I had set aside this article for translation because it was rather long, and also because the information it contains is not subject to change any time soon. It is also rather technical about the subject of how to compile an archive, but it does shed much light on archiving problems for even such a fairly recent event as Vatican II, which took place before there were computers and even efficient copying machines... It is particularly relevant, of course, on the 50th anniversary of the opening of that historic Council... It was also disconcerting that the OR did not see it fit to inform the general reader about the names that Doria cites in the article and what they had to do with Vatican-II. I have inserted some brief biodata picked up from Wikipedia.
How much of Vatican-II
still remains to be studied!
Cataloguing still incomplete for
the Council archive ordered by Paul VI
by Piero Doria
From the 5/1/12 issue of
The writer of the article is an assistant at the Vatican Secret Archives.
On September 27, 1967, on orders of Paul VI, the Archive of the Second Vatican Council was 'born'. Mons. Giovanni Benelli*, then Deputy Secretary of State (Sostituto), communicated by letter to then Mons. Pericle Felici** that the Pope had approved the institution of "an office for the printing of the Council
Actaa, and for the scientific compilation of all materials for the Archive".
*
[Giovanni Benelli (1921-1982 was the private secretary to the future Paul VI in 1947-1050, before embarking on a distinguished career in the Vatican diplomatic service; he was named deputy Secretary of State by Paul VI in 1967, until he was named Archbishop of Florence in 1977, a position he occupied until his death.]
**
[Pericle Felici (1911-1982) headed the General Secretariat of Vatican-II; he was made a a cardinal in 1977; in 1967, he headed the team that revised the Code of Canon Law, and later became Prefect of the Apostolic Segnatura.]
Primarily, the work would involve publication of the
Acta Synodalia, which was completed only in 1999 under the special editorial supervision and competence of Mons. Vincenzo Carbone.
It was also Paul VI's intention that the new office would assume the task of gradually making the enormous mass of documentation available to scholars and researchers. Papa Montini was, in fact, aware, as he history of past Councils taught, that
it was important from the beginning to avoid theological drifting or subjective interpretations of the documents in a way that would falsify both the spirit of the Council itself, as well as to faciliate a correct reading of the Conciliar documents by promoting direct study of the papers from the Council.
In this regard, one must recall the words of John XXIII, the Pope who convoked the Council, in his allocution
Gaudet Mater Ecclesia (Mother Church rejoices) on October 11, 1962, which opened Vatican II.
Our duty is not only to protect this precious treasure - the depositum fidei (deposit of faith ) - as though were only preoccupied with the past, but to dedicate ourselves with prompt readiness and without fear to the work that our age requires... It is necessary that this sure and immutable doctrine be studied in depth and presented in a way that responds to the demands of our time.
"The deposit of faith - namely, the truths contained in our venerated doctrine - is one thing. How these truths are enunciated, while conserving their very sense and importance, is something else.
A place on via Pfeiffer was the first office for the Archive, which was classified in the Annuario Pontificio among the 'temporary institutions' of the Vatican. Its officials were Vincenzo Carbone, officer-in-charge; Mariano De Nicolò and Emilio Governatori, research assistants; Nazareno Cinti, writer-archivist; and Gianni Malpassi, writer.
In July 1975, the office transferred to the Palazzo delle Congregazioni on Piazza Pio XII (adjoining St. Peter's Square) in the rooms once occupied by the Congregation for Divine Worship, where it stayed until March 9, 2000, at that time reduced to one official, Mons. Carbone, who has now retired.
This writer (being in charge of preparing the Archive inventory) was present when Mons. Jorge Maria Mejia, Archivist-Librarian of the Holy Roman Church, and Fr. Sergio Pagano, Prefect of the Vatican Secret Archive, officially took over the Archive of the Second Vatican Council.
Transferring the documents to the Vatican Secret Archive took place in the next several days, under the supervision of the Prefect, with my participation and that of some staff members of the Vatican Secret Archive. At that time, the Council Archives had more than 2,000 unnumbered folder-envelops containing various documents.
At the end of the transference and a faithful reconstruction of the system used by the previous office, I started to study the massive amount of documentation to establish the criteria for a proper inventory and what form it should take.
It was immediately evident that it would not be possible to proceed to do this by sampling what was available, as is usual in these cases, in order to have an exact idea of all the papers found in the Archive. Although this was documentation from a relatively recent event, the complexity of its nature was also immediately obvious.
(As to the faithful reconstruction of the documents as previously 'classified' by the temporary office, I must point out that I personally undertook to numbering each folder-envelop before it was moved out.)
