Cardinal Augustin Bea and the Historicity of the Gospels at the Second Vatican Council: The Making of the Pontifical Biblical Commission’s Instruction of 21 April 1964 ^†

Abstract

In November 1962, Cardinal Augustin Bea distributed to the Fathers of the Second Vatican Council a pamphlet on the historicity of the Gospels, intervening—after two years of apparent silence—in the dispute between the Pontifical Biblical Institute and the Pontifical Lateran University over the legitimacy of the historical-critical method in Catholic exegesis. This article investigates Bea’s specific, little-explored contribution to the conciliar debate on this question, central to the future constitution Dei Verbum. Drawing on unpublished correspondence, diaries, and drafts preserved in Bea’s private archive in Munich and in other conciliar collections, the study reconstructs the genesis of the 1962 pamphlet and its links to the Instruction Sancta Mater Ecclesia, issued by the Pontifical Biblical Commission on 21 April 1964. The evidence shows that Bea opened a new, more assertive phase of a lifelong commitment to exegetical freedom—understood here as the use of his own institutional authority to shield the Biblicum’s exegetes from ecclesiastical suspicion and prejudice against the historical-critical method—and that he played a decisive, largely backstage role in shaping the 1964 Instruction, which directly influenced Dei Verbum 19. Far from a peripheral academic quarrel, the historicity of the Gospels has been one of the longest-running fault lines between conservatism and renewal in twentieth-century Catholicism, and remains a significant point of discussion in biblical scholarship today. Bea’s conciliar action thus confirms his role as a decisive, if ambivalent, mediator between tradition and “aggiornamento”.

1. Introduction

The number of pamphlets privately circulated among the bishops gathered in St Peter’s Basilica during the first session of the Second Vatican Council was remarkable. From the very beginning, typographers were hard at work reproducing, within this improvised “paper arena,” the terms of long-standing theological, exegetical, and ecclesiological controversies (Gilbert 2009, pp. 165–68). In late November 1962, amid the conciliar discussion of the schema De fontibus Revelationis—rejected by the majority of the bishops on 20 November (Guasco 1989, pp. 443–62)—a particularly notable pamphlet authored by Cardinal Augustin Bea emerged from this deluge of paper. Titled The Historicity of the Gospels: Cyclostyled Notes on the Grave Problem of the History of Forms, Made Available to the Council Fathers for Private Use, the text was translated into several languages and widely distributed among the Council Fathers (Bea 1962a). This was an exceptional move for Bea, who refrained from distributing any other pamphlet in St Peter’s during the Council’s four sessions. Indirectly, it marked his intervention, after two years of apparent silence, in the intense controversy between the Pontifical Biblical Institute (PBI) and the Pontifical Lateran University (PLU), ignited by the attacks of Antonino Romeo and Francesco Spadafora on the Jesuit institute that Bea himself had led as rector for nearly two decades, from 1930 to 1949 (Burigana 2001; Dupont and Schelkens 2008).

As is well known, the controversy was aimed at influencing the Council’s preparation and at preventing scholars from the Biblicum from being appointed as experts to the conciliar commissions. It formed part of a decades-long dispute within Catholic exegetical circles over the interpretation of Pius XII’s encyclical Divino afflante Spiritu (1943), and specifically over the legitimacy of applying the historical-critical method to biblical studies without contradicting tradition and the magisterium (Laplanche 2006; Schelkens 2010; Pfister 2020). This article does not retrace the longer, pre-conciliar history of the dispute—which involved Bea from the very beginning of his career as a young exegete at the Biblicum in the 1920s, through his rectorship of the Institute (1930–1949), up to the eve of the Council—since that history has been examined in detail in a companion study (Marotta 2022). The focus here is deliberately narrower: to reconstruct Bea’s specific, and so far little-explored, contribution to the question of the historicity of the Gospels during the Council itself, taking the distribution of his 1962 pamphlet as a starting point and following its consequences through to the Pontifical Biblical Commission’s (PBC) Instruction Sancta Mater Ecclesia of 21 April 1964, which directly shaped paragraph 19 of the conciliar constitution Dei Verbum.

Despite having intervened repeatedly in defence of modern exegesis in the years immediately preceding the attack (Bea 1958a, 1958b, 1959a, 1959b, 1959c), Bea withdrew into public silence after Romeo’s assault, perhaps underestimating, at least initially, its likely consequences.1 Not even the removal—by order of the Holy Office—of Professors Max Zerwick and Stanislas Lyonnet from teaching, in which the controversy culminated in September 1961, broke Bea’s public silence (Gilbert 2009).2 The hypothesis put forward here is that Cardinal Bea did not intervene earlier because he believed the cause would have a greater chance of success if he kept a certain distance between himself and the Biblicum (Marotta 2022). It is indeed plausible that the attack on the Institute was orchestrated by the Roman Curia specifically to check Bea’s unexpected rise during the pontificate of John XXIII (Hebblethwaite 2013, p. 526; Burigana 2001, p. 75).3 However, from the Council’s first session onward, Bea resolved to take the field personally on the long-standing controversy over the historicity of the Gospels, one of the crucial issues in the conciliar debate on the biblical schema.

