He answered papal summons to journalism: Italian writer tracked evolution of John XXIII's council - Vatican II: 40 years later - Giancarlo Zizola - Column

National Catholic Reporter, Oct 4, 2002 by Giancarlo Zizola

In 1961 Pope John XXIII called me to Rome because he wanted the eight Italian Catholic newspapers to have a journalist devoted to the ecumenical council he had convoked in 1959. In those newspapers, the practice at the time was to simply lift the religious news out of L'Osservatore Romano, the official Vatican organ, where the pope was still called "His Holiness of Our Lord," and it was said that he "graciously received the Most Eminent and Most Reverend Cardinal" or that he "kindly pronounced from his august lips" a given speech.

I came down to Rome from my village in the Northeast, in the province of Treviso, in a small truck with my Bible, my books, my portable typewriter and my 25 years. The trip took almost all night, because the highway wasn't yet finished. For several hours we were trapped behind an oversize slow truck, with a sign on the back warning of "powerful brakes."

Thus forced into a kind of slow march, I had the freedom to reflect on the fact that like the truck, my church too, which I loved and still love, was also oversized and slow, and had its own "powerful brakes." I didn't doubt that they were necessary. But my young truck driver pointed out to me that when one tries to drive with the brakes on, they heat up and there's the risk of a catastrophe. Thus I thought that the church, which had continued to live with its brakes on at least since the modernist crisis, was on the verge of heating up, and that Pope John had had an inspiration from heaven in offering it the possibility to change course.

In those early days there was, without doubt, an element of pragmatism about the council. John XXIII said that at the beginning of his pontificate the was beseiged by bishops, each of whom put his own problems on the table and proposed reforms. His was a faith with its eyes open, as the faith of all Christians should be, and so he concluded: "Why doesn't everyone come to Rome and we'll talk about these things?"

Yet when I prepared the first biography of Pope John's five years (The Utopia of Pope John, 1973), I put my hands on documents proving that for him the idea of a council had been an intellectual fixation since he was a young priest. When he was the delegate of Pius XII in Istanbul, he asked every friend who went to Rome to bring him books on ecumenical councils, the first few of which had been held on Turkish soil. What was natural for him certainly was not, of course, for everyone. Nevertheless, he let the entire church speak.

The "spirit of the council" was not a vaguely utopian and romantic atmosphere. For myself, I can say that it touched my sense of the Christian faith in which I had been educated. Many in my generation had already struggled in Italy, in groups of Catholic Youth, against political use of the faith. Our leader, Marco Rossi, president of the strongest youth association of Italy, was forced to resign by the leaders of the church in 1954. These were the same men who had convinced Plus XII to send Giovanni Battista Montini, the future Paul VI, into exile in Milan. This blow had demoralized us deeply. It was the church that made us suffer, and it was terrible to see that it could not understand how we battled to relieve it from its chains to political power. We weren't the only ones to ask this. Appeals for reform multipled among us, as in many other countries. My studies in the archives of Catholicism in Italy in the 1950s revealed to me, for example, that the invocation of a reform of the church rose from Cloistered monasteries, from sectors of the clergy, from the bishops themselves.

The embers smoldered under the ashes and needed only a breath to burn anew. There existed in the body of the Catholic church currents of ideas, aspirations, problems and requests that the leaders of the time did not allow to emerge, and in fact ignored and sought to impede. Pope John had taken the initiative to blow on those ashes, pushing the church onto the path of renewal, in a world of immense transformation. This extraordinary idea of a church that "changes" moved us deeply. It not only encourged us to remain in the faith, but also to change ourselves in the faith. I read then with passion the texts of Cardinal John Henry Newman: "To live is to change, and to be alive is to have changed often." His toast in the Letter to the Duke of Norfolk, in which he salutes the high priesthood of conscience before that of the pope, helped me to understand that I had to work, alongside Pope John and his ideas, so that Catholics, also in Italy, might develop a more evangelical understanding of the authority of Peter.

Thus I can say that the maturation of my Christian faith and my sentire cum Ecclesia ("to think with the church") owe much to the council. It was a grace to have been able to follow all four sessions from up close. It was also a theological school and an amazing professional adventure. I received accreditation to cover the Vatican in 1961, exactly when the Vatican turned the floor over to the universal church, to ecumenism, to dialogue with the Jews. The grand monolith gave way to research and discussion, and the reign of dogma opened itself to opinion. The object of my work changed under our eyes and made "news."