constituted only when the Pope calls it to collegial action was rejected as contrary to the accepted text. The final formula came from another amendment: the college's power can be exercised "only with the consent of the Roman Pontiff." A college that exists is thereby distinguished from its actual exercise of collegial power.
Source: Acta Synodalia III/8, p. 54 (September 30 results), pp. 66-68 and p. 73 (amendment responses).
On October 1, 1964 the Fathers received the new text, thirteenth in the order of business and so called Schema XIII, "On the Church in the world of this time," with five long appendices on specific problems. The next day Secretary General Pericle Felici corrected his own first description of the accompanying booklet: not a private work of the lay apostolate commission, but the work of a mixed commission joining members of that commission and of the theological commission, though still without conciliar standing. The appendices were not debated on the floor; written comments were invited.
Fr. Roberto Tucci, editor of the Roman Jesuit review Civilta Cattolica, explained the text's lineage at the American bishops' press panel: a first draft in six chapters; a reworking suggested by Cardinal Suenens, prepared by Louvain theologians and known on the commission as the "Louvain text"; then a third reworking by a subcommission, which produced the three chapters and a new fourth chapter now before the Fathers, the earlier material standing as the appendices. This is Tucci's account, given as the debate opened.
Source: Council Daybook, third session, October 2 and 20-21, 1964.
The debate opened at the 105th general congregation on October 20, 1964. On October 21 eleven Fathers asked that the text be accepted as the basis of discussion and one asked for its rejection. On October 22 Archbishop John Heenan of Westminster denounced it as a "dangerous . . . set of platitudes . . . unworthy of a council" and proposed postponing the next session three or four years while a new commission, including married couples, doctors, economists and scientists, reworked it. After three days of debate the text was accepted as the basis for further discussion. The debate ran into November and took up atheism, marriage and the family, world poverty, the place of women, and war and peace.
Source: Council Daybook, third session, congregations of October 20-23, 1964.
At the 123rd general congregation on November 16, Secretary General Felici addressed procedural objections and doctrinal doubts, stated that the procedure had been observed, and communicated, from higher authority, a preliminary explanatory note, usually called the Nota praevia, according to whose meaning and intent the chapter was to be explained. The note says "college" does not mean equals who hand their power to a president, but a stable body whose structure and authority are learned from revelation; that consecration gives an ontological participation in sacred functions, whose exercise also requires a canonical determination and hierarchical communion; and that the college always includes its head while not being permanently engaged in strictly collegial action. The note belongs to the interpretation of the revised chapter; describing it as an unrelated text that erased collegiality, or as a detail with no bearing on interpretation, would both be inadequate.
The same communication opened by asking what theological note the doctrine of the draft should carry. The Theological Commission answered that the Council's text is to be interpreted by the general rules known to all, and it repeated its declaration of March 6, 1964. The declaration has two parts: the Council defines as binding only what it openly declares binding, and the rest of its teaching, as the teaching of the supreme magisterium, is to be accepted and embraced by each of the faithful according to the mind of the Council. In its words: "Taking conciliar custom into consideration and also the pastoral purpose of the present Council, the sacred Council defines as binding on the Church only those things in matters of faith and morals which it shall openly declare to be binding. The rest of the things which the sacred Council sets forth, inasmuch as they are the teaching of the Church's supreme magisterium, ought to be accepted and embraced by each and every one of Christ's faithful according to the mind of the sacred Council. The mind of the Council becomes known either from the matter treated or from its manner of speaking, in accordance with the norms of theological interpretation."
Source: Acta Synodalia III/8, pp. 9-13 (November 16 communication and note). English text of the notification and note, IARCCUM archive.
One dated reaction from outside the hall belongs to these weeks. Wiltgen reports that Fr. Schillebeeckx defended Pope Paul VI in the Dutch review De Bazuin after the third session and, in an article dated January 23, 1965, discussed the preliminary explanatory note: though he personally preferred a stronger formulation of collegiality, he objected to wording left deliberately ambiguous so that stronger conclusions could later be drawn from it, holding that the text should state its position plainly and that the Pope's note was needed to prevent ambiguity (p. 242). The evidence chain is worth stating: Wiltgen recounts Schillebeeckx's own published account, which includes a conversation with an unnamed expert; the Dutch original remains to be checked, and the unnamed man's view is not a commission's intention. Bishop Luigi Carli later cited Schillebeeckx's article in his own discussion of the third-session disputes (p. 247).
On November 19 the general-congregation vote on the whole constitution was 2,134 in favor, ten against and one invalid, and the secretary explicitly announced a further public-session vote. On November 21 the solemn vote was 2,151 in favor and five against, followed by Paul VI's approval and promulgation. The final article 22 retains both the corporate episcopal authority with the Pope and the Pope's freedom to exercise his own supreme authority. The successive votes are different events and must not be substituted for one another.
The promulgated constitution describes its relation to earlier teaching in its own words. Article 18 opens its treatment of the episcopate: "This Sacred Council, following closely in the footsteps of the First Vatican Council, with that Council teaches and declares that Jesus Christ, the eternal Shepherd, established His holy Church." Dei Verbum, article 1, uses a similar phrase: "following in the footsteps of the Council of Trent and of the First Vatican Council." These are the Council's own descriptions of its relation to earlier teaching. Whether the texts that follow keep to that description is a separate question.
Source: Acta Synodalia III/8, p. 407 (November 19), p. 782 (November 21). Lumen gentium, article 22 and the explanatory note.
A further revised fascicle was distributed on November 20, 1964. Its ninth section no longer defined tradition simply as Christ's mind, teaching, examples and commands; it says tradition transmits in its entirety the word of God entrusted by Christ and the Holy Spirit to the apostles, for their successors to preserve, explain and spread. The report says the change makes tradition's divine character clearer. On October 3, 1964, a note published in Rome by the Melkite patriarchate had already called the new text "a complete reversal" of De fontibus while asking for care over language of tradition's growth; this account does not establish that the note caused the revisions.
Source: Acta Synodalia IV/1, printed pp. 336-354, especially p. 350 and p. 354. Melkite patriarchate note, October 3, 1964.
Fr. Ratzinger names the Redemptorist moral theologian Fr. Bernhard Häring as the chief architect of the 1964 draft. In January 1965 the drafters met at Ariccia near Rome, where a new text by Abbe Pierre Haubtmann prevailed over a draft of Polish origin; the text then passed through the commission's phases and was ready for distribution by the end of the summer of 1965. These stages are recounted from Ratzinger's report.
Source: Ratzinger, Theological Highlights, report on the fourth session.
For Ad gentes, the decree on the Church's missionary activity, the Divine Word archives study names the experts who shaped the text's theological foundations: after proposals from Fr. Congar and Fr. Ratzinger in December 1964, a subcommission met at Nemi in January 1965, the full missions commission met there March 29 to April 3 with Fr. Ratzinger participating, and the later revision of chapter I brought Fr. Congar, Fr. Ratzinger and Bishop Stanislaus Lokuang together at Nemi in October 1965. These are specific drafting and revision roles, not an inference from membership alone.
Wiltgen adds that the Nemi draft was sent to Cardinal König for comment because of his influence on the Theological Commission, and that König returned four pages of observations (p. 257).
In the fourth session, on September 21, 1965, Archbishop Gabriel-Marie Garrone of Toulouse read the commission's report on the revised schema and the debate began again in the hall.
Source: Acta Synodalia IV/1, general congregation of September 21, 1965.
Wiltgen records two substantive criticisms of the schema from cardinals who supported the renewal side. Cardinal König asked for fundamental theological principles and for more attention to sin, the Cross, repentance and resurrection, and warned against presenting an achievable earthly solution to every problem (p. 253). Cardinal Frings asked for substantial reorganization because the draft confused human progress through dialogue with supernatural salvation through Christ's mission (p. 254).
One appointment of this year is recorded for Cardinal König: in April 1965 Pope Paul VI placed him in charge of the new Secretariat for Non-Believers (p. 273).