2. A Pamphlet for the Council: Bea in the “Paper Arena”

Bea’s pamphlet marked the Cardinal’s entry into the paper arena of the Second Vatican Council, an arena in which no small part of the conciliar struggle was fought.

In fact, the text had been sitting on his desk for some years. He had written it in 1960, at the request of the Archbishop of Chicago, Albert Meyer, who needed a text for his own diocese, since the controversy between the Biblicum and the Lateranense had its counterpart overseas (Bea 1960).4 In the summer of 1961, the Cardinal returned to these reflections with the intention of publishing them, but the project was abandoned, probably because of the deteriorating situation at the Biblicum, especially after the suspension of Zerwick and Lyonnet.

A year later, at the beginning of the Council, the moment seemed to have come to publish these notes. Indeed, on 14 October 1962 Francesco Spadafora was permitted to distribute his pamphlet Rationalism, Catholic Exegesis and the Magisterium to the Italian bishops (Spadafora 1962).5 It was probably around this time that Bea conceived, or was asked, to publish an authoritative treatise on the subject.

Indeed, Spadafora’s pamphlet, which reached even non-Catholic hands—such as the Reformed observer Lukas Vischer, who came away from it distinctly unfavourably impressed6—sought to warn the Italian Fathers of the danger that the historical-critical method of “Formgeschichte” posed to the Catholic Church, and called for its outright condemnation together with tighter oversight of the teaching given in the Roman institutes, so that “young priests who come to study Sacred Scripture do not lose everything they have learned in theology, but are formed according to the directives of the Holy See” (Spadafora 1962). As he had already done in the long controversy that had preceded the Council’s opening, Spadafora did not refrain from levelling explicit accusations against individual exegetes—first among them the Jesuit Xavier Léon-Dufour, recently appointed a consultor of the Pontifical Biblical Commission alongside two former pupils of the Biblicum, Giorgio Castellino and Benjamin Wambacq, the latter as the Commission’s secretary. On 25 October the professors of the Biblicum circulated their own reply, maintaining that the methods of the so-called “school of forms” could be applied without accepting its philosophical premises (Pontificio Istituto Biblico 1962); Spadafora responded with a further pamphlet, demanding that they name a single monograph proving that “Formgeschichte” was not opposed to Catholic doctrine (Marotta 2022, p. 81).

Meeting Bea’s secretary, Stjepan Schmidt, in early November, Tucci recorded in his diary: “Mons. Spadafora has been ranting against the Biblicum and Fr K. Rahner (a formal heretic!) before the Mexican bishops. They came away badly impressed by his dogmatism and fanaticism, and so thought of asking Cardinal Bea to come and speak to them on biblical questions. He, with fine tact, replied that he could not do so on account of his all-too-intense activity, but that he would send someone ‘who thinks as I do’—namely the Dominican Fr Duncker, who is very open-minded and a friend of the Biblicum. The Mexican bishops then let Mons. Spadafora, who wanted to continue his exposition, know that they no longer wished to hear him. If true, it is the lesson he deserves” (Tucci 1962–1965, entry for 8 November 1962, pp. 51–52).

These developments probably explain the timing of Bea’s own pamphlet, drafted as an indirect response to Spadafora: the whole Jesuit community collaborated: the director of Civiltà Cattolica, Roberto Tucci, worked on “correcting the Italian text” (Tucci 1962–1965, entry for 19 November 1962, pp. 78–79), while the professors of the Biblicum worked on the Spanish, English, and French translations.7

On 7 November, Schmidt had written to Léon-Dufour asking him to read Bea’s text and suggest corrections (Schmidt 1962); since the essay was not yet ready when Léon-Dufour returned it on 13 November—the day before the debate on de fontibus Revelationis opened—the Biblicum distributed instead, as a stopgap, a reprint of an article by Jean-Julien Weber, Bishop of Strasbourg and a former pupil of the Institute (Weber 1962). On the morning of 19 November, while Émile De Smedt spoke on behalf of the Secretariat for Christian Unity to attack de fontibus for its lack of ecumenical sensitivity and call for its withdrawal (Sacrosancti Concilii Oecumenici Vaticani II 1962–1986, vol. 1.3, pp. 184–87), Tucci himself was absent from the debate in the hall, still occupied with those very corrections (Tucci 1962–1965, entry for 19 November 1962, pp. 78–79). The following day, 20 November, brought the vote that has become the emblematic moment of the Council’s first session: 1,368 Fathers called for the schema’s outright rejection against 822 in favour—but since the two-thirds majority required by the Council’s own rules of procedure was missed by only about a hundred votes, discussion continued into the next day, when the intensity of this clash would find its clearest summation in the Pope’s decision to suspend the debate on De fontibus Revelationis and withdraw the schema, entrusting it to a joint commission of the Secretariat for Christian Unity and the Theological Commission (Sacrosancti Concilii Oecumenici Vaticani II 1962–1986, vol. 1.3, pp. 219–23; Ruggieri 1996). This initiative gave voice to the Council’s own clear will, and Bea himself appears to have played a part in it. At a lunch held that day at the Japanese embassy to the Holy See, the Secretary of State, Amleto Cicognani, asked Bea to sound out the opinion of other cardinals on the situation; that afternoon Bea met Achille Liénart and Josef Frings, both members of the Council’s governing Council of Presidency and, not by chance, the same two cardinals who on 13 October had been decisive in postponing the election of the conciliar commissions by a few days, so as to give the various national episcopates time to coordinate their own lists of candidates (Sacrosancti Concilii Oecumenici Vaticani II 1962–1986, vol. 1.2, pp. 207–208; Riccardi 1996, p. 47). Both cardinals told Bea that they agreed the Pope ought to intervene to overcome the procedural difficulty of the missing two-thirds and have the debate halted (Schmidt 1987, p. 458). That evening, reached by telephone by Cicognani, Bea reported back the outcome of these consultations, while John XXIII was privately receiving Cardinal Léger at the end of an audience already scheduled with the Canadian bishops (Ruggieri 1996, pp. 291; Marotta 2022, p. 82).

