More Scholarship on Vatican Council II
- More Scholarship on Vatican Council II
This review-article continues a series of presentations of scholarly publications on the Second Vatican Council.1 I present here (1) an edition of diaries of the Council’s General Secretary, Archbishop Pericle Felici, and (2) the collection of the many writings of Karl Rahner concerning the Council from early 1962 into the early 1980s.
Personal Notes of the Council’s Omnipresent General Secretary Felici
On Christmas Day 1961, on the cold, wind-swept porch of St. Peter’s Basilica, Archbishop Pericle Felici, Secretary of the Vatican II Central Preparatory Commission, read aloud the Bull of Indiction of the Council, Humanae salutis, which Pope John XXIII had just signed, which convoked Vatican II to begin in the coming year 1962. Six weeks later, on February [End Page 322] 2, 1962, the Pope’s Apostolic Letter, Concilium, set the date of October 11, 1962, for the Council’s inauguration.
Nearly four years later, on December 8, 1965, in St. Peter’s Square, after the concluding liturgy of the Council, Archbishop Felici, the Council’s General Secretary, at a sign from Pope Paul VI, read out the Apostolic Letter, In Spiritu Sancto, formally closing the Council. By this time Felici’s voice and rhythms of Latin were well known to the Vatican II Fathers, from his announcements and communications during the 168 congregations and ten public sessions of the Council. He had also read out 544 questions for the Fathers to decide by votes entered on IBM cards by magnetic pencils.
Felici kept two sets of notebooks during the Council years, which his collaborator Msgr. Vincenzo Carbone combined into a single text after Felici’s death in 1982. One set was a spiritual journal, Cogitationes cordis mei, in four volumes, while the other comprised eight one-year agende (1959–1967) with notes, often daily, on meetings and Council work in progress.
Pericle Felici was born in 1911 in Segni, thirty-five miles southeast of Rome. He completed studies for ordination in Rome’s Major Seminary in 1934 and gained a doctorate in canon and civil law at the Lateran Athenaeum in 1938, where he remained as director of the Apollinaris Institute for Juridical Studies. In 1947, he became an auditor of the Rota, the church’s highest appellate court, where he served on three-judge panels to rule on appeals from decisions of lower church courts, especially concerning validity or nullity of marriages. In 1949, while continuing at the Rota, Felici moved back to the Roman Seminary to be spiritual director and became well appreciated for his balance and moderation as a spiritual guide.
On May 14, 1959, Cardinal Domenico Tardini, Secretary of State of Pope John XXIII, surprised Felici with the news that he was to be secretary of the Pre-Preparatory Commission of the Second Vatican Council. Felici had to set up the initial Vatican II secretariat with a small staff for putting into order the responses to the canvass of 1959–60. This work produced a huge collection of proposed topics for the Council sent in by 1998 bishops, 101 general superiors of men’s religious orders, fifty-one pontifical theological faculties, and ten congregations of the Roman Curia.2 [End Page 323]
In late January 1960, Tardini suffered a heart attack, followed by other bouts of illness before his death on July 30, 1961. As a consequence, Felici became Pope John’s regular informant on the Vatican II preparations and the newly published diary tells of the flow of Council information to the pope.3 The diary gives as well numerous accounts of the pope...