Fr. Chenu's part in the pastoral constitution's hardest season is documented by Joseph Komonchak's redaction history, citing Giovanni Turbanti's study of the schema's drafting. Early in the fourth session his widely distributed talk "A Pastoral Constitution of the Church," given at the Dutch documentation center, had a powerful effect on the schema's redactional history by defending its method under heavy attack, and his letter of October 2, 1965 to Pierre Haubtmann urged that the schema's structure and inspiration not be modified. That is documented advocacy for the text. Verbal carryover from Chenu's own drafts into the constitution's articles has not been established, and Ratzinger's commentary records that the final text reduced the role of the signs-of-the-times idea after criticism from biblical scholars and Protestants.
The printed record of amendments says 111 Fathers sought, in somewhat different formulas, an addition stating that not all Catholic doctrine could be proved from Scripture alone. The commission accepted instead the formula that the Church "does not draw her certainty about all revealed things from Sacred Scripture alone." On October 29, 1965, Cardinal Ermenegildo Florit of Florence explained that the addition clarified tradition's transmission of the word and the equal reverence due Scripture and tradition, and that it presents neither tradition as a quantitative supplement to Scripture nor Scripture as a codification of the whole revelation.
Source: Acta Synodalia IV/5, modi around pp. 700-701; Florit's explanation pp. 739-741.
The revised text with the commission's reports was distributed at the 160th general congregation on November 13, 1965, and the fascicle of proposed amendments with the commission's responses reached the Fathers' residences in Rome on December 3.
Source: Acta Synodalia IV/6, distribution notes.
Dei Verbum, the constitution on divine revelation, was promulgated on November 18, 1965. Its ninth section retains the common origin, Scripture and tradition "flowing from the same divine wellspring," and includes the added certainty sentence. Its tenth section preserves the 1963 formulation that the Church's teaching office is not above the word of God but serves it. The documentary result is a replacement of the opening "twofold source" frame with a shared origin and differentiated transmission, followed by a late clarification about certainty. It is not an elimination of tradition or a declaration that Scripture alone suffices.
Source: Dei Verbum, especially sections 9-10.
On December 4 the Fathers voted on the seven parts of the revised text: marriage and the family, 2,047 for and 155 against; culture, 2,137 to 81; economic and social life, 2,110 to 98; political life, 2,086 to 121; peace and the community of nations, 1,710 to 483; the conclusion, 2,039 to 128; and the title "pastoral constitution" itself, 1,873 to 293. The peace chapter drew by far the largest opposition of the seven. On December 6, at the last general congregation, the whole text as amended received 2,111 placet against 251 non placet, with one placet iuxta modum and ten invalid ballots out of 2,373.
An official note on the title explains what "pastoral" means here: the constitution is so called because, resting on doctrinal principles, it intends to express the Church's relation to the world and to the men of this time, and it "is therefore to be interpreted according to the general norms of theological interpretation," with account taken, especially in the second part, of the changeable circumstances connected with its subject. Like the March 6, 1964 declaration quoted above, this note is part of the record of how the Council said its text should be read.
The amendment record preserves one exchange in full. In the marriage chapter, 190 Fathers proposed wording that would present marriage's goods and ends as "hierarchically connected." The commission declined: a hierarchy of goods, its printed answer says, "can be considered under different aspects," citing Pius XI's 1930 encyclical Casti Connubii itself; the word "hierarchy" seemed too technical for a text addressing the world in a direct, pastoral style; and the primordial importance of procreation and education is stated at least ten times in the text. Sixteen Fathers, joined by four others, asked that procreation be named the primary end; the adopted formula says instead that marriage and conjugal love "by their very natural character are ordained toward the procreation and education of offspring, and in this are crowned as by their summit." When 163 Fathers asked that "chiefly with a view to the children" replace "also with a view to the children," lest the hierarchy of ends be inverted, the answer was that those words were added "not to settle the question of the ends of marriage (which is not treated here at all), but to urge the indissolubility of marriage." The wording adopted runs: "This intimate union, as a mutual giving of two persons, and the good of the children, demand full fidelity from the spouses and urge their indissoluble unity."
What the earlier law said is on record. The 1917 Code of Canon Law, canon 1013, named the procreation and education of offspring as the primary end of marriage, and mutual help and the remedy of concupiscence as the secondary end; Casti Connubii had taught the same ordering, and the constitution's marriage chapter cites that encyclical in its own footnotes. Placing these texts side by side shows what each says and what the commission said it was doing; it does not by itself demonstrate agreement or contradiction.
Source: Acta Synodalia IV/7: votes of December 4-6, pp. 617-619, 631-633 and 641; the title note; the marriage amendment responses, pp. 477-482. Pius XI, Casti Connubii, December 31, 1930.
At the public session of December 7 the solemn vote was 2,309 placet to 75 non placet, with seven invalid out of 2,391. Paul VI then pronounced over this constitution and the three other texts finished that day: "And We, by the apostolic power handed down to Us by Christ, together with the venerable Fathers, in the Holy Spirit approve them, decree and establish them, and order that what has been so synodally established be promulgated to the glory of God." The instrument is dated at St. Peter's, December 7, 1965. The record adds that for the new laws contained in the instruments promulgated that day the Pope set a vacation until June 29, 1966, with norms for their execution to follow.
The promulgated text opens: "The joys and the hopes, the griefs and the anxieties of the men of this age, especially those who are poor or in any way afflicted, these are the joys and hopes, the griefs and anxieties of the followers of Christ." Ratzinger calls it the longest of the Council's documents. After a short preface, an introductory exposition reads the condition of man in the world today and states the Church's standing duty "of scrutinizing the signs of the times and of interpreting them in the light of the Gospel" (section 4). The first part then treats, in four chapters, the dignity of the human person, the human community, human activity in the world, and the role of the Church in the modern world; the second part takes up five questions it calls especially urgent.
The first chapter grounds the human person in the image of God and in conscience: "For man has in his heart a law written by God; to obey it is the very dignity of man; according to it he will be judged" (16). Sections 19 to 21 treat atheism systematically: they distinguish its forms, name among its roots the protest against evil in the world and the exaltation of man, and say that "believers can have more than a little to do with the birth of atheism" through deficient teaching and life (19). The chapter closes on Christ: "only in the mystery of the incarnate Word does the mystery of man take on light" (22).
The second chapter treats the human community and lists as "infamies indeed" murder, genocide, abortion, euthanasia and degrading working conditions: "They poison human society, but they do more harm to those who practice them than those who suffer from the injury. Moreover, they are supreme dishonor to the Creator" (27). The third chapter treats human activity in the world: created things and societies "enjoy their own laws and values which must be gradually deciphered, put to use, and regulated by men," so that it is "entirely right to demand that autonomy" (36); and "earthly progress must be carefully distinguished from the growth of Christ's kingdom," yet "to the extent that the former can contribute to the better ordering of human society, it is of vital concern to the Kingdom of God" (39).
The fourth chapter defines the Church's role: "Christ, to be sure, gave His Church no proper mission in the political, economic or social order. The purpose which He set before her is a religious one" (42) - though out of that religious mission, the text says, come "a function, a light and an energy which can serve to structure and consolidate the human community according to the divine law."
Of the five questions in the second part, the first is marriage and the family: parents are "cooperators with the love of God the Creator" in transmitting human life (50), and "from the moment of its conception life must be guarded with the greatest care while abortion and infanticide are unspeakable crimes" (51). The second is culture: "There are many ties between the message of salvation and human culture," and God "has spoken according to the culture proper to each epoch" (58).
The third is economic and social life, where "whatever the forms of property may be ... attention must always be paid to this universal destination of earthly goods" (69). The fourth is the political community: "The Church, by reason of her role and competence, is not identified in any way with the political community nor bound to any political system. She is at once a sign and a safeguard of the transcendent character of the human person" (76).