The next morning, 21 November, as the papal decision and the creation of a mixed commission were announced, Alfredo Ottaviani left the hall in evident dismay, while the majority of the bishops celebrated the news in the side aisles, arranging to gather the following afternoon—a Thursday, with no conciliar session scheduled—at the Biblicum, to attend Norbert Lohfink’s defence of his doctoral thesis before a remarkable gathering of 400 Council Fathers, in a pointed show of solidarity with the embattled Institute (Gilbert 2009, p. 167). Congar noted at the end of the day: “Another victory for Cardinal Bea. The Council is Cardinal Bea’s Council” (Congar 2002, p. 254).

Distributed the following week, on 26 November,8 Bea’s paper sought to explain to the Council Fathers the nature of the exegetical school known as “Formgeschichte”, which, by the way, he preferred to call “Redaktionsgeschichte”.9 The pamphlet’s distribution was an exceptional step for Bea: during the four sessions of the Council he would never again circulate a text of his own in St Peter’s, nor speak publicly on any subject besides the ecumenical cause—for which he ceaselessly prepared articles, interviews, and lectures, gathered that same autumn by Tucci into the volume L’unione dei Cristiani (Bea 1962b)—except, from 1964 onward, on the question of the Jews. Tucci had hoped to publish the two articles, at least in Civiltà Cattolica, but the plan was postponed for years, probably because of the Secretariat’s own involvement in the mixed commission for revising the biblical schema, which began its sessions on 25 November; the articles finally appeared only in 1964, as a commentary on the Biblical Commission’s Instruction (Bea 1964a, 1964b).

The text was organised as two distinct essays, Il carattere storico dei Vangeli sinottici considerato dal punto di vista puramente umano-storico (“The Historical Character of the Synoptic Gospels Considered from a Purely Human-Historical Point of View” in English) and Il carattere storico dei Vangeli sinottici considerati come opere ispirate e parola di Dio (“The Historical Character of the Synoptic Gospels Considered as Inspired Works and the Word of God”)—an attempt at a double demonstration, treating the profane and the sacred dimensions separately, that did not escape Léon-Dufour’s own objections.10 In the first essay, on the synoptics as human works born of the self-narration of particular Christian communities, Bea argued that these communities, conscious of the historical value of their writings and anxious to hand down the truth about the events of Jesus’s life, had drawn on “literary genres” among the cultural tools available to them, without inventing anything or blending their accounts with pagan myth, and so had produced works that were historically reliable. In the second, on the inerrancy of the Gospels as inspired works, the Cardinal addressed the difficulties raised by the discrepancies among the synoptics, defending the possibility that a single event, whether directly witnessed or learned at second hand, could be recounted in different ways and from different perspectives without its truthfulness being compromised.11 If, on the one hand, Bea firmly condemned the extreme consequences to which the philosophical and sociological premises of the “school of forms” could lead—such as the “demythologisation” at which Bultmann had arrived12—on the other he recognised the legitimacy of applying some of its methods and procedures to the New Testament as well, methods that Old Testament exegetes had for some time already used successfully, with the encouragement and approval of Pius XII’s Divino Afflante Spiritu: “let [the exegete] be persuaded that this part of his duty he cannot neglect without gravely damaging Catholic exegesis” (Pius XII 1943, p. 316) Bea warned, quoting the encyclical directly. To recognise the influence of texts that predated the Gospels as we now have them, and on which the evangelists drew, did not, in Bea’s view, undermine either the historicity or the inerrancy of the synoptic accounts—any more than did the fact that the faithful conservation and transmission of the preaching of Jesus and the apostles had not been a “mechanical” transmission, but a “living” adaptation of the account to the audiences of the different milieus it addressed—an adaptation that was itself a form of “preaching”. The Jesuit firmly maintained that these recent scientific findings did not compromise either the historical value or the inspired character of Scripture, nor did they in any way authorise limiting infallibility only to “the essential, the religious element, that which concerns faith and morals, and regarding the rest as the ‘concrete garment’ in which religious doctrine is presented” (Bea 1962a, p. 40).

