ROME
Crux
By John L. Allen Jr.
Associate editor October 15, 2014
ROME – True old-timers in the Vatican press corps still love to reminisce about how much fun it was covering the Second Vatican Council, a gathering of the world’s Catholic bishops from 1962 to 1965 that launched the Church on a course of modernization and reform.
It was a gripping story, filled with colorful characters. There were the great lions of the reform camp, such as Cardinal Leo Suenens of Belgium and Giacomo Lercaro of Italy, facing off against the old guard, personified by Italian Cardinal Alfredo Ottaviani, whose episcopal motto Semper Idem, “Always the Same,” was an entire ideological program in miniature.
Underneath the drama was the sense that something momentous was happening — a Church that had seemed frozen in place was suddenly on the move. Whether it was doing so in a wise or haphazard fashion is a matter of debate to this day, but no one denied that the plates were shifting.
Over the past two weeks, that kind of drama has been back on the Vatican beat.
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