Religion: Council of Renewal

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non-Catholics would attend as observers rather than participants. Lately some U.S. archbishops added to the gloom by telling their laymen not to expect too much from Vatican II, and last week the warning was echoed by a veteran of many ecclesiastical gatherings. Speaking at San Francisco's Grace Cathedral, Lord Fisher of Lambeth, the retired Archbishop of Canterbury, noted: "It is always unwise to expect too much from councils."

Whether much or little comes out of the council depends to a large extent upon the numerical strength—and the endurance—of the two opposing forces that will clash at the council. Says Archbishop Denis Hurley of Durban, South Africa: "There will be much disputing in the nave of St. Peter's over how the church must enter the Atomic Age." A number of conservative bishops believe that the church should stand aloof from the pressures of a temporal world, holding fast to its traditions. Led by such impressive figures as Alfredo Cardinal Ottaviani of the Holy Office, Ernesto Cardinal Ruffini of Palermo and Giuseppe Cardinal Siri of Genoa, the "integralists" include nearly every bishop in Italy and Spain, a majority of the prelates from the U.S. and Latin America.

Opposed to them will be the church's "liberals"—bishops who believe that the church should discard nonessentials that harm its mission, seek to make it, without sacrificing doctrine, more accessible as a home for modern man. Apart from unity-minded Cardinal Bea, the liberals have few friends in the Vatican Curia, but they do include such articulate prelates as Tanganyika's Laurean Cardinal Rugambwa, Utrecht's Bernard Jan Cardinal Alfrink, Montreal's Cardinal Léger, Munich's Julius Cardinal Döpfner, a clear majority of the bishops in France, The Netherlands, Germany, Austria, Africa and Asia.

Ultimately, how far the church moves, and in what direction, will be determined by the Pope of transition, John XXIII. So far, his record is puzzling. One of his first major personnel changes was removing the aged, archconservative Giuseppe Cardinal Pizzardo as head of the church's doctrine-guarding ministry, the Holy Office—only to name the equally conservative Cardinal Ottaviani as Pizzardo's successor. As Papal Nuncio to France, John seemed to be sympathetic to the worker-priest movement, despite strong Vatican disapproval; after he became Pope, John issued an order that killed the experiment for good. In talks with audiences, John has sometimes spoken favorably of translating parts of the Mass into the vernacular; yet last winter he issued a strongly worded Apostolic Constitution that forbade priests to write against the use of Latin in the liturgy. "If John is a liberal who is simply making concessions to the Vatican," complains the editor of a Catholic diocesan weekly in the U.S., "give me a conservative who will make a few concessions to the liberals."

Pope John's defenders among Catholic liberals point out that there is still plenty of reason to be optimistic about the outcome of Vatican II. Although he is by disposition no innovator, the Pope himself is keenly aware of the mood of the church —and if the church's mood is to change, then he will help it do so. No one has higher ambitions for the outcome of the council,