30 GERALD P. FOGARTY
man, archbishop of New York—then in Istanbul to visit U.S. troops
in Turkey—to a conference at his residence. The cardinal then al-
tered his itinerary to fly to Rome for an audience with John XXIII
on January 5, 1960, and presented the patriarch’s “views to his
holiness [to] see if some reunion were possible.” The pope was en-
thusiastic, but Domenico Cardinal Tardini, the secretary of state,
was less so. Spellman subsequently drafted a letter to Athenago-
ras, which he planned for the Vatican to send, but Tardini altered it
and instructed Spellman to send it to the patriarch himself. Spell-
man would later recall that the new letter was not as cordial as he
had originally intended.5 It would be four years before Paul VI’s
dramatic meeting with Athenagoras in Jerusalem, and this chilly
response may have contributed to the patriarch’s having no repre-
sentative during the first two sessions of the Council.
In the meantime, on June 5, 1960—Pentecost—John XXIII
established the Secretariat for Promoting Christian Unity. As
president, he appointed Augustin Cardinal Bea, SJ, former rector
of the Pontifical Biblical Institute, with Johannes Willebrands as
secretary. Initially viewed by some merely as a clearinghouse for
information for non-Catholics, the secretariat gradually won the
right to prepare schemata before the Council. Later, it was grant-
ed equal status with the Theological Commission, presided by Al-
fredo Cardinal Ottaviani, secretary of the Holy Office. John XXIII
instructed its members to carve out territory for the secretariat.6
Before the Council, the secretariat had the tasks of drafting a
preliminary schema on religious liberty and of arranging to have
invitations extended to non-Catholic observers to attend the
Council. The invitations to non-Catholic observers proved to be
complicated. The first break came when John XXIII, without con-
- Spellman to “Dear Friends,” n.p., “Christmas Night”—probably December 27,
1959, Archives of the Archdiocese of New York. - Thomas F. Stransky, “The Foundation of the Secretariat for Promoting Chris-
tian Unity,” in Vatican II by Those Who Were There, ed. Alberic Stacpoole (London:
Geoffrey Chapman, 1986), 79–80.