INTRODUCTION 17have argued, “The Council did not intend to produce a new doc-
trinal ‘Summa’ (according to John XXIII, ‘that did not require a
Council’!) nor to give answers to all problems.” Recognizing those
aspirations, this book focuses not on the minutiae of conciliar
debates and declarations, but rather on the proper place of indi-
vidual and collective human agency in the Council’s story, “as an
expression and prolongation of the event itself.”48
By the numbers, it is not difficult to see why historians have
traditionally questioned the conditions of possibility for agency
within the story of Vatican II by Catholics behind the Iron Curtain.
Out of a total of nearly 2,500 bishops who participated in the first
conciliar session, only two were from Hungary, four from Czecho-
slovakia, twenty-four from Yugoslavia, and twenty-six from Po-
land. These numbers varied over the course of the Council, yet in
view of the total number of bishops in Rome at any given moment
while the Council was in session, they remained consistently un-
impressive.
And yet close analysis of these bishops’ voting records tells a
dynamic and often surprising story. Sociologist Melissa Wilde’s
unprecedented access to the Vatican II voting records held within
the Vatican’s secret archive has allowed her to develop a typology
of “progressive” and “conservative” voting tendencies by bishops
from around the world, grouped by their country of origin.49 Al-
- Giuseppe Alberigo, “Preface: 1965–1995: Thirty Years After Vatican II,” in
History of Vatican II, ed. Giuseppe Alberigo and Joseph A. Komonchak, trans. Mat-
thew J. O’Connell (Maryknoll, N.Y.: Orbis, 1995), 1:xii. - Wilde derives these broader classifications from a close study of two small,
informal groups of Council fathers, each of which constituted a nexus for opinion-
making and lobbying for votes among the remaining bishops: respectively, the “pro-
gressive” Domus Mariae and the “conservative” Coetus Internationalis Patrum. For
an explanation of Wilde’s methodology, see Wilde, “How Culture Mattered at Vatican
II,” 579–80. Wilde was also kind enough to share additional data on voting patterns
in Communist countries. The raw votes that she has compiled are now available on-
line at “Second Vatican Council Votes,” Association of Religious Data Archives, at
http://www.thearda.com/Archive/Files/Descriptions/VATICAN.asp; accessed Janu-
ary 1, 2014.