Religion: Council of Renewal

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clerics sent in replies. Compiled into twelve volumes of 7,981 pages, the replies proved to be an encyclopedia of churchly selfcriticism, which ten preparatory commissions and two secretariats, set up by the Pope in June 1960, boiled down to a working agenda of 129 proposed subjects. Last month attending prelates received drafts of decrees on the first seven topics scheduled for discussion: the deposit of faith, Scripture and tradition, marriage, the moral order, communications media, church unity, religious liberty.

Compromiser & Cheerleader. John himself, in the council preparations, played the dual role of head cheerleader and supreme referee. He frequently visited the office of Archbishop Pericle Felici, secretary of the Central Preparatory Commission, and benevolently told the workers that he was pleased with their progress and would pray for their work. Occasionally he took a hand in redrafting agenda items that might cause offense to certain prelates. One agenda item suggested by Alfredo Cardinal Ottaviani's theological commission, on the relation of Scripture to church tradition, was so potentially damaging to interfaith relations that Cardinal Bea personally wrote a more liberal statement, got the Pope's assurance that both views would be heard by the council fathers.

Under the rules of order issued last month, the council will meet for formal discussions in Latin each morning at 8; on weekday afternoons the bishops will separate into committees, rewrite proposed legislation in shirtsleeve sessions. When the council fathers have voted approval of a decree, the Pope will convene a public session to announce the news to the world. At one audience this summer, John suggested that the council "could go on for two or maybe three years." Some Roman observers suspect that so long a council would come close to bankrupting the Vatican; the first session alone will cost the church at least $6,400,000. Most council experts believe that Vatican II will convene from Oct. 11 to Dec. 8, return after Easter for a second session of about two months; if a third session is necessary, it will meet in the fall of 1963.

Pope John believes that the council will be "eminently pastoral in character," and has publicly said that he does not expect the fathers to promulgate new dogmas. The most challenging issues that the council has scheduled to discuss, or is likely to bring to the floor, are these:

∙ EPISCOPAL INFALLIBILITY. The major achievement of Vatican I was the dogma that the Pope, speaking to the church ex cathedra on matters of faith and morals, is infallible. The council, which broke up at the onset of the Franco-Prussian war, never got around to defining a related issue on its agenda: how other bishops of the church, as descendants of the apostles, share in this infallibility. To put the dogma of papal infallibility in proper perspective, Vatican II may formulate the traditional Catholic belief that when bishops in their dioceses speak out on a matter of faith and morals with unanimity, they also are infallible. Such a statement would add to the prestige of the episcopacy; after Vatican I some non-Catholic theologians charged that the bishops had been reduced to the rank of ecclesiastical errand boys for That Man in Rome. It would sit well with Orthodoxy, which holds that infallibility is a property of the church rather than