So where does Original
Sin fit into the second Vatican Council story?
And one level it is
everywhere, of course, because the effects can be seen in all actions – or most
of them anywhere. But I think that we can see it in the actions of the Council
Fathers in a particular way.
The story goes like this:
With increasing
centralisation, the Roman Curia had become a little heavy handed in the way it
dealt with the Local Church. Translation:
head Office did not always remember that the guys on the front line needed
their support and not what sometimes seemed like rules that made life more
difficult.
When the Council Fathers
arrived at the fated Council the preliminary documents had been prepared by the
Curia (the Vatican’s Civil Service). The Curia was headed by Cardinal Ottaviani
(who became a bit of a bug bear). His name had been on the documents which the
Bishops had received in the years before, and as it is easy to blame one man
for anything and everything. Then I suspect that when the Bishops came face to
face (or mitre to mitre) with him, then the relationship was cool. Translation: the branch managers from
Hicksville and Dogsbreath-in-the-Marsh came to head office in the Capital, but
instead of being dazzled by the lights and smart suits of the Company’s
management Team, rather resented the whole thing.
So then what?
Let’s think about
Original sin and let me tell you what I think one of the main results of it is
– that we think that the world revolves around us. I am the only really
important person there is, and nothing should happen which effects me that I do
not have a casting vote in. I am the centre of my own universe and that is just
as it should be. If I give away power then I do so on my own terms and I am
still really in charge.
I believe what happened
in the council was this. Certain Bishops realised that actually in this
situation they had the power.
The Curia could only put forward and propose Documents and the good Cardinal
Ottaviani was only one voice among many. And the perfect way to get back at the
well oiled, well dressed Vatican machine was to take all its work and rip it up
in front of its face. Now if this were a child you would smack its legs and
send it back to its room and tell it ‘to think very hard about what it had just
done’. But neither Mummy nor Daddy was there, because the Pope was absent from
the Council (as was right and just) and there was no one to tell the Bishops to
think about their motives. So the Bishops stretched the boundaries further and
further. It was their show. These were their toys and no one was going to tell
them what to do. They were Bishops for goodness sake. (And the snake was the subtlest of creatures in the garden…)
But what could be put in
the place of the Documents which the Bishops had ripped up?
Bless them, they wrote
them themselves. But they were not cool tactician civil servants with the eye
on 2000 years of theology and the responsibility of the world wide vision of
the Universal Church of Almighty God. They were men who had drunk at the well
of this nonsense of man’s ability to change the world.
They replaced the
proposed Documents with the ones we have now – full, not of sound and fury, but
of kittens and flowers, happiness and joy, hope and peace. I know, I know –
that is good and worthy, noble and just and the Christian message – I know. And
if they had stayed on the shelf then they would have remained as interesting
Documents in the Church’s rich tapestry. But we know that they were written in
such a loose way that the role of the Church in the past 50 years has been to
‘interpret’ them to keep them Catholic and to try to stop the grass roots from
becoming in their theology and practice functionally Protestants.
The regional manager found out that by Company Law he and the other
regional managers had the casting vote, and so they took the ten year world
wide marketing strategy which the men in the flash suits in head office had
spent ages writing, and voted it down. What a rush of power and excitement!
Then they wrote some stuff themselves culled from ‘market-speak monthly’ and
voted that through instead.