The fifth is peace. Peace "is not merely the absence of war" but "rightly and appropriately called an enterprise of justice" (78); laws should make "humane provisions for the case of those who for reasons of conscience refuse to bear arms" (79); the arms race "is not a safe way to preserve a steady peace" (81); and "It is our clear duty ... to strain every muscle in working for the time when all war can be completely outlawed by international consent" (82). Article 80, "making its own the condemnations of total war already pronounced by recent Popes," declares: "Any act of war aimed indiscriminately at the destruction of entire cities or of extensive areas along with their population is a crime against God and man himself; it merits unequivocal and unhesitating condemnation." A closing chapter commits the Church to dialogue with the world and with all men of good will.
Source: Gaudium et spes, Vatican English text, sections cited.
The text's own footnotes attach it to earlier documents. On atheism, sections 19 to 21 cite Pius XI's Divini Redemptoris of 1937 with Pius XII's Ad Apostolorum Principis of 1958 and Paul VI's Ecclesiam Suam of 1964. The 1937 encyclical is cited at the sentence in which the Church "has already repudiated and cannot cease repudiating, sorrowfully but as firmly as possible, those poisonous doctrines and actions which contradict reason and the common experience of humanity" (21). That encyclical declares: "Communism is intrinsically wrong, and no one who would save Christian civilization may collaborate with it in any undertaking whatsoever" (58). The 1965 sections take up distinct questions within the same subject. Section 20 describes systematic atheism, including the form that "anticipates the liberation of man especially through his economic and social emancipation" and that, "when the proponents of this doctrine gain governmental power," fights against religion "by using, especially in the education of youth, those means of pressure which public power has at its disposal." Section 19 asks how atheism arises: "taken as a whole, atheism is not a spontaneous development but stems from a variety of causes, including a critical reaction against religious beliefs," and "believers can have more than a little to do with the birth of atheism." The earlier encyclical's prohibition of collaboration with communism is not itself restated in these sections; what they add is the firm repudiation of the doctrines, the description of their systematic forms, and the examination of causes.
On war, the constitution says it is "making its own the condemnations of total war already pronounced by recent Popes." The question Pacem in terris had addressed two years earlier is whether war can still serve as redress: "in this age which boasts of its atomic power, it no longer makes sense to maintain that war is a fit instrument with which to repair the violation of justice" (127). The constitution's own positions on war run in several parts: article 79 says that "as long as the danger of war remains and there is no competent and sufficiently powerful authority at the international level, governments cannot be denied the right to legitimate defense once every means of peaceful settlement has been exhausted," and that "it is one thing to undertake military action for the just defense of the people, and something else again to seek the subjugation of other nations"; article 80 then declares indiscriminate destruction of whole cities or regions "a crime against God and man himself." The earlier statement about war as an instrument of redress and the later condemnation of total-war acts are different propositions about war; both stand here as quoted.
On marriage, the earlier-law wording and the adopted formula are laid out with the December 4-6 vote record above, together with the commission's own answers to the proposed amendments. Other sections of the constitution cite John XXIII's Mater et Magistra of 1961 and Pacem in terris, and the marriage chapter cites Casti Connubii. These citations and the quoted passages are the record; this account does not declare the earlier and later texts in agreement or in contradiction.
Source: Gaudium et spes, Vatican English text. Pius XI, Divini Redemptoris, March 19, 1937. John XXIII, Pacem in terris, April 11, 1963. John XXIII, Mater et Magistra, May 15, 1961. Pius XI, Casti Connubii, December 31, 1930.
This section gathers the thread the letter has followed: for each proposal named in section VI, what the record shows became of it at the Council. Three kinds of evidence stay distinct, as they have throughout: opportunity (a seat or role), documented action (a draft, a proposal, an intervention), and textual effect (adoption, rejection, revision). A man's presence near a text does not make the text his, and the ballots were secret.
The return to the sources itself. The revelation document moved. The opening frame of "two sources" was rejected in direction in November 1962; the replacement spoke of Scripture and tradition flowing from one divine wellspring; the final Dei Verbum adds that the Church "does not draw her certainty about all revealed things from Sacred Scripture alone," and preserves the formulation that the Church's teaching office "is not above the word of God but serves it." The drafting was the mixed commission's, the adoption the Council's, and the final text expressly preserves tradition and the magisterium. No line is traced here from any one man's book into its sentences. The men documented at work around it: Fr. de Lubac, a regular at the Theological Commission; Fr. Congar, the Doctrinal Commission's expert, who had criticized the first draft as a consultor; Fr. Daniélou, whose commission drafting work, help to bishops and presentations are recorded, with Archbishop Garrone and Fr. de Lubac attesting that his role was important; Fr. Rahner and Fr. Ratzinger, whose Council-era collaboration on revelation and episcopal-college papers is documented.
Fr. Chenu's historical reading of St. Thomas and the "signs of the times." The category entered the conciliar record through John XXIII's Humanae salutis in 1961, before Chenu's documented conciliar work. The pastoral constitution's fourth section then made "scrutinizing the signs of the times and of interpreting them in the light of the Gospel" the Church's standing duty. Fr. Chenu's defense of the schema in its hardest season is documented; verbal carryover from his drafts is not, and the final text reduced the idea's role after criticism.
Fr. Congar's Christian unity. The Council issued a decree on ecumenism, Unitatis redintegratio, on November 21, 1964, grown from Cardinal Bea's Secretariat with the Eastern commission's unity draft and the theological commission's treatment. Fr. Congar's documented Council drafting lay elsewhere: the De Ecclesia rewrite and the missions decree. No textual line from Chrétiens désunis into the decree is established in this account. The question a reader can ask is narrower and fairer: whether the decree's principles - a communion view of the Church, elements of the Church among separated Christians - resemble what he argued in 1937. The texts stand side by side for that reading; the lineage of the words is not claimed.
Fr. Congar's laity. The Church constitution gave the laity its own chapter, and a decree on the apostolate of the laity, Apostolicam actuositatem, followed on November 18, 1965. Fr. Congar and Fr. Féret's documented assistance to Cardinal Cardijn's interventions touched the same subject. No line from the 1953 Jalons into either text is traced here.
Fr. Rahner's episcopate and primacy. The comparison here is the most direct. The 1961 title essay argued for holding together the papal primacy and the episcopal college as both of divine right, against a merely "monarchical" picture. The promulgated Lumen gentium holds both as well: the college "succeeding the Apostles and possessing supreme power with its head," in the directional votes' wording, and the Pope's full, supreme and universal power freely exercised, with the college's power never independent of him - read through the preliminary note. Fr. Rahner's documented role is the joint report on collegiality he prepared with Salaverri, Maccarrone, Ratzinger, Thils and Dhanis. Between his essay and the text stand a commission, papal suggestions, two revision rounds and thousands of votes; the conjunction his essay argued for is the one the promulgated text states; the making of that text, however, was not his.
Fr. Rahner's permanent diaconate. His Diaconia in Christo of 1962, dated only by year, argued for a permanent diaconate. The fifth directional vote of October 30, 1963 favored restoring one, 1,588 to 525. The promulgated constitution provides that the diaconate "can in the future be restored as a proper and permanent rank of the hierarchy," the decision left to territorial bodies of bishops with the Pope's approval (article 29). Whether his book appeared before the Council opened is not established, and no textual line from it is traced.
Fr. Rahner's concelebration. His 1949 article raised concelebration and was answered with a ban on his discussing it. The liturgy constitution's article 57 extends permission for concelebration to named cases, giving as its reason that concelebration "has remained in use to this day in the Church both in the east and in the west." On the practice his article raised, the constitution now extends permission to named cases, giving its own stated reason; no line from his article into that article is traced.
Fr. de Lubac's nature and grace, and Eucharist and Church. What the record documents is the man's own role: removed from teaching by his order in 1950, a consultor in 1960, a peritus through all four sessions, collaborating with the future Pope John Paul II on the pastoral constitution's atheism texts. A scholarly publisher's description calls the Council appointment something that could appear to him and his friends as a rehabilitation. The often-repeated claim that his books were on the Index finds no support in the documented record.
Fr. Küng's renewal and reunion. The ecumenism decree exists; Fr. Küng's documented Council service was as a peritus, and no textual line from his 1960 book into the decree is established. His own road after the Council is noted in the epilogue.