Notwithstanding certain more cautious passages meant to reassure the Fathers regarding what were then the harshest and fiercest accusations levelled at historical-critical exegesis, the Cardinal, with that pamphlet, was declaring himself with determination in a sense openly aligned with the exegetical positions then accused of heterodoxy—positions which, in his view, constituted instead, incontestably and legitimately, “the great current of Catholic exegesis”. He made this clear in the first, severe note to his text—later removed from the 1964 printed edition as no longer topical—in which Bea, citing an essay by Karl Rahner (Rahner 1961), implicitly gave a clear endorsement to the Jesuit theologian, himself also a target of Spadafora’s darts. Indeed, in that note Bea took up almost verbatim the particularly heated tones with which, in a letter to Antonio Piolanti, director of the journal Divinitas, he had expressed, the previous December, his full disappointment over the affair of Spadafora’s attacks (Bea 1961a).

It is worth pausing here to recall what had actually passed between Bea and Piolanti on that occasion, which fell a year before the debate of the Council’s first session, right in the midst of Spadafora’s affair against the PBI. Bea, silent until then on the controversy, could not restrain himself from reacting, at least privately, after the Holy Office, in October 1961, had imposed, without ever giving reasons, the indefinite suspension from teaching of Zerwick and Lyonnet, professors at the Biblicum for more than twenty years and themselves targets of Romeo’s and Spadafora’s attacks. Faced with this painful turn of events, in December 1961 he found himself provoked by an audacious Christmas greeting from the director of Divinitas, who in the preceding months had even refused to publish, in the pages of his own review, the reply of the Biblicum’s professors.13 For decades, the full harshness of Bea’s reply remained hidden in the archives, coming to light here for the first time:

I do not set myself up as judge of the particular part that Your Reverence, as director of the review, had in the publication of the same (Romeo 1960). I start simply from the fact that the review published it under your direction, and that the article was given wide circulation. It is difficult to think that all this could have happened without some participation on your part. I will not dwell here on the harm suffered by those who are, after all, my confreres in religious life and were my collaborators in an Institute to which I have devoted my life (though it is difficult to set that aside) […] I do not think I should remain silent about the great harm that this publication, and the controversies that followed, have caused to the authority of the organs of the Holy See, to which the responsibility for the article has unjustly been attributed, and thereby to the Church herself—and this not only among Catholics, but also among non-Catholic Christians, who have not infrequently said: “If this is how, in Rome, they treat their own brothers in the faith, what can we, who are separated, expect?” It will be very difficult to repair such great harm. Since this is my first encounter with you, Most Illustrious and Reverend Monsignor, since the time of that grave and painful event, I do not think I can let it pass in silence, still less allow it to be papered over with polite words. Certainly, in the act of impressing upon you the duty of justice and charity, I have no wish to fail in it myself. I do not, therefore, set myself up as judge of anyone’s subjective responsibility; I have simply wished to draw your attention to the objective gravity of the fact, and to express to you the profound sorrow I have felt at the harm done—not only to my confreres and to so deserving an Institute, but above all to Holy Church, to the Holy See, and to souls. This harm could certainly have been avoided by having recourse, had it seemed necessary, to those authorities of the Holy See entrusted with vigilance over biblical studies, over doctrine, and over teaching institutions. I pray that the Lord may enlighten all those who, in whatever way, took part in it, so that they may repair the harm done and the wounds inflicted on Christian charity (Bea 1961a).

It was this same, barely contained indignation that resurfaced, a year later and in a gentler, more oblique form, in the note Bea drafted for his conciliar pamphlet:

[Some,] alarmed by the extreme results of the “method of the history of forms,” think they must anathematise and completely reject such an apparently subversive method and all that it implies […] They interpret all the sayings of Jesus as if they were a mechanical recording or a stenograph, and the accounts of the facts and events of his life as if they were a chronicle or an accurate “take,” in the modern sense of the word, or an archival document. Others, both priests and lay people, who look at the facts with open eyes, wonder how they can be explained without falling into one of the two extremes, neither into an excessive and naive conservatism, nor, even less, into the danger of questioning the historical value of the Gospels. A recent, and in some sense authoritative, voice giving expression to this unease among Catholics is that of K. Rahner. It is obvious that, in addressing this unease, we do not intend in any way to involve ourselves in the recent controversies that have arisen on the subject among Catholics, but to treat the matter objectively and calmly. Of these controversies we shall say only this: it is well known that in the course of them some have gravely failed in justice and charity. It seems to have been forgotten that one cannot wish to defend the truth, the word of God, and the teaching of the Church by means that then contradict that very truth, that word of God, and that teaching. The admonition of Pius XII of happy memory, in the encyclical Divino Afflante Spiritu, that all the children of the Church must judge the efforts of scholars not only with the utmost fairness but also with the utmost charity, does no more than instil what is a requirement of God, of the teaching of Christ, and of the human and Christian conscience. It may be added, with regret, that such ways of proceeding have certainly not helped to enhance the good name of Catholic exegesis among non-Catholics, even though the latter, too, evidently know how to distinguish between sporadic episodes and the great current of Catholic exegesis (Bea 1962a).

