38 The New York Review
Changing the ‘Changeless’ Church
Garry Wills
When Bishops Meet:
An Essay Comparing Trent,
Vatican I, and Vatican II
by John W. O’Malley.
Belknap Press/Harvard University
Press, 223 pp., $24.95
In John O’Malley’s When Bishops
Meet—the latest of his five books on
ecumenical church councils—he com-
pares and contrasts what he has written
on the three last councils and argues
that there should be a new one. This
is the culmination of a great project
that was almost forced upon him in
the years 1963–1965 when, as a young
Jesuit priest, he was in Rome as a fellow
at the American Academy, finishing
research for his Harvard dissertation
on Giles of Viterbo (1469–1532). Giles,
a reforming superior of the Augustin-
ian religious order, whose members
at one time included the young friar
Martin Luther, had delivered the open-
ing address at the Fifth Lateran Coun-
cil (1512–1517). So the young O’Malley
was studying sixteenth-century church
reform while watching, along with the
entire world, the concluding two years
of the Second Vatican Council assem-
bled by Pope John XXIII in 1962. He
was given access to the council’s delib-
erations through Roman connections
at the American Academy and through
his Jesuit order, headquartered in
Rome.
He has maintained this double focus,
on the sixteenth and the twentieth
centuries, through much of his distin-
guished career as a Renaissance histo-
rian. After receiving his doctorate, he
regularly taught a course at the Weston
Jesuit School of Theology called “Two
Great Councils: Trent and Vatican II.”
They seemed to make a natural pair,
since the common view was that Trent
(1545–1563) launched the Catholic
Counter-Reformation and Vatican II
ended it. O’Malley does not like the
term “Counter-Reformation,” and he
wrote the first of his conciliar books,
Trent and All That (2000), on the his-
torical treatment (and mistreatment) of
the Council of Trent, giving a nuanced
account of what the council actually
tried to achieve and what uses had been
made of it. He argued that Catholic ef-
forts to reform the church had predated
the council, and that many of the rigid
rules adopted by popes and bishops as
“Tridentine”—from the Latin name
for Trent—were later accretions to the
council’s doctrines. The subsequent
ban on reading the King James Version
of the Bible, for instance, was part of
the reason a separate Catholic school
system was set up in America, to es-
cape Protestant indoctrination in pub-
lic schools.
Va tican IIAfter this glance at one of the two foci
of his years in Rome, O’Malley wrote a
book on the other council treated in his
course at Weston: What Happened at
Va tican II (2008). This was “the biggest
meeting in the history of the world.”
Pope John XXIII surprised everyone
by announcing the council in 1959. The
two preceding councils had been called
to confront a clear menace—Trent to
deal with the Protestant Reformation
spreading throughout Europe, Vatican
I (1869–1870) to deal with the democra-
tizing energies unleashed by the French
Revolution. But there was no such ob-
vious crisis in 1959. Catholics seemed
happy in the 1950s, a period of bub-
bling religiosity. But John XXIII had a
sense that all was not well in the church
he had observed in his many diplomatic
posts and as patriarch of Venice.
His predecessor, Pius XII, had been
afraid of liberalizing trends in theology,
so he had suppres sed t hem i n t he enc yc -
lical Humani Generis (1950). Leading
Catholic thinkers were quietly told toshut up—to stop teaching or stop pub-
lishing. Silencing Karl Rahner, Yves
Congar, Marie-Dominique Chenu,
John Courtney Murray, and others was
a form of unilateral intellectual disar-
mament. Little of this was known to the
general public. But it was known to the
bishops and the religious order superi-
ors who had to implement this narco-
tizing of the mind in their seminaries
and schools, and it was guessed at by
the colleagues and students of those
who were muted. But finally, in the
progress of Pope John’s council, bishop
after bishop brought along, as his theo-
logical adviser, another person on Pius
XII’s dishonored list. Eventually, they
were all in attendance. It was like the
swarming of freed prisoners at the end
of Beethoven’s opera, Fidelio.
Another thing Pope John knew, but
few of his fellow bishops were admit-
ting, was that the church could no lon-
ger, after the Holocaust, retain its old
“supersessionist” view that God had
canceled his covenant with the Jews
to replace it with the New Testament.
When John sent out a letter to bishops
before the council asking what issues
should be dealt with, no one mentioned
Jewish relations. But John sympathized
with the persecuted Jews and over the
course of his career had known many.