The others. Fr. Bouillard had no documented Council role; he resumed teaching fundamental theology at the Institut Catholique de Paris in 1964, while the Council was still in session. Fr. Féret worked as a private expert. No Council role for Fr. Mondésert is documented. Fr. von Balthasar did not participate. Fr. Charlier's book remained where 1942 left it.
And the critics. Cardinal Ottaviani's commission produced the doctrine drafts; the revelation draft was rejected in direction and replaced, and the Church draft was revised past his commission's first form. Influence exercised and contained are both in the record. Fr. Parente, credited with the first "new theology" label, sat on the subcommission that drafted the collegiality chapter.
And the wider circle. Beside the school and adviser connections of section XII, Wiltgen's account gives four of the five names documented interventions: the organizing around the commission elections and the agenda, the opposition to the first revelation schema, the Fulda coordination, the Marian interventions, the calls for full texts on priests and on missions, and the criticisms of the modern-world draft's theology by Cardinal König and Cardinal Frings - with Fr. Schillebeeckx's defense of the Pope's explanatory note against deliberate ambiguity. For Fr. Hamer his account names no episode; his place in this letter rests on the Le Saulchoir post and the Council appointment recorded at the opening. The same reports record differences within the group, and this letter does not treat them as one uniform party. What these interventions carried into the Council's decisions is Wiltgen's reporting, page-referenced above and still to be checked against the official proceedings.
This letter's own reading of the mapping, offered as interpretation rather than as a further finding, is modest. In the revelation case, the direction the text took - renewed attention to Scripture and to the living transmission of revelation - is the direction for which their works had argued. The areas in which the texts moved were largely the areas in which these men had proposed moving; the movements were made by commissions and by more than two thousand voting bishops, not by the men; and the texts carry express safeguards of their own - the certainty sentence, the teaching office that serves the word, the preliminary note, the preserved Latin rule. Attributing the Council's texts to the reformers would repeat, in reverse, the error of attributing every error to them. Fr. Congar's own four conditions for true reform - charity and pastoral concern first, communion with the whole Church, patience, renewal through return to tradition rather than forced novelty - remain where he published them, as a test the reader can apply to everything traced above.
All four of the Council's constitutions have now been traced from draft to promulgation: Sacrosanctum Concilium on December 4, 1963, Lumen gentium on November 21, 1964, Dei Verbum on November 18, 1965 and Gaudium et spes on December 7, 1965. Beside them stand nine decrees and three declarations, sixteen principal documents in all, each with its own documented genealogy from preparatory draft to solemn vote; their drafting histories, like the votes against within the limit of the secret ballots and the later implementation of what was decided, are further cases this account has opened but not concluded.
The documentary movement is specific in each case. The liturgy constitution changed language policy and the distribution of decisions while preserving a Latin rule and Roman oversight. The revelation constitution replaced the opening "twofold source" frame with a shared divine wellspring and a differentiated account of transmission, with a late clarification about certainty. The Church constitution combined a developed account of the bishops' corporate authority with express protection of independent papal action, read through the preliminary note. The pastoral constitution gathered the questions of the Church's relation to the modern world into a single text, passed through a mixed commission and two full debates, and closed with the largest minority of its own voting record on the peace chapter, while its commission expressly declined to settle the ordering of marriage's ends.
Calling this a blanket replacement of old doctrine by new doctrine would go beyond these cases. So would denying that the texts moved. What the record supports is a sequence of drafts, interventions, revisions and commission explanations, each dated and each preserved in the official proceedings - and, now, a sequence of men: what each proposed, what was done to each, and what each was doing when the texts were made.
The letter's period closes on December 8, 1965. A few dated outcomes belong to the men's stories and are recorded here without entering the later years' debates. Fr. Congar continued historical and theological work and was created cardinal-deacon on November 26, 1994; he died in Paris on June 22, 1995. Fr. de Lubac served on the International Theological Commission from 1969 to 1974, helped found the journal Communio, was created cardinal-deacon on February 2, 1983, and died in Paris on September 4, 1991. Fr. Bouillard co-founded a research institute with Fr. Daniélou in 1967; Fr. Daniélou died in 1974, Fr. Bouillard in 1981. Fr. Chenu died in 1990. Fr. Rahner died in 1984. Fr. von Balthasar died in 1988. Fr. Küng's road diverged from the others': a first doctrinal proceeding in 1968, a declaration of February 15, 1975 finding views opposed to Catholic doctrine and admonishing him, and a declaration of December 15, 1979 that he had departed from the integral truth of Catholic faith and could no longer be considered a Catholic theologian or teach as one; his chair was separated from the Catholic faculty at Tübingen in 1980 while he continued as a university professor of ecumenical theology. The measure was loss of authorization to teach as a Catholic theologian, not loss of all university teaching or of the priesthood.
For the proposals themselves, the record gives dated implementation steps; those named here are dated examples, not a claim to be the earliest in every case. Concelebration, which the constitution extended to named cases, received its new rite even before the close, in the Sacred Congregation of Rites' decree Ecclesiae semper of March 7, 1965 (AAS 57 [1965] 410-412), and was carried into the revised Roman Missal of 1969-1970. The permanent diaconate was restored in the Latin Church by Pope Paul VI's motu proprio Sacrum Diaconatus Ordinem of June 18, 1967 (AAS 59 [1967] 697-704). The wider implementation and reception of the Council's texts in the decades that followed lies outside this letter's scope; those decades have their own documentary record, not surveyed here.
The sections that follow take up the sixteen documents themselves, in promulgation order: what each taught, how it was implemented, who the record names, and what is documented to have followed. Section XVIII left the decades of implementation outside this letter's scope; the continuation here surveys that record directly, document by document. Each document is treated the same way: Teaching, Implementation, Participants and Results, in that order. Implementation covers the sacramental rites, canon law and other changes, with the previous Church teaching set beside them. Where the pairing with earlier teaching shows an apparent contradiction, a flagged note states both sides and leaves the question open; disciplinary changes are distinguished from doctrinal claims. The sources are linked in section XXIII, and where a detail rests on a standard reference rather than a linked primary source it is marked as the histories record it.
Constitution 1 of 4 · Promulgated December 4, 1963, by Pope Paul VI · Final vote 2,147 to 4
Teaching: what the Council taught. The Council calls the liturgy the summit toward which the Church's action moves and the fount from which her power flows (art. 10), and it puts the full, conscious and active participation of the faithful before all else in the restoration it orders (art. 14). The rites are to be simplified, restored and made intelligible (arts. 21, 34), the liturgical books revised "as soon as possible" with experts (art. 25), and a richer table of Scripture opened at Mass (art. 51).
On language the constitution holds two things together: "the use of the Latin language is to be preserved in the Latin rites" (art. 36.1), while the use of the mother tongue "frequently may be of great advantage" and may be extended (art. 36.2). Regulation of the liturgy belongs to the Apostolic See and, within law, to the bishops and their territorial bodies; "absolutely no other person, not even a priest, may add, remove, or change anything in the liturgy on his own authority" (art. 22).
Implementation: rites, canon law and other changes, with the earlier teaching beside them. Pope Paul VI's motu proprio Sacram Liturgiam (January 25, 1964; a motu proprio is a letter the pope issues on his own initiative) erected the Consilium for the Implementation of the Constitution on the Sacred Liturgy beside the existing Sacred Congregation of Rites. The Consilium prepared the instruction Inter Oecumenici (approved September 26, 1964), the first general application of the constitution, and further instructions followed, including Musicam Sacram on sacred music (1967).
The new rites then appeared book by book: the rite of concelebration (Ecclesiae semper, March 7, 1965); the revised ordination rites (apostolic constitution Pontificalis Romani, June 18, 1968); the calendar (Mysterii Paschalis, February 14, 1969); the rite of marriage (March 19, 1969); the new Order of Mass and its General Instruction (apostolic constitution Missale Romanum, April 3, 1969, in force November 30, 1969); the rite of baptism of children (May 15, 1969); the lectionary (May 25, 1969); the funeral rite (August 15, 1969); the Liturgy of the Hours (promulgated November 1, 1970; typical edition April 11, 1971); the rite of confirmation (August 22, 1971); the rite of anointing of the sick (December 7, 1972); and the rite of penance (December 2, 1973). In canon law these changes preceded the 1983 Code, whose liturgy canons restate the constitution's rules.