With this pamphlet, the Cardinal was taking a decisive stand in the exegetical controversy. He was aware that he was staking all his authority—not only as President of the Secretariat for Christian Unity and a trusted collaborator of John XXIII, but also as a former close collaborator of Pius XII. The Jesuit Cardinal seemed, in fact, to embody a bridge between the two pontificates, and a possible reconciliation between Pacelli’s magisterium and Roncalli’s “aggiornamento”. It was precisely for these reasons that Bea’s pamphlet proved effective.

The Archbishop of Florence, Ermenegildo Florit—a leading figure of Roman theology and later a protagonist in the redaction of the new schema De divina Revelatione (see Bocchini Camaiani 1997)—commented in the margin of his own copy of Bea’s pamphlet: “What is good in the ‘method of forms’ can be conceived and realised outside it and any other theoretical system, and so we escape misunderstandings and the danger of regrettable excesses. The Divino Afflante Spiritu is sufficient for us in this matter. This is my conviction” (Florit 1962). Bea had reached his goal, winning over not only many of the roughly 2200 bishops gathered in Rome—most of whom, before that autumn of 1962, had never felt directly responsible for, nor shown much interest or competence in, disputes of this kind—but also some of the most obdurate conservatives, Florit among them.

3. The Pontifical Biblical Commission’s Instruction of 21 April 1964

The schema De divina Revelatione, prepared by the mixed commission established in November 1962, remained “frozen,” not being discussed during the Council’s second session: contributing further to this delay were the death of John XXIII in June 1963 and the ecclesiological priorities of Paul VI’s new pontificate. In the intersession preparing for the third session, once the bishops’ observations on the matter had been gathered, its revision passed back exclusively into the hands of the Doctrinal Commission, which on 7 March 1964 created within itself a sub-commission, chaired precisely by Charue and Florit, for its revision (Declerck 2017, pp. 127–32; Burigana 1998, pp. 229–45, 255–63).14 This sub-commission, to which the drafting of the text of the future Dei Verbum is in fact owed, had begun its work barely a month earlier when, on 21 April 1964, the Pontifical Biblical Commission published the Instruction Sancta Mater Ecclesia on the historicity of the Gospels (Pontifical Biblical Commission 1964; Bolin 2012).

Aiming to clarify, once and for all, the authentic interpretation of Divino Afflante Spiritu, and to complete its indications regarding the historical truth of the Gospels, the Instruction put an end to the controversy and definitively cleared the historical-critical method of the charge of being a modernist Trojan horse smuggled into New Testament studies. The Instruction declared it licit “to examine what reasonable elements are contained in the ‘Form-Critical method’ that can be used for a fuller understanding of the Gospels,” and affirmed that “from the results of the new investigations it is apparent that the doctrine and the life of Jesus were not simply reported for the sole purpose of being remembered, but were ‘preached’ so as to offer the Church a basis of faith and of morals” (Pontifical Biblical Commission 1964). In particular, the distinction between the three phases of the transmission of Revelation—the basis of “Redaktionsgeschichte”—was taken up almost verbatim in Dei Verbum 19, which explained how the evangelists had proceeded by “selecting some things […], reducing some of them to a synthesis, explaining some things in view of the situation of their churches […] but always in such fashion that they told us the honest truth about Jesus”.15

The timing of the publication of Sancta Mater Ecclesia—overlapping with the delicate phase of reworking the texts whose discussion would open the Council’s third session—suggests that the Biblical Commission intended the document to “force the hand” of the ongoing revision of De Divina Revelatione, which could not have ignored the constraint imposed by so authoritative and definitive a pronouncement. This, together with the fact that the SCU, in the transition between the two pontificates, had been shut out of the final drafting of the schema, has long led historians to suspect that Bea—already a consultor of the PBC since 1931, and confirmed as a member in the wake of his creation as cardinal—was the protagonist not only of the document’s material drafting but also of its very conception. However, the genesis of the Instruction long predates the conciliar events and is closely linked to the history of Bea’s own pamphlet, as well as to the “case” of the conflict between the Biblicum and the Lateranense. The papers of the Cardinal’s personal archive, held in Munich (ADPJ), allow us to substantiate this hypothesis.

In the summer of 1961, the Cardinal had postponed the publication of the pamphlet drafted for Meyer (Bea 1960) precisely because of an imminent pronouncement expected from the Biblical Commission. The same thing happened again in spring 1963, when Tucci wanted to publish Bea’s pamphlet in Civiltà Cattolica and was told by Schmidt that, in the words of Tucci’s diary, “nothing [with the article] will be done for the moment, since it is expected that the Biblical Commission, which is currently working on a document, will intervene; perhaps mid-June we will resume.” (Tucci 1962–1965, entry for 27 April 1963, pp. 148–49).

