To make good on last month’s promise, to devote the “front page” during the year 2013 to topics having to do with the main features of Pope John XXIII’s project (“what he had in mind”) in convoking the Second Vatican Council, a first step will be to differentiate somewhat more carefully the dimensions of his  project. 

Giuseppe Roncalli, Bishop of Rome and Shepherd of the Roman Catholic Church for scarcely five years in the middle of the last century (1958-1963), maintained that the thought of convoking an Ecumenical Council came to him in a dream.  Once given to him as a symbol, however, it had to be imagined and worked out in his mind.  And eventually he was the one who managed to get this enormous project started, a gathering of more than 2,500 Bishops in Rome, attended also by a host of consultors, and by observers who represented other Churches in Divided Christianity, and consisting in searching inquiry about the Church herself and her relation to the Modern World --  a process that once off the ground lasted for more than three years!  Even though he died before the second of four sessions had begun, it was, after all and throughout, his Council. 

But what did he have mind?  How did the dream get expressed in a less symbolic, more intelligible form?  Surely Pope John did not foresee the results of his Council, but in the course of some 50 years it has become evident that his intentions were not at all vague; he articulated them quite  distinctly.  And I should say that they can be represented by three key and interrelated terms: aggiornamento, pastoral encounter, and dialogue. 

Aggiornamento was the first to be mentioned by the Pope himself, when in his discourse on 25 Jan, 1959, he announced his intention to convoke an Ecumenical Council.  He was speaking to a consistory of the Cardinals of the Roman Curia, in the basilica of St. Paul-outside-the-Walls, on the day when the Church of Rome commemorates the “conversion” of Paul the Apostle, i.e., his becoming a Christian.  Pope John took those present quite by surprise, and with them the entire Church, when he declared his intention to convoke a Council (“A what?” we can hear some say!), which, he said, would bring the Church up to date, and thus effectively put into place the conditions for continual ecclesial renewal and conversion.  

Then, three years and some months later, on 11 October, 1962, in a kind of inaugural address to those who would be called “Fathers of the Council,” gathered in the basilica of St. Peter, he articulated the other two projects he intended the Council to promote.   First, he insisted that the Council should be pastoral, thereby reminding the Bishops that they had come to Rome as Shepherds of the Flock, and that on this account they should encounter the Church (even their own local Churches!) while in the Eternal City.  Thus the Council would become a pastoral encounter of the Bishops with the People of God, with the living Word of God at the center of everything that would take place..  Second, he made it clear that the Council would not achieve its purpose unless  ecumenical dialogue was brought into play, i.e., conversation with other Christians in their Churches, for the sake of ecclesial unity.

In summary, and in a format that suggests the finality or inner dynamism of these intentions, we have the following:

Aggiornamento.  The Pope wanted the Council to do something about bringing the Church up to date in her relation with the modern world.  We may read this intention as an Implicit recognition of the empirical notion of culture (Method in Theology, xi), and acceptance of the challenge to address the vast and complex project of inculturation.   After all, the term, modern world, refers principally to the culture of a world that is largely constituting itself through modern science and technology and modern means of communication.  It is this culture that offers itself as a “vehicle for communicating the Christian message” (ibid., 363). 

Pastoral encounter.  To affirm that the Council was to be pastoral was the Pope’s way of calling attention to the life-giving Word of God as the engine of ecclesial renewal (cf. M.-D. Chenu, La Parole de Dieu, vol. 2: L’Evangile dans de Temps [Paris: du Cerf, 1964], 655-672), and on this account the heart of the entire conciliar project.   The presence of that Word is a necessary element among the components which make an ecclesial activity to be pastoral.  Again, implicit in this intention of the Pope is the injunction that provision be made for continual renewal in the Church (perhaps one Council in this rapidly changing world would not be enough!).  For the Bishops to adopt this frame of mind would be for them to play their role in bringing about a pastoral encounter, first with the believing community  whose Shepherds they are, and then beyond the boundaries of the visible Church, with the present-day world.      

Ecumenical Dialogue.   The Pope dedicated the Council to a conversation with other Christians for the sake of ecclesial unity.  Earlier in his ministry in the Church, during which he spent many years as a papal diplomat, especially in countries where Orthodox Churches were the prevailing component  of the Christian presence, Giovanni Roncalli had made many friends with members of these Churches, and had come to the conviction that Christianity’s flawed unity (Divided Christendom) called for healing, both for the life of the Church itself and for her mission in the world – “… that the world may be believe that you have sent me.”  Moreover, he had become a man dedicated to dialogue, and he longed for the growth in unity that it promises.  The Council had to serve to promote a more perfect Christian unity.

At that moment these were possibilities of which those who were listening to Pope John had little experience.  Now, however, the terms are more familiar, and they seem to be related in the ideal of continual renewal, to which Lonergan refers in the closing paragraphs of Method in Theology, as the fruit of integrated studies, where “the best available knowledge and the most efficient techniques [are applied] to coordinated group action” (367).   In other words, the three intentions are not separate; they are three dimensions of an integral whole, a grand idea conceived in the pastorally formed mind of Giovanni Roncalli.