Two textual facts belong beside this list. On the anointing: the 1917 Code (canon 940) had restricted Extreme Unction to the faithful "in danger of death from sickness or old age"; the constitution (art. 73) kept the danger-of-death criterion while teaching that the sacrament "is not... for those only who are at the point of death"; the 1972 constitution Sacram Unctionem Infirmorum quotes both Trent's description of the anointing as given "to the sick, especially those who are in such a condition as to appear to have reached the end of their life" and article 73's danger-of-death sentence in full, before directing the anointing of "those who are dangerously ill"; and the 1983 Code (canon 1004) admits one who "begins to be in danger due to sickness or old age," in Latin without the words "of death." On the ordination rites: compared formula by formula with the 1947 declaration Sacramentum Ordinis, the 1968 rite retained the essential words for deacon and priest nearly unchanged, pluralized for several ordinands, while the essential form for a bishop is wholly new - the 1947 "Comple in Sacerdote tuo ministerii tui summam" giving way to "Et nunc effunde super hunc Electum... Spiritum principalem," drawn from the Tradition attributed to Hippolytus.
Participants: who the record names. The preparatory Commission on the Sacred Liturgy was led by Cardinal Gaetano Cicognani as president, with Father Annibale Bugnini as secretary; after Cicognani's death in February 1962, Cardinal Arcadio Larraona took the presidency of the conciliar commission. Pope Paul VI named Cardinal Giacomo Lercaro president of the Consilium, with Father Bugnini as secretary; Cardinal Benno Gut succeeded Lercaro in 1968. The instruction Inter Oecumenici bears the signatures of Cardinal Lercaro as president of the Consilium and of Cardinal Larraona and Archbishop Enrico Dante as prefect and secretary of the Congregation of Rites.
Results: what is documented to have followed. By the end of 1973 every sacramental rite of the Latin Church had a revised typical book, the Mass had a three-year Sunday and two-year weekday lectionary, and the Consilium had been integrated into the new Congregation for Divine Worship on May 8, 1969, remaining in operation until the end of its mandate. These are the dated, documented results; what they produced in parish life is a separate and larger record.
Open question of implementation, flagged and left open
Language. Article 36.1 commands that the use of Latin "is to be preserved in the Latin rites"; articles 36.2 and 54 permit and extend the mother tongue. The constitution thus states a norm and a permission together, and the permissions were applied, by the Holy See itself, until the ordinary celebration in most places was almost wholly vernacular. A retained norm beside a permitted practice is not by itself a contradiction, and none is claimed. The documented question is one of degree: whether the extent of the permissions kept the balance the constitution's own words state. It is flagged as a question of implementation and left open, and it concerns discipline, not defined doctrine.
Apparent contradiction, flagged and left open
Holy Communion in the hand. The instruction Memoriale Domini (May 29, 1969) retained the traditional manner of receiving on the tongue as the Church's norm, while recording that some episcopal conferences had requested the newer practice and could receive permission for it. The practice spread widely afterward. The reader can weigh that against the instruction's own stated norm; the question is left open.
Apparent contradiction, flagged and left open
The Order of Mass. Missale Romanum (April 3, 1969) set a new Order of Mass in place of the missal in use since 1570. A Short Critical Study of the New Order of Mass, completed June 5, 1969 by a group of Roman theologians working with Cardinal Antonio Bacci and sent to Pope Paul VI under Cardinal Alfredo Ottaviani's covering letter of September 25, 1969 (the "Ottaviani Intervention"), charged the new Order with departures from the Council of Trent's theology of the sacrifice; the General Instruction was reissued in revised form in March 1970 and the rite stood. The study concerns the Order of Mass, not the ordination rites, and it is recorded here as such, attributed and left open.
Constitution 2 of 4 · Promulgated November 21, 1964, by Pope Paul VI · Final vote 2,151 to 5
Teaching: what the Council taught. The constitution treats the Church in eight chapters: her mystery, the People of God, the hierarchy, the laity, the universal call to holiness, religious, the Church's union with the Church in heaven, and the Blessed Virgin Mary. Article 8 teaches that the one Church of Christ, "constituted and organized in the world as a society, subsists in the Catholic Church, which is governed by the successor of Peter and by the Bishops in communion with him," while "many elements of sanctification and of truth are found outside of its visible structure."
Chapter III teaches that the college or body of bishops, together with its head the Roman Pontiff and never without him, holds "supreme and full power over the universal Church" (art. 22). By order of Pope Paul VI a Preliminary Explanatory Note was attached to the constitution, directing how the chapter on the college is to be read: the college acts as such only in communion with its head, and his primacy over pastors and faithful alike "remains whole and intact."
Implementation: rites, canon law and other changes, with the earlier teaching beside them. Pope Paul VI erected the Synod of Bishops as a permanent central body (motu proprio Apostolica Sollicitudo, September 15, 1965); its first ordinary assembly met September 29 to October 29, 1967. The norms applying the constitution and the decree Christus Dominus made episcopal conferences standing juridic bodies (motu proprio Ecclesiae Sanctae, August 6, 1966) and restored a permanent diaconate open to married men (motu proprio Sacrum Diaconatus Ordinem, June 18, 1967). At the constitution's promulgation the Pope proclaimed Mary Mother of the Church. The 1983 Code carries the college (canon 336), the Synod (canons 342-348), the conferences, and the restored diaconate into the Church's standing law.
Participants: who the record names. The preparatory Theological Commission was presided over by Cardinal Alfredo Ottaviani, with Father Sebastian Tromp as secretary; the same men led the conciliar Doctrinal Commission. Cardinal Leo Jozef Suenens proposed the plan that divided the subject into the Church ad intra and ad extra. The conciliar histories credit Monsignor Gerard Philips of Louvain as the principal redactor of the adopted text.
Results: what is documented to have followed. A permanent Synod of Bishops meeting regularly in Rome, episcopal conferences standing as juridic bodies whose decisions bind in the cases the law defines, and a restored permanent diaconate are the constitution's documented institutional results, all carried into the 1983 Code of Canon Law.
Apparent contradiction, flagged and left open
"Subsists in." Pius XII's Mystici Corporis Christi (June 29, 1943) taught that the true Church of Jesus Christ is the One, Holy, Catholic, Apostolic, Roman Church. Lumen Gentium art. 8 says the one Church of Christ "subsists in" the Catholic Church. The Doctrinal Commission's own relatio presents the choice as fitting the mystery of the Church existing in the concrete Catholic society while elements of sanctification and truth exist outside her structure; the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith's declaration Dominus Iesus (August 6, 2000, n. 16) reads the verb as harmonizing two doctrinal statements: "that the Church of Christ, despite the divisions which exist among Christians, continues to exist fully only in the Catholic Church, and on the other hand, that 'outside of her structure, many elements can be found of sanctification and truth'" in the separated Churches and communities. Whether the change of verb widens the Church's bounds, and how far, has been disputed since 1965. Both texts are cited, and the question is left open.
Apparent contradiction, flagged and left open
The college and the primacy. Vatican I's Pastor Aeternus (1870) defined the Roman Pontiff's primacy of jurisdiction over the whole Church. Lumen Gentium chapter III adds the college's supreme and full power, and the Council itself attached the Explanatory Note to govern the reading. Whether the two chapters sit together without remainder is a question the histories record as argued at the time and after; it is flagged and left open.
Constitution 3 of 4 · Promulgated November 18, 1965, by Pope Paul VI · Final vote 2,344 to 6
Teaching: what the Council taught. The constitution teaches that sacred Tradition and sacred Scripture form one sacred deposit of the word of God (art. 10), that the books of Scripture "teach firmly, faithfully, and without error that truth which God wanted put into the sacred writings for the sake of our salvation" (art. 11), and that the interpreter must attend to literary forms and to the unity and analogy of the whole of Scripture (art. 12). It calls for easy access to Scripture for all the faithful (art. 22) and calls the study of the sacred page "the soul of sacred theology" (art. 24).