A file in particular in the Cardinal’s own archive in Munich documents his very active role in the drafting process of the Instruction. Although the documents it contains remain unusable for now, closed to consultation—together with many others—in a special fund known as “Carcer” (CCR), pending the opening of the corresponding Vatican archives,16 the inventory shows that it holds Bea’s own “observations” on successive drafts of the Instruction from as early as 1962, together with a letter from Wambacq of 20 June 1961 informing him that the PBC’s own consultors had just been asked to draft a pronouncement on the dispute over the Gospels—confirming that the roots of Sancta Mater Ecclesia long predate the redactional process of De Divina Revelatione, which may, at most, have hastened its final stages. Indeed, throughout the controversy between PLU and PBI John XXIII had repeatedly pressed the Biblical Commission to act, even threatening at one point to dissolve it. A note to the Secretary of State, Amleto Cicognani, dated 21 May 1962, betrays the Pope’s full impatience and irritation at the Commission’s inaction:

It is time to conclude on this point. Either the Biblical Commission means to move, to work, and to provide the Holy Father with suggestions suited to the needs of the present hour, or it is worth dissolving it and letting the Higher Authority provide, in Domino, for its reconstitution. But the impression of the uncertainties circulating here and there—which do honour to no one, born of hesitation over the clear positions that ought to be taken regarding the leanings of particular persons or schools, and over a judicious allocation of tasks and duties—must absolutely be dispelled.

(John XXIII 1978, pp. 536–37).

A few months later the Pope did indeed partly renew the Commission’s ranks, appointing a new secretary and five new consultors from among the foremost figures of international biblical scholarship, in the hope that a change in its composition, giving greater representation to the more advanced currents of Catholic exegesis, might shake it out of the immobility in which it had seemed mired for years.17 Alongside Léon-Dufour, Castellino, and Wambacq, already mentioned, the French Dominican Ceslas Spicq, the Belgian Franciscan Béda Rigaux, and the German Rudolf Schnackenburg were thus added in July 1962; according to Léon-Dufour, it was above all the latter two who were among the Instruction’s principal contributors (Léon-Dufour 1995, p. 90; Laplanche 2006, p. 476). The archival record nonetheless points to a very active role for Bea himself.

As early as 1962, he commented on a draft of the Instruction, asking for “a much more explicit mention of the ‘history of forms.’”18 A year later, commenting on the third draft of May 1963, he was more severe, criticising the text’s “uncertain character” and accusing its authors of failing to grasp either “the audience and the purpose of the document” or “the complexity of the problem”—yet he concluded:

However, a question can be asked: is not the document as it stands the only possible outcome in the present general situation and the particular situation of the Biblical Commission in its present composition? Is not something better than nothing? Is it not better to be satisfied with this document in principle, while at the same time correcting it not only in style and clarity, but also in content at the points indicated?19

The Lercaro archives confirm that, on 22 April of that same year, the cardinals of the Biblical Commission had indeed been convened over the querelle between the Lateranense and the Biblicum, and asked to “determine what measures, in their tried wisdom and competence, they would advise adopting so as to prevent similar disputes in future” (Burigana 2001, p. 64). According to Jean Dupont’s testimony, it was at that very session that Bea, holding the floor for almost the whole time, asked for a formal censure of Romeo and Spadafora, though he obtained only a simple warning for both to desist (Burigana 2001, p. 65). Meanwhile, on 13 May, a new rector, Roderick MacKenzie, was appointed at the Biblicum in place of Ernst Vogt, whose final years as rector had been overshadowed by the clash with the Lateranense; the handover may have been meant to prepare the ground for the Vatican intervention that would finally close the affair, but barely a month later the death of John XXIII froze the Instruction’s project.

This was not resumed until the following year, when a new draft was circulated to the members of the Biblical Commission in February 20 and presented by Bea himself at a plenary session convened on 11 March.21 A month later, Sancta Mater Ecclesia was finally published (Rouquette 1968, t. 2, p. 475).

It cannot be ruled out that the Instruction’s long gestation, protracted well beyond the timeframe initially envisaged, may have been one of the reasons that in fact kept Bea from taking a public stand on the controversy between the Biblicum and the Lateranense —a controversy that nonetheless closely involved him. But if, on the public stage, the Cardinal seemed to hold his tongue, behind the scenes he had probably not stinted in his support, pressing the cause with John XXIII in whatever ways were open to him, in particular to remedy the suspension of Zerwick and Lyonnet.

