In 1959, to everyone’s surprise, Pope John XXIII announced the project of a new council, to “ventilate the Church”. Three years later, on October 11, 1962, Vatican II opened. A world -scale event that was going to change the face of the Church and whose consequences are still topical.
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On January 25, 1959, on the occasion of a week of prayers for the unity of Christians, a religious ceremony was held at the Saint-Paul-Hors-les-Murs basilica, in the Vatican. Pope John XXIII (1881-1963), freshly elected, invites the cardinals present to meet after mass. They are only seventeen to have made the trip, the other guests thinking that it was only a small unimportant ceremony. But to everyone’s surprise, the sovereign pontiff makes a shattering announcement.
“Venerable brothers and very expensive son! We do before you, with a certain fear and a little emotion in the voice, but also with a humble resolution of words, the project of a double celebration: a diocesan synod For the city [Rome] and an ecumenical council for the Universal Church, “he declared to his audience which, according to several testimonies, remains amazed.
The last ecumenical council, Vatican I (1869-1870), did not even have a century and the previous one, the Council of Trent (Italy), dated from the Renaissance (1545-1563). Almost no one expected such an ad. Three years later, on October 11, 1962, Vatican II opened, an event of world magnitude whose echo is still felt today.
why did Jean XXIII Decision to open Vatican II?
Nothing suggested the slightest change within the Church. Certainly, since the 1930s, several voices, including theologians, had spoken out to anchor it in modernity and demand changes in the field of liturgy, ecumenism or the role of lay people. But they had all been strongly condemned by the Vatican, censored and banned from the institution. John XXIII himself illustrated himself by condemning the “workers’ priests”, these ecclesiastics who wanted to get closer to the laity by going to work in the factories.
How to explain this sudden decision? In his subsequent writings, John XXIII explains that he had an “inspiration”, which he puts on the account of the divine. Several sources report that when his entourage had asked him for the reasons for his decision, he would have gone to open the windows as an answer, to “ventilate the Church”.
Cold war, nuclear threat, secularization … The announcement does not intervene in any context. “The problems of the whole world were immense. We did not know each other and we did not know the different situations, even in the Catholic world. John XXIII suddenly thinks: there, it would take a council,” recalls Loris Capovilla, private secretary of the pope at the time, in a documentary distributed by the day of the Lord .
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