Implementation: rites, canon law and other changes, with the earlier teaching beside them. The constitution had no implementing body of its own. Its most direct instrument is the revised lectionary (May 25, 1969), which the apostolic constitution Missale Romanum presents as answering Sacrosanctum Concilium's call for a richer table of Scripture (arts. 35 and 51). One published tabulation of the 1992 Catechism of the Catholic Church counts seventy-six citations of Dei Verbum there.
Participants: who the record names. The drafting history is itself part of the record. On November 20, 1962 the Fathers voted on whether to end discussion of the preparatory schema De fontibus revelationis: 1,368 voted to end discussion and 822 to continue it, short of the two-thirds the rules required; the next day Pope John XXIII withdrew the schema and sent it to a mixed commission of the Doctrinal Commission and the Secretariat for Promoting Christian Unity, under Cardinals Ottaviani and Augustin Bea. The conciliar histories record that the periti Karl Rahner and Joseph Ratzinger prepared an alternative draft in early 1963. The revised text returned through the Doctrinal Commission and was carried through the 1964 and 1965 sessions to adoption.
Results: what is documented to have followed. The documented results are the lectionary's cycles and the constitution's standing use as the Church's charter for biblical study, including its reliance in the 1992 Catechism.
Apparent contradiction, flagged and left open
Inerrancy. Leo XIII's Providentissimus Deus (1893) taught that inspiration "not only is essentially incompatible with error but excludes and rejects it," and that it is "absolutely wrong and forbidden" to admit that the sacred writer has erred; Pius XII's Divino Afflante Spiritu (1943) defended the same freedom from error while opening historical and literary study. Dei Verbum art. 11 ties the books' freedom from error to "that truth which God wanted put into the sacred writings for the sake of our salvation." Whether the added clause limits the earlier inerrancy or describes it is among the most discussed sentences of the Council. Both texts are cited, and the question is left open.
Constitution 4 of 4 · Promulgated December 7, 1965, by Pope Paul VI · Final vote 2,309 to 75, with 7 abstentions (Holy See's Vatican News account; one secondary tabulation prints 2,307)
Teaching: what the Council taught. The pastoral constitution reads "the signs of the times" and interprets them in the light of the Gospel (art. 4). Its first part treats the dignity of the human person, the community of mankind, man's activity in the world, and the Church's service; its second treats marriage and the family, culture, economic and social life, politics, and peace. Article 90 asks that a special organism of the universal Church be set up for the Church's work of justice, love and peace.
On marriage it teaches that "by their very nature, the institution of matrimony itself and conjugal love are ordained for the procreation and education of children, and find in them their ultimate crown" (art. 48), and that marriage "is not instituted solely for procreation," since its unbreakable covenant and the welfare of the children demand that the spouses' love grow and ripen (art. 50). It names no primary and secondary ends.
Implementation: rites, canon law and other changes, with the earlier teaching beside them. Pope Paul VI answered article 90 with the Pontifical Commission Justice and Peace, erected experimentally by the motu proprio Catholicam Christi Ecclesiam (January 6, 1967) and made definitive by the motu proprio Iustitiam et Pacem (December 10, 1976). His encyclical Populorum Progressio (March 26, 1967) cites and applies the constitution. In canon law, the 1983 Code (canon 1055) describes marriage as ordered "to the good of the spouses and to the procreation and education of offspring," where the 1917 Code (canon 1013) had ordered the ends as primary and secondary.
Participants: who the record names. Cardinal Suenens proposed the Church ad extra schema that became this constitution and suggested the Mixed Commission, drawn from the Doctrinal Commission and the Commission for the Lay Apostolate and launched under their presidents, Cardinals Ottaviani and Cento. The conciliar histories record that Suenens remained the schema's coordinator while the drafting passed to a sub-commission of the Cardijn bishops, and they name Father Pierre Haubtmann as the chief redactor of the final text.
Results: what is documented to have followed. A permanent Roman dicastery for justice and peace and the post-conciliar line of social teaching beginning with Populorum Progressio are the constitution's documented institutional results. The final vote's seventy-five negative ballots were the largest dissent recorded for any of the four constitutions.
Apparent contradiction, flagged and left open
The ends of marriage. The 1917 Code (canon 1013) ordered the ends of marriage as primary (procreation and education of offspring) and secondary (mutual help and the remedy of concupiscence). The constitution describes the ends without that ordering, and the drafting commission's printed answer on the point states that the words in question were added "not to settle the question of the ends of marriage (which is not treated here at all)," as the letter's earlier section records from Acta Synodalia IV/7. The 1983 Code (canon 1055) states the ends without the old ordering. Whether a doctrinal point or only a juridical presentation changed was argued at the Council itself; the commission's refusal to settle it is documented, and the question is left open.
Decree 1 of 9 · Promulgated December 4, 1963, by Pope Paul VI · Final vote 1,960 to 164
Teaching: what the Council taught. The decree treats the press, cinema, radio, television and like instruments: they are to serve the spread of the Kingdom of God, and both society and users carry duties toward them. It asks for an annual day for social communications in every diocese (art. 18) and for a pastoral instruction to develop its principles (art. 23).
Implementation: rites, canon law and other changes, with the earlier teaching beside them. Pope Paul VI reorganized the Pontifical Commission for Social Communications (April 2, 1964), which issued the pastoral instruction Communio et Progressio (May 23, 1971). A World Communications Day has been observed annually since Pope Paul VI's first message for it (May 7, 1967).
Participants: who the record names. The preparatory Commission for the Apostolate of the Laity, the Press and Entertainment was presided over by Cardinal Fernando Cento; the decree itself names the pre-conciliar Secretariat for the Supervision of Publications and Entertainment (art. 19). Archbishop Martin John O'Connor led the implementing commission.
Results: what is documented to have followed. The documented results are the standing Roman office for communications, the 1971 pastoral instruction, and the annual observance. The 164 negative votes were the largest dissent of the Council's second session.
Decree 2 of 9 · Promulgated November 21, 1964, by Pope Paul VI · Final vote 2,110 to 39
Teaching: what the Council taught. The decree holds the Eastern Catholic Churches in equal dignity with the Latin Church, restores to the Eastern patriarchs their rights and privileges as fathers and heads of their patriarchates (arts. 7-9), and directs that Eastern rites, disciplines and spiritual heritage be preserved whole. It lays down a conciliatory policy for sacramental sharing with the separated Eastern Churches, placed in the care of the local hierarchs (arts. 26-29).
Implementation: rites, canon law and other changes, with the earlier teaching beside them. Its execution ran through the Congregation for the Oriental Churches and was finally codified in the Code of Canons of the Eastern Churches, promulgated by Pope John Paul II's constitution Sacri Canones (October 18, 1990) and in force from October 1, 1991.
Participants: who the record names. The Commission for the Eastern Churches, presided over by Cardinal Amleto Cicognani, prepared and carried the decree.
Results: what is documented to have followed. The documented results are the restoration of patriarchal rights in the Eastern Churches' own law and a complete Eastern code beside the Latin one.
Decree 3 of 9 · Promulgated November 21, 1964, by Pope Paul VI · Final vote 2,137 to 11
Teaching: what the Council taught. The decree teaches that the restoration of unity among all Christians is one of the Council's principal concerns, that "some and even very many of the significant elements and endowments which together go to build up and give life to the Church itself, can exist outside the visible boundaries of the Catholic Church" (art. 3), and that dialogue, cooperation and interior conversion are the path. On worship in common it states two principles: witness to the Church's unity very generally forbids it, while the grace to be had from it sometimes commends it, the judgment resting with local episcopal authority under the Holy See (art. 8).
Implementation: rites, canon law and other changes, with the earlier teaching beside them. The Secretariat for Promoting Christian Unity issued the Ecumenical Directory, Part I (May 14, 1967) and Part II (April 16, 1970), regulating dialogue, prayer and sacramental sharing. On December 7, 1965 Pope Paul VI and Ecumenical Patriarch Athenagoras issued a joint declaration removing from memory and from the churches the excommunications of 1054. The Secretariat was made a permanent department of the Roman Curia and later a Pontifical Council.
