Sandro Magister, China. On the Powers of the Bishops, the Council Saw Far Ahead

It established that without the papal mandate, they cannot govern the dioceses. The young Ratzinger was against it at the time, but soon changed his mind. It is thanks to that norm that today, as pope, he is disarming the illegitimate bishops. And defusing the schism

The ordination of these "mandarin" bishops is sacramentally valid. Also sacramentally valid are the Masses celebrated by them. What they lack is hierarchical communion with the see of Peter. And it is this that renders them devoid of authority over their respective dioceses, over the clergy and the faithful.

They are in fact bishops, but devoid of that power of governance which only the pope can give. The declarations and instructions that the Holy See released following the latest illicit episcopal ordinations in China insist on this.

This is a point that saw a highly charged clash of positions at Vatican Council II.

There were in fact some who held the position according to which sacramental ordination is sufficient to confer on the new bishop the fullness of his powers, including that of governance, without the need for a further mandate from the pope: that is, precisely the position that is so agreeable to the Chinese authorities today.

An active part in that conciliar clash was also played by a young theologian named Joseph Ratzinger.

On which side of the fence did he stand?

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To answer this question, one must go back to the middle of November 1964, to what has been called the "black week" of Vatican Council II.

That week began, on Monday, November 16, with the unexpected reading in the basilica of Saint Peter, on the part of the secretary general of the Council, Archbishop Pericle Felici, of a "Nota explicativa praevia" desired by the "highest authority," meaning Pope Paul VI.

At the behest of the pope, the note was to be received as "explanation and interpretation" of chapter three of the constitution on the Church "Lumen Gentium": the chapter dedicated to the role of the bishops, submitted for voting in those same days.

In point number 2, the note affirmed that one becomes a bishop by virtue of episcopal consecration. But in order that a bishop may exercise the "power" that has been conferred on him with sacred orders, he must receive the "iuridica determinatio" from the supreme authority of the Church.

The note raised protests from the progressives. Even the theologian who had drafted it, the Belgian Gérard Philips, was complaining two years later about its excessive "legalism," which ended up "suffocating and extinguishing the communion of charity."

Among the conciliar periti, one of the most determined in criticizing the note was the young Ratzinger, who was the trusted theologian of German cardinal Joseph Frings.

In an essay that will soon be published by Libreria Editrice Vaticana and has recently been previewed in issue number 61 of the Notiziario of the Paul VI Institute, the author, Belgian canon Leo Declerck, reconstructs Ratzinger's position at that juncture, on the basis of the diaries of other protagonists of the Council.

In order to clear the way for the note and its interpretation of the powers of the bishops, Ratzinger met with Professor Giuseppe Alberigo, a representative of Fr. Giuseppe Dossetti, who was the leader of the progressives. Together they wrote the draft of a speech by which Cardinal Frings would downgrade the note to a simple commission text and would ask that it be submitted for discussion in the assembly. At the same time, groups of bishops, including about a hundred Africans, would sign petitions to the pope. The objective was the removal of the entire third chapter of "Lumen Gentium."

But that's not what happened. The third chapter was approved by a large majority, and the note entered among the conciliar documents as a supplement to "Lumen Gentium."

Ratzinger recognized afterward that the note had had the merit of defeating the "maximalism" of the progressives and appeasing the Council's traditionalist minority, getting "Lumen Gentium" approved almost unanimously.

But he was careful to point out that the note did not bear the signature of the pope or of the Council fathers, but only that of Archbishop Felici.

And he wrote, shortly after the Council had ended, that in any case the note left "a bitter taste," both for the way in which it had been imposed and for its content, expressive "of a legal-systematic mindset that has as its standard the present-day juridical figure of the Church," in contrast with "an historical approach that would be based on the full extent of Christian revelation."

Today, a few decades later, having become pope, Joseph Ratzinger takes a more critical view of the conviction that "the Church should not be a Church of law, but a Church of love," free from juridical restraints.