Robert Rouquette’s chronicles suggest indeed that the intention to rehabilitate Zerwick and Lyonnet was already present at the change in pontificate, but that the Jesuit Superior General, Jean-Baptiste Janssens, advised the new Pope to “wait a little […] so as not to give the impression of contradicting John XXIII” (Rouquette 1968, p. 475).22 This did not, however, stop Paul VI from delivering, that September, a veiled rebuke—on the occasion of the opening of the Lateranense’s academic year—to those tempted by “jealous rivalry” and “irksome polemic” with the other Roman institutes.23 Indeed, only a few days after his election, the new Pope had received Bea and assured him that there would be no further attacks on the Biblicum during his pontificate; word of this, passed on discreetly by the Cardinal to his former colleagues, encouraged MacKenzie to take gradual steps toward unblocking the affair (Burigana 1998, p. 223). In February 1964 Paul VI received the new rector in audience—MacKenzie having just asked, in vain, for an update on the Zerwick-Lyonnet case from the Holy Office’s secretary, Alfredo Ottaviani. Mackenzie’s letter to Ottaviani had been personally corrected by Bea, who, meanwhile, on 1 October 1963, had finally been made a member of the Holy Office itself: tellingly, this was still the one congregation among those to which Bea was a consultor at the time of his elevation to the cardinalate, that had not yet counted him among its members (Gilbert 2009, p. 181).

The Pope listened to MacKenzie “attentively, took notes, committed himself to nothing, but said he would look into the matter” (Fogarty 1992, p. 571). Within days, Bea had already been charged by the Pope with clarifying the affair, and invited the two exegetes to set down their own version of events in writing, since they had never had the chance to defend themselves against a measure the Holy Office had communicated only orally, without ever specifying either its reasons or the particular theses held against them (Gilbert 2009, p. 182). The Biblicum’s archives preserve only Lyonnet’s reply of 17 March, but it is telling that, only nine days later, Lohfink was thanking the Cardinal for the “joyful news that Father Zerwick’s rehabilitation seems to be on the way”.24 On 25 May, indeed, a letter from the Holy Office to Janssens confirmed that the Congregation had, on the 13th of that month, lifted the teaching ban on the two professors; by September, “sine clamore aut gloriatione,” both had already resumed their courses.25

For a long time, the authorship of, and reasons for, the suspension order against the two Jesuits remained a mystery. A letter in the Bea archive, addressed to Janssens on 5 June 1964, sheds light on the matter and reveals what the Cardinal had discovered in the course of his own investigation:

Parente informed me that the measure at that time did not come from the Holy Office, but from the Secretary of State, the late Cardinal Tardini. This would explain why the Holy Office did not want to deal with the matter. This news should not be known either by the two Fathers concerned or by others; but it may be useful for Your Paternity to know how things went.26

“The thing didn’t come from us,” Bea was told by the Holy Office consultor Pietro Parente; and Bea’s secretary, Stjepan Schmidt, later had this confirmed by a “high prelate” working “in a high office of the Secretariat of State”, who confessed: “Yes, I remember that at that time we had to collect incriminating texts from the two professors.”27 This confirms the suspicion that the attack on the Biblicum had been orchestrated by Tardini in order to strike at Bea himself: on that occasion, Ottaviani’s Holy Office would thus merely have carried out, without discussing it, the decision of another Vatican authority.

4. Conclusions

Some conclusions can be drawn from this reconstruction. First, far from being a mere dispute between Roman academies, the question of the historicity of the Gospels was one of the longest-lasting expressions of the opposition between conservatism and modernity within twentieth-century Catholicism. This longer history—which runs from Bea’s earliest years at the Biblicum, through the “Fonck affair” of the 1920s and the “Cohenel affair” of the following decade, to his rectorship of the Institute (1930–1949)—has been examined in detail elsewhere (Marotta 2022). It is worth recalling here only that one of the principal achievements of Bea’s twenty years as Rector was the creation, within the Institute, of a Faculty of Oriental Studies, born of his conviction that the specialisation of historical, archaeological, and philological studies of the ancient Near East was a necessary condition for exegetical scholarship able to keep pace with international—and, in particular, Protestant—exegesis (Bea 1928). Yet this methodological openness stood in some contrast with Bea’s own scholarly output, which left no lasting legacy for later research and was marked by considerable caution (Lobignac 1934, p. 230; Gilbert 1983, pp. 373–74). By contrast, the commentaries and translations published by the Biblicum’s professors under Bea’s rectorship had a more enduring fate—a sign that, even in a difficult historical moment, the Rector did not deny his faculty the greatest possible freedom of research. The hypothesis advanced here is that Bea deliberately built an impeccable reputation as an exegete who was, if not conservative, then at least far from a “hothead,” precisely in order to protect the Institute with his own authority and to shield the rest of the teaching staff from being attacked alongside him. This hypothesis is corroborated by his correspondence of the period, in which he repeatedly expressed regret at not having, after his retirement, the time to devote himself to research and to the rewriting of his own books (Schmidt 1987, pp. 122–23; Marotta 2019, pp. 53–55).