Participants: who the record names. Cardinal Augustin Bea presided over the Secretariat for Promoting Christian Unity, with Monsignor Johannes Willebrands as secretary; the same Secretariat prepared the two declarations Nostra Aetate and Dignitatis Humanae.
Results: what is documented to have followed. The documented results are the Directory, the standing ecumenical structures, and the bilateral dialogues the Secretariat and its successor opened with the Orthodox Churches and the ecclesial communities of the West.
Apparent contradiction, flagged and left open
Ecumenical participation. Pius XI's Mortalium Animos (January 6, 1928) held that the Apostolic See "cannot on any terms take part" in the assemblies of the ecumenical movement and forbade Catholics to support such enterprises; a Holy Office instruction of 1949 had already permitted measured participation under conditions. The decree and the 1967 Directory then regulated Catholic participation directly. Whether the movement from 1928 to 1967 is a change of discipline only, or something more, is a question the sources state and the letter leaves open.
Decree 4 of 9 · Promulgated October 28, 1965, by Pope Paul VI · Final vote 2,319 to 2
Teaching: what the Council taught. The decree teaches that bishops govern their particular churches as proper pastors, under the authority of the Supreme Pontiff; it treats their relations with the Curia, asks that episcopal conferences be erected everywhere as standing bodies meeting at fixed times (arts. 37-38), and orders the reorganization of the Roman Curia (art. 9) and a fitting revision of diocesan boundaries (arts. 22-23).
Implementation: rites, canon law and other changes, with the earlier teaching beside them. The motu proprio Ecclesiae Sanctae (August 6, 1966) erected the conferences as juridic bodies and asked for bishops' resignations at seventy-five; the motu proprio Regimini Ecclesiae Universae (August 15, 1967) reformed the Roman Curia. The 1983 Code carries both into standing law, including the resignation norm.
Participants: who the record names. The Commission for Bishops and the Government of Dioceses, presided over by Cardinal Paolo Marella, prepared the decree.
Results: what is documented to have followed. Standing episcopal conferences in nearly every nation and a reformed Roman Curia are the documented results.
Decree 5 of 9 · Promulgated October 28, 1965, by Pope Paul VI · Final vote 2,321 to 4
Teaching: what the Council taught. The decree joins two principles for religious life: a continuous return to the sources of Christian life and to each institute's founding spirit, and an adaptation to the changed conditions of the times (arts. 1-2). It directs each institute to revise its constitutions and directories, under the authority of the Holy See and the local ordinaries.
Implementation: rites, canon law and other changes, with the earlier teaching beside them. Ecclesiae Sanctae (August 6, 1966), Part II, ordered special general chapters in every institute to carry out the revision. The instruction Renovationis Causam (January 6, 1969) set norms for the renewal of formation, and Pope Paul VI's exhortation Evangelica Testificatio (June 29, 1971) addressed the renewal's course.
Participants: who the record names. The preparatory roster published before the Council (the vaticano2 roster linked in the sources) names Cardinal Valerio Valeri as the Commission for Religious' president; after his death on July 22, 1963, later secondary commission lists (the Vatican II Council article, also linked) name Cardinal Ildebrando Antoniutti, appointed prefect of the Congregation for Religious on July 26, 1963, as the commission's president for the decree's later stages.
Results: what is documented to have followed. The documented results are the special chapters held order by order and the revised constitutions approved by the Holy See in the years following.
Decree 6 of 9 · Promulgated October 28, 1965, by Pope Paul VI · Final vote 2,318 to 3
Teaching: what the Council taught. The decree orders a "program of priestly training" for each country or rite, drawn up by the episcopal conferences, revised periodically, and approved by the Apostolic See (art. 1). It treats the fostering of vocations, the ordering of seminaries, and the spiritual, intellectual and pastoral formation of priests.
Implementation: rites, canon law and other changes, with the earlier teaching beside them. The Sacred Congregation for Catholic Education issued the Ratio Fundamentalis Institutionis Sacerdotalis (January 6, 1970), the universal framework under which the national programs were drawn up.
Participants: who the record names. The Commission for Seminaries, Studies and Catholic Education, presided over by Cardinal Giuseppe Pizzardo, prepared the decree.
Results: what is documented to have followed. The documented result is the standing system of national programs of formation under the 1970 Ratio and its later revisions.
Decree 7 of 9 · Promulgated November 18, 1965, by Pope Paul VI · Final vote 2,340 to 2
Teaching: what the Council taught. The decree teaches that the laity are assigned to the apostolate by the Lord Himself through Baptism and Confirmation (art. 3), that their proper field is the temporal order, and that pastors and laity work together in the Church's one mission. Article 26 asks for a special secretariat at the Holy See for the lay apostolate.
Implementation: rites, canon law and other changes, with the earlier teaching beside them. Pope Paul VI erected the Consilium de Laicis experimentally by the motu proprio Catholicam Christi Ecclesiam (January 6, 1967) and made it a permanent Pontifical Council for the Laity by the motu proprio Apostolatus Peragendi (December 10, 1976).
Participants: who the record names. The Commission for the Lay Apostolate, presided over by Cardinal Fernando Cento, prepared the decree; the conciliar record preserves the interventions of Cardinal Joseph Cardijn, whose life's work stood behind it.
Results: what is documented to have followed. The documented result is a permanent Roman dicastery for the laity, answering article 26.
Decree 8 of 9 · Promulgated December 7, 1965, by Pope Paul VI · Final vote 2,394 to 5
Teaching: what the Council taught. The decree teaches that the pilgrim Church is missionary by her very nature (art. 2), treats mission work among the nations, the building up of young churches, and the cooperation owed by the whole Church, and draws the mission's theology from the Trinity itself.
Implementation: rites, canon law and other changes, with the earlier teaching beside them. Ecclesiae Sanctae (August 6, 1966), Part III, set experimental norms for missionary cooperation, and the 1967 curial reform retitled the Congregation de Propaganda Fide the Congregation for the Evangelization of Peoples.
Participants: who the record names. The Commission for the Missions, presided over by Cardinal Gregorio Pietro Agagianian, prepared the decree.
Results: what is documented to have followed. The documented results are the standing norms and the retitled congregation.
Decree 9 of 9 · Promulgated December 7, 1965, by Pope Paul VI · Final vote 2,390 to 4
Teaching: what the Council taught. The decree presents priests as the bishop's co-workers in the one priesthood, treats their ministry, their spiritual life and their relationship to the laity, and advises a council or senate of priests in each diocese (art. 7). On celibacy it teaches that the Latin Church's legislation, "this holy synod again approves and confirms," while in no way altering the different discipline that legitimately flourishes in the Eastern Churches (art. 16).
Implementation: rites, canon law and other changes, with the earlier teaching beside them. Ecclesiae Sanctae (August 6, 1966), Part I, ordered presbyteral councils in every diocese, and the 1983 Code makes them standing law. Pope Paul VI's encyclical Sacerdotalis Caelibatus (June 24, 1967) held the Latin discipline of celibacy against the requests to reconsider it.
Participants: who the record names. The Commission for the Discipline of the Clergy and the Christian People, presided over by Cardinal Pietro Ciriaci, prepared the decree.
Results: what is documented to have followed. The documented results are presbyteral councils as ordinary diocesan structures and the retention of the Latin discipline, confirmed by the 1967 encyclical.
Apparent contradiction, flagged and left open
A request the record preserves. During the Council a number of Fathers asked that the Latin discipline of priestly celibacy be opened to discussion; Pope Paul VI asked that it not be debated on the floor, the decree reaffirmed the discipline, and the 1967 encyclical held it again. The discipline itself did not change; the request and its refusal are part of the documented history.
