VATICAN II AND THE COLD WAR 31sulting other members of the Curia, agreed to accept a “courtesy
visit” from Archbishop Geoffrey Fisher of Canterbury on Decem-
ber 2, 1960. Next came an invitation from Visser’t Hooft, secre-
tary general of the World Council of Churches, to have the secre-
tariat send observers to the Third General Assembly, held in New
Delhi from November 18 to December 5, 1961. Bea favored it, but
Ottaviani objected. As a compromise, the secretariat designated
five observers, who were not official staff members of the secre-
tariat. This paved the way for John XXIII in his Christmas allocu-
tion formally to invite other Christians to send observers to the
Council.
But the Orthodox proved more difficult. In September 1961,
the first Pan-Orthodox conference was held at Rhodes, at Athe-
nagoras’s convocation. Its final session proclaimed the essential
unity of all of the Orthodox churches and called for unity in all of
their activities.7 In July 1961, the official journal of the Moscow
patriarchate had already dismissed the notion of sending observ-
ers to the Council, issuing a solemn non possumus. The Russian
objection flowed from its perception that the Vatican was too
active in the political sphere. From September 27 to October 2,
1962, Willebrands then undertook a secret mission to Moscow
to inform the patriarch and his advisors of preparations for the
Council, its nonpolitical agenda, and the invitation to all of the
churches. Cardinal Bea then telegraphed Metropolitan Nikodim,
director of the patriarch’s Department of External Affairs, to
say that he had sent an invitation to Patriarch Alexius, who re-
sponded almost immediately that he would send delegates to the
Council.8 They were Archpriest Vitaly Borovoy and Archiman-
drite Vladimir Kotlyarov. In light of the close supervision that
the Soviet government exercised over the Russian Orthodox
Church, Khrushchev had to have approved the patriarch’s action.
- New York Times, October 1, 1961.
- Alberigo and Komonchak, eds., History of Vatican II, 1:324–46, 403–4.