As pope he commissioned Cardinal
Augustin Bea to shepherd through the
council a change in the church’s attitude
toward them. Bea was able to draw on
the experience of Jews who had “con-
verted” to Catholicism without giving
up one God for another (there is onlyone)—Karl Thieime, John Oester-
reicher, and a dozen others.^1
There was a fierce battle on this
issue. When Bea told Pope Paul VI
(who continued Vatican II after Pope
John’s death in 1963) that Maximos
IV Sayegh, the patriarch of Antioch,
was threatening to withdraw from the
council if the view of Jews as “dei-
cides” was renounced, Paul said that
in that case he would have to suppress
the discussion of the Jews. After that,
Bea and Paul were at odds, and Bea
won when the bishops voted for Nostra
Aetate, a document saying that the cho-
sen people remain God’s chosen. Otherhard-fought changes were brought
about: a recognition that freedom of
conscience demands the separation
of church and state (John Courtney
Murray won here), that church liturgy
could be celebrated in the vernacular
instead of Latin, and that “collegiality”
of all the bishops should stand on a par
with papal primacy. It was a stunning
victory for change in the supposedly
“changeless” church.Tre n tThough O’Malley had already written
Trent and All That, which was close to
his scholarly interest in the sixteenth
century, that book dealt mainly with
the council’s afterlife. Now, borrowing
part of the title of What Happened at
Va tican II as a subtitle, he wrote Tre n t:
What Happened at the Council (2013).
The impulse for calling that council did
not come from the pope at the time,
Paul III, who feared councils but was
pushed into it by the Holy Roman Em-
peror Charles V. There was nothing
unusual about this initiative. The first
eight ecumenical councils, held from
the fourth to the ninth centuries, were
called by Roman emperors, and popes
played little to no part in them. Even
as late as the Council of Constance
(1414–1418), the superiority of councilsto popes was made clear. Constance
ended a nearly forty-year schism in the
church by deposing three rival claim-
ants to the papacy and, on its own au-
thority, electing Otto Colonna as pope,
though he was not even a priest, much
less a bishop (he was ordained and
consecrated within three days after
becoming Pope Martin V).
Martin was elected with certain
conditions, especially that he call a
council every five years. He called and
quickly dismissed one after six years,
then waited until he was dying eight
years later to call another, the Council
of Basel, which reaffirmed Sacrosancta,
the decree of Constance that declared
the authority of councils superior to that
of popes. No wonder Paul III was afraid
to call another in 1545. But he needed
the political and military support of
Charles V, and Charles wanted to rec-
oncile Protestant reformers and Catho-
lics within his vast realm. The pope
had to agree that the council would
convene in German Trent instead of
Rome, and that no personal condemna-
tion of Luther would be issued (though
his doctrines were attacked). Paul III
was hundreds of miles away in Rome,
but he sought to steer the council
through his authorized delegates.
Against the three powerful dogmas
of Luther (called the “three onlys”)—
salvation comes sola scriptura (only
from the Bible), sola fide (only from
belief), and sola gratia (only from
grace)—the bishops convening at
Trent tried not to issue a simple denial
but a nuanced reading of them: salva-
tion comes from the Bible, tempered
by tradition; from belief, tempered by
authority; and from grace, tempered by
performance (“works”). It was hard to
oppose Luther’s powerful streamlined
doctrine with such Scholastic distinc-
tions about free will and God’s fore-
sight, or about grace and human effort,
and some Tridentine theologians put a
thumb on the scales, defining what they
believed only by emphasis on what they
should not believe—in Luther’s grace
alone (without efforts, “works,” to earn
the grace) or Calvin’s predestination.
Trent forbade all joint services with
other Christians. That would be “coun-
tenancing error.”
The council gave tools of control
to the pope and his curia, such as the
authorization of the single Latin trans-
lation of the Bible (the Vulgate), the
Index of Forbidden Books (on which
Luther’s works were included), and
the supremacy of the pope over these
and other tools. O’Malley traces the
delicacy of the council’s deliberations,
which he calls Trent, and the crudity
of their competing implementations,
which he calls “Trent.” It was “Trent”
that said Catholics could not read any of
the hundreds of books on “the Index.”
Thus a council called by Charles V to
reconcile his Protestant and Catholic
subjects was, in stages that O’Malley
carefully traces, turned into an instru-
ment for deeper division between the
two bodies of believers.Va tican IThe only council held between Charles
V’s and John XXIII’s was the First Vat-The closing ceremony of the Second Vatican Council, Vatican City, December 1965Keystone-France/Gamma-Keystone/Getty Images(^1) See my “Catholics and Jews: The
Great Change,” The New York Review,
March 21, 2013.