Declaration 1 of 3 · Promulgated October 28, 1965, by Pope Paul VI · Final vote 2,290 to 35
Teaching: what the Council taught. The declaration affirms every person's right to an education, names parents the first and chief educators of their children, and treats the Catholic school's role. It states that its principles "will have to be developed at greater length by a special post-conciliar commission and applied by episcopal conferences to varying local situations." It stands in the line of Pius XI's encyclical on Christian education, Divini Illius Magistri (December 31, 1929).
Implementation: rites, canon law and other changes, with the earlier teaching beside them. That commission's work became the Schools Office added when Regimini Ecclesiae Universae (August 15, 1967) renamed the existing Congregation of Seminaries and Universities, dating to 1915 with roots to 1588, the Sacred Congregation for Catholic Education. The congregation was thus renamed and expanded, not newly created.
Participants: who the record names. Cardinal Giuseppe Pizzardo's Commission for Seminaries, Studies and Catholic Education prepared the declaration.
Results: what is documented to have followed. The documented result is the standing Schools Office within the renamed congregation, developing the declaration's principles in later documents on Catholic schools.
Declaration 2 of 3 · Promulgated October 28, 1965, by Pope Paul VI · Final vote 2,221 to 88
Teaching: what the Council taught. The declaration states what men have in common and what draws them to fellowship, expresses the Church's esteem for what is true and holy in other religions, and then treats the bond between the Church and the Jewish people: the Church "decries hatred, persecutions, displays of anti-Semitism, directed against Jews at any time and by anyone" (art. 4), and it teaches that the Jewish people cannot be charged collectively with the death of Christ.
Implementation: rites, canon law and other changes, with the earlier teaching beside them. Pope Paul VI erected the Commission for Religious Relations with the Jews (October 22, 1974), which issued its Guidelines and Suggestions (December 1, 1974) for applying the declaration's fourth article.
Participants: who the record names. Cardinal Bea's Secretariat for Promoting Christian Unity prepared the declaration. It began as a statement on the Jews at Pope John XXIII's direction, the histories recording his meeting with the historian Jules Isaac on June 13, 1960, and was widened in scope as it moved through the Council. Before the Council, Pope John XXIII had already ordered the word "perfidis" removed from the Good Friday prayer for the Jews (ordered March 21, 1959; formalized July 5, 1959), as the histories record.
Results: what is documented to have followed. The documented results are the standing commission, its 1974 Guidelines, and the bilateral dialogue that followed. The eighty-eight negative votes were the largest dissent recorded for a declaration.
Declaration 3 of 3 · Promulgated December 7, 1965, by Pope Paul VI · Final vote 2,308 to 70
Teaching: what the Council taught. The declaration teaches that the human person has a right to religious freedom: immunity from coercion, within due limits of public order, in acting according to conscience, privately and publicly, alone and with others (art. 2). It grounds the right in the dignity of the person, not in the indifference of truth, and its first article states that it "leaves intact the traditional Catholic teaching on the moral duty of men and societies toward the true religion and toward the one Church of Christ."
Implementation: rites, canon law and other changes, with the earlier teaching beside them. The declaration had no implementing body; it stands as the Council's own statement, carried forward by later papal and curial teaching.
Participants: who the record names. The Secretariat for Promoting Christian Unity prepared the declaration, with Bishop Emile-Joseph De Smedt of Bruges as relator; the conciliar histories credit Monsignor Pietro Pavan and Father John Courtney Murray with the principal drafting. A mixed committee named in 1962 to reconcile the Secretariat's text with the Theological Commission's Church-and-state draft never met, and the Secretariat's text is what the Council carried.
Results: what is documented to have followed. The documented result is the declaration itself and its standing use in the Church's later teaching on the state and the person.
Apparent contradiction, flagged and left open
The Syllabus pairing. Pius IX's Syllabus of Errors (1864) had condemned the propositions that "every man is free to embrace and profess that religion which, guided by the light of reason, he shall consider true" (prop. 15), that "it is no longer expedient that the Catholic religion should be held as the only religion of the State" (prop. 77), and that newcomers to Catholic countries should "enjoy the public exercise of their own peculiar worship" (prop. 78). Leo XIII's Libertas (1888) and Pius XII's Ci Riesce (1953) developed the Church's teaching on toleration between those condemnations and the Council. Article 2 of the declaration and the 1864 condemnations are the Council's most debated pairing; the declaration's own first article claims continuity, and the histories record that its drafting was intended to state the difference. Flagged, sourced, and left open.
The record establishes the sixteen documents themselves, their texts and votes, the bodies the Council and Pope Paul VI set up to implement them, and the dated rites, instructions, codes and commissions that followed. It also establishes where the questions lie: the pairings flagged above are documented in the Council's own texts and the earlier magisterial texts they sit beside. They are stated here as the histories state them, attributed, and left open, as the letter's method requires.
Sacrosanctum Concilium - Lumen Gentium - Dei Verbum - Gaudium et Spes
Inter Mirifica - Orientalium Ecclesiarum - Unitatis Redintegratio - Christus Dominus - Perfectae Caritatis - Optatam Totius
Apostolicam Actuositatem - Ad Gentes - Presbyterorum Ordinis - Gravissimum Educationis - Nostra Aetate - Dignitatis Humanae
History of the Consilium (Congregation for Divine Worship) - Inter Oecumenici, Acta Apostolicae Sedis 56, pp. 877-900 - Inter Oecumenici, readable copy with the signature block - Missale Romanum (April 3, 1969) - Mysterii Paschalis (Latin) - Pontificalis Romani (Latin) - Typical editions of the revised liturgical books (GCatholic)
Memoriale Domini (May 29, 1969) - Sacrum Diaconatus Ordinem (June 18, 1967) - Episcopalis Communio, recounting Apostolica Sollicitudo (September 15, 1965) - Ecclesiae Sanctae (August 6, 1966) and the Council's implementation
Ecumenical Directory, Part I (May 14, 1967) - Joint Catholic-Orthodox declaration of December 7, 1965 - Commission for Religious Relations with the Jews: history and 1974 Guidelines
History of the Pontifical Council for the Laity - History of the Congregation for Catholic Education - Communio et Progressio (May 23, 1971) - History of the Pontifical Council for Social Communications - Sacerdotalis Caelibatus (June 24, 1967) - Populorum Progressio (March 26, 1967)
Renovationis Causam (January 6, 1969) - Ratio Fundamentalis Institutionis Sacerdotalis (January 6, 1970) - Evangelica Testificatio (June 29, 1971) - Paul VI, message for the first World Communications Day (1967) - Divini Illius Magistri (December 31, 1929) - Code of Canon Law (1983) - Sacri Canones, Code of Canons of the Eastern Churches (October 18, 1990)
Mediator Dei (1947) - Mystici Corporis Christi (1943) - Mortalium Animos (1928) - Providentissimus Deus (1893) - Divino Afflante Spiritu (1943) - The Syllabus of Errors (1864) - Sacramentum Ordinis (1947, Latin)
The De fontibus revelationis vote of November 20, 1962 (Etudes, Persée) - John Courtney Murray on the drafting of Dignitatis Humanae (1966) - The Secretariat's Declaration on Religious Freedom (Revue des sciences religieuses) - The Good Friday prayer for the Jews, the 1959 change (reference history) - The vote on Sacrosanctum Concilium (Holy See, 2003) - The closing session's votes, including Gaudium et spes at 2,309 to 75 with 7 abstentions (Vatican News, Holy See) - Final votes tabulation (which prints 2,307 for Gaudium et spes) and Catechism citations (76 for Dei Verbum) - 1917 Code, canon 1013, the ends of marriage (reference translation) - 1983 Code, canons 1055 and 1004 (official text) - Rosters of the preparatory and conciliar commissions - Cardinal Antoniutti, prefect from July 26, 1963 (reference) - The Vatican II Council article, its commission rosters (reference) - The relatio and the choice of "subsistit in" (L'Osservatore Romano study) - Dominus Iesus (August 6, 2000) - Sacram Unctionem Infirmorum (November 30, 1972, official English) - 1983 Code, canon 1004 - The Short Critical Study of the New Order of Mass, with its dates - The drafting of Gaudium et Spes (The Leaven in the Council)
Faithfully yours in Christ Jesus,
John Marie
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