Second, if Bea’s exegetical works—and the content of his own teaching—had long masked his commitment to defending freedom of research, the Council began to tear away this veil of dissimulation, even though the Cardinal’s most decisive actions again took place largely behind the scenes. In 1962, writing to his colleagues on the Biblical Commission to urge them forward with the Instruction, he stated:

The ‘literalist’ mentality assumes that inspiration guarantees literal, material truth down to the last detail. Otherwise, goodbye to inerrancy! Two erroneous propositions that must be revised […] Scripture is absolutely inerrant (of faith), but inerrant is what the hagiographer intended to say, not what the words materially say.28

This statement, consistent with the content of his pamphlet on the historicity of the Gospels, sits in some tension with the position Bea took at the meeting of the Doctrinal Commission of 19 October 1965—convened by the Pope on the eve of the final approval of Dei Verbum—where he pressed for personal changes to the text, including the removal of the phrase “veritas salutaris”, a formula substantially, if not literally, retained in the final text of Dei Verbum 11, which restricted biblical inerrancy to the truth that God wished to see recorded “for the sake of our salvation”, rather than truth in every historical or scientific detail (Caprile 1966, pp. 214–31; Burigana 1998, pp. 424–28). This aspect of Bea’s conciliar activity has indeed long remained obscure to historians, as it was to many of his contemporaries, who were greatly disappointed by this contradiction (Grootaers 1998). In response to this disappointment, Schmidt reports an invitation from the Pope to attend this meeting, an invitation that was “quite painful” for Bea: he indeed took care to correct press reports—including a note in La Croix, signed by Jean Daniélou, which stated that Bea had attended on behalf of the Secretariat for Christian Unity—by clarifying, and formally requesting a rectification, that he was attending only in a personal capacity, and not as President of the Secretariat, whose members were even unaware that the meeting was taking place (Schmidt 1987, p. 629). This was hardly a neutral clarification and it clearly underscores how the positions Bea took at that meeting did not coincide with those of the Secretariat (nor with those promoted by the Biblical Institute). Only the archival papers, however, can illuminate exactly which positions Bea put forward at that meeting. The “Carcer” section of the Cardinal’s private archive in Munich (see above, n. 16) contains the memoranda he submitted to the Pope and to the meeting. Pending the availability of these documents to scholars, what follows anticipates the findings of a preliminary survey, which appear fully consistent with Bea’s earlier positions: in his text to the Pope, Bea argued for the need to limit inerrancy to what the sacred author “asserts” as true, not to everything he says or writes. On this point he fought—unlike his colleagues at the Biblicum, for whom “the term ‘assert’ too narrowly restricts the text to the logical field”29—to have the verb “asserunt” retained in the text, as indeed it was. More problematic was his argument for the need to remove—as the Pope insisted, with considerable pressure—the adjective “salutaris” qualifying the truth subject to inerrancy: for Bea, “the text of the schema as it stands (retaining the adjective ‘salutarem’) would too easily provide an opening for Catholic exegetes, whenever they encountered a difficulty, to free themselves from it with a certain levity, by declaring that the point at issue did not concern ‘the salvation of mankind’. This would clearly be highly damaging”.30 On this point, the archival sources would seem to confirm the Pope’s last-minute and “rather painful” injunction for Bea to attend the meeting: the Cardinal’s diaries confirm that he met with the Pope’s theologian, Carlo Colombo, on 13 October, while already the following day he was returning to him proposed new formulations of the passages of the text of the future conciliar constitution most contested by Montini. This leaves open the hypothesis that Bea’s conduct, and in particular his position on “veritas salutaris”, was shaped by a strict obligation of obedience (Jesuits being bound to obey the Pope)—a papal request that caught up with him precisely at the delicate moment of the approval of the much-contested declaration on the Jews, Nostra aetate (voted by the assembly on 14–15 October 1965, the day after the Bea-Colombo meeting and only days before the Doctrinal Commission meeting), and of the declaration on religious freedom, Dignitatis humanae, which followed on 26–27 October (Velati 2001, pp. 223–42). With regard to the first of these texts in particular, one may ask whether Bea gave up “veritas salutaris” in exchange for seeing Nostra aetate survive—a question the archival papers cannot, at present, resolve.

Notwithstanding this episode, even in the process of drafting Dei Verbum Bea confirmed himself as one of the most decisive actors of the Second Vatican Council—one whom Congar himself later compared to Ossius at the Council of Nicaea or to Leo at Chalcedon (Segretariato per l’Unità dei Cristiani 1983, pp. 27–28) and of whom the Lutheran theologian Johann Christoph Hampe could rightly say, on the Cardinal’s death, that “without Bea, the Council would have been different, that is, worse, just as without Pope John it would never have begun” (Hampe 1971, p. 348).

Bea was well aware of the influence he exercised over the Council Fathers—an influence capable of rallying the consensus of the assembly, which often saw in him the interpreter and guardian of the Council’s original spirit and of Pope John’s legacy, all within a framework of unwavering loyalty to Pius XII, which made him an authoritative safeguard against even the most extreme traditionalist charges of innovation (Marotta 2019, pp. 485–512). Bea exercised this influence with restraint and determination, and this was perhaps one of the most effective of his contributions to the outcome of Vatican II (Segretariato per l’Unità dei Cristiani 1983, pp. 1–23). Bea seemed, indeed, an eloquent witness to how the Church could open itself to Roncalli’s “aggiornamento” (Alberigo 1993; Bredeck 2007) while remaining faithful to itself and to its own mandate—a potent symbol of the epochal transition then underway in Catholicism (Alberigo 2006).