Jeg leste ferdig selvbiografien til presten og teologen Louis Bouyer for noen uker siden (se her), og vil her ta med noen utdrag fra et av kapitlene i boka, som han kaller About a Council, der han skriver om sine ubehagelige opplevelser fra arbeidet han var involvert i (mest) før og etter Vatikankonsilet. Har starter kapittelet slik:
My nomination to a Council preparatory commission (for studies and seminaries) brought about the end of my teaching duties at the Institut catholique de Paris. This nomination would play an equally important role in determining a fundamental evolution in my very concept of the life of the Church. It is very much a characteristic of mine to be slow in drawing conclusions from experience.
… I have never stopped believing that the Church is, in her ultimate term, «unanimity in love.» The most recent Council, however, has cured me of my illusions that the royal path to achieve it might be this «conciliarity.» Although my full recovery was therefore quite slow in coming, there is no doubt that its seed was planted when I was first invited to participate in a farce that was indecent from start to finish: the labors of the first commission to which I was called.
Its presidency by Cardinal Pizzardo, whose well-advanced state of senility clearly couldn’t much worsen his radical unfitness for the job, was not the worst of it. In point of fact, the delicacy, tact, and superior feel for the issues that characterized its secretary, Msgr. Mayer, a Germanic Benedictine and since Cardinal, acted as a corrective to a situation which, without him, would have been grotesque. …
As for the rest of the commission, although it included a fair number of superior intellects and of deeply sensible and experienced men, they were submerged in a mass of worthless idiots and of those self-confident sorts who, in the Church as in government, so often show themselves to be mere blockheads obstinately clinging to their own limitations.
… Thank God the inept or incoherent proposals which were all that could emerge from our interminable palavers would not even be examined later on by the Fathers of the Holy Council!
Bouyer skriver her om en av de kommisjonene som hadde bli nedsatt (av pave Johannes 23) før konsilet, for å forberede dokumentene som mange hadde regnet med skulle vedtas ganske raskt – men det viste seg at nesten alle dokumentene ble forkastet av biskopene, og man måtte begynne arbeidet helt fra bunnen av. Bouyer var som vi leser her ikke særlig imponert over medlemmene av kommisjonene, eller dokumentene de produserte.
Bouyer var også medlem av Concilium (som arbeidet med å revidere liturgien etter konsilet, mer om det senere) og fra starten av medlem av the International Theological Commission, og negative erfaringer fra arbeidet der får ham til å avslutte kapittelet om konsilet slik:
… After these several experiences, it is understandable that I haven’t kept much of my youthful enthusiasm for «conciliarity» in general, and less yet for that pocketsize conciliarity now abusively dubbed «collegiality» where, in fact, a few clever devils regularly pull the strings behind the backs of simple gulls who after all that imagine they’ve taken decisions others took for them, though under their responsibility.