Religion: Council of Renewal

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carpenters fastened the 2,800 plastic-covered airline-like seats that have been as signed to the council fathers on facing rows of tiered bleachers, each 330 ft. long. On the right and left walls of the basilica, plumbers put the finishing touch to brand-new bathrooms that will be preserved, for the benefit of tourists, as a humble memento of the council.

Divine Intercession. From his Vatican office, Monsignor Luigi Sposito, chairman of the council's Technical Organizing Committee, was busy lining up hotel and pensione accommodations for the bishops—as a concession to the council, Rome innkeepers have refrained from raising prices—and negotiating with city police to have motorcycle escorts for the 100 rented buses that will shuttle the clergy from their residences to the council.* "If the police can get the bishops through Rome's traffic jams," says one Roman observer, "it will be a real demonstration of divine intercession."

Canceling all audiences, Pope John retreated to his recently restored summer apartments in the Vatican's 9th century Tower of San Giovanni for a week of prayer. On three days last week, every employee, cleric and layman alike, in the Vatican and diocesan chancery of Rome attended special services to offer prayers for the council's success. In dioceses around the world, Catholics joined in special novenas, asking the blessing of God upon the deliberations of the fathers. Uncounted millions of Protestants, asked by their leaders to pray for the council, prayed that it become a landmark in the Ecumenical Century equal in significance to the World Council of Churches Assembly in New Delhi last year.

State of the Church. Ecumenical councils of the past were summoned when the church was faced with clear and present danger—heresy, schism, internal corruption, or the violent enmity of civic powers. Vatican II comes at a time when the Roman Catholic Church has never seemed so strong or so durable. Its membership—550 million—is at an alltime high; it has no fewer than 418,000 priests and 946,000 nuns.

Yet the council will convene at a time when the church is in the midst of transition, attempting to plot a true and vigorous course through intellectual and social turbulence. Archbishop Lorenz Jaeger of Paderborn, one of Germany's most articulate advocates of change in the church, argues that Catholicism has finally come to the "end of the Constantinian era." In a world of permanent revolution, he argues, the church must think in universal terms and abandon a number of concepts that governed its past. Among these are the belief that the alliance of temporal and spiritual powers is "natural," the rigid juridical view of the church derived from Roman law, the unduly abstract understanding of man's nature derived from scholastic thought, the acceptance of Western social and economic forms as practical ideals. But such a long view or such a philosophic stance is hardly needed to sense the winds of change. Items:

>In northern Europe and the U.S., a new generation of theologically educated laymen has begun to grumble at the canned sermons and unsophisticated pieties of an older generation of priests, begun to ask for a proper share in running the affairs of the church. Justifying the new lay movement, scholars in France and