The complexity was also underscored by some memoranda from archivist Emilio Governatori, which is kept in the Council Archives, in which, in order to avoid "posthumous facile judgments and imputations" in the ante-preparatory and preparatory phases of Vatican-II, he had written: "For almost two years, all the documents regarding the answers of the bishops
[to questionnaires sent out to all the bishops of the world in the months preceding the opening of the Council] which constituted the primary and largest nucleus of the Archive were used in the volumes
Acta et documenta. In during this, the original documents themselves were handled since at the time there were no efficient photocopying machines. Often the order established by the researchers was disturbed several times whenever officials in charge of correcting the proofs took the necessary documents for reference without notifying the archivist".
Furthermore, "There was never a single proper responsible official for the Archive and its protocols... Many documents, among them the most important ones, were kept by the Secretary
[Does he mean the General Secretary, Mons. Pericle?] in his own Archive.
It was only in 1962, shortly before the Council opened, that the Secretary was able to review the contents of his archive, and he passed on many documents to the general archive. Many documents were never properly subjected to [classification] protocol or were classified very belatedly... So it is possible that many documents are not found in the right chronological order, as to when they were received and when they were classified".
As for the rearrangement of the Archive, after the institution of the temporary office, Emilio Governatori wrote an 'attestation of (his) service' saying: "Reassigned to the Secretariat of the Post-Conciliar Commission and the Archive of Vatican-II on via Pfeiffer, Mons. Governatori edited the systematic presentation of all the documentary material from the ante-preparatory phase and almost all of the preparatory phase itself (under the Central Commission and Preparatory Commission of Vatican II). This work, which was suspended in 1962, after the Council had started, was carried on again in November 1967, when he [Governatori] returned to via Pfeiffer, until December 1968, when he was reassigned to the Pontifical Commission for Social Communications".
These testimonials, all of which can be counter-checked, as well as other factors - such as excessive use of photocopying; the use of original texts or original copies as drafts for publication; vote tallies at the Council classified according to the subject of the vote and then filed in separate folders; cover letters with attached votes, which sometimes were not signed or not properly 'numbered' according to protocol; the lack of some registration protocols - led the prefect of the Secret Archive to decide, on the one hand, to faithfully maintain the order established by the previous office, and on the other hand, to proceed to an 'analytical inventory'. knowing full well that such an inventory would doubtless require much more time and effort, but that it would be a most useful tool for researchers. as well as allowing the Secret Archive to dispose of a complete index of the most important documentation.
At the current state of the work, 1,465 folder-envelops out of a total 2,153 have been inventoried, for a total of 7,200 pages of inventory subdivided into 18 volumes, the 18th is still being completed but already has 408 complete pages and has to do with the documentation regarding the Secretariat for Christian Unity.
The inventory may be summarized as follows: Vol. 1 - General Congregations, envelopes 1-87; Vol 2 -
Animadversiones scriptae (Observations in writing), env. 88-147; vol 3-5
Modi - env. 148-256; vol. 6-10
Segreteria Generale (General Secretariat) - env. 257-727; vol. 11-18 Commissions and Secreariats - env 728-1,465.
As for the original Vatican-II Archive - though the work carried out by Mons. Carbone and his co-workers was praiseworthy - I must say that sometimes one gets the impression no special attention was given to their office organization but that the work of publishing the volumes of the
Acta Synodalia had completely absorbed all their efforts, especially after Emilio Governatori was assigned to another position in December 1968 (he had been archivist of the General Secretariat from November 1967). Governatori went on to become archivist of the Pontifical Commission for Social Communications without having finished the task of reorganizing the Vatican Council Archive.
In other words, the reorganization was 'interrupted' because it was no longer carried on with the same 'enthusiasm' by those who succeeded him.
Only such reasons could justify such an approximative ordering of the documentation, especially those that have to do with the General Secretariat
[which 'managed' Vatican-II from its ante-preparatory and preparatory phases through its duration] For this section, in fact, the envelops were externally 'organized' in a confused way, without specific references, nor a chronological order, nor a thematic order, but most of all, without external numbering which may partly explain why they were returned to the shelves at random after they were consulted.
And, of course, all the anomalies committed can no longer be corrected, because the Council Archive had been much consulted before its transfer to the Secret Archive, and because upon their transfer, the envelops had to be numbered in order to facilitate any further consultation.
With regard to the work of the Vatican-II Commissions, insofar as their external ordering, and in some cases, even within the envelops, the papers are more carefully ordered, probably thanks to the fact that they were properly arranged before they were transferred from the individual commissions to the General Secretariat.
On the other hand, in the presentation of these considerations, it must be remembered that persons assigned to carry out the role of archivist do not always have the necessary competence and that some of them acquired this competence on the job.
In this regard, one example will suffice: the protocol for registry, whose criteria are generally well observed, at times became too 'personalized' leading to contradictory results, such as the protocol registries from the secretariat for Christian Unity.
It must also be pointed out that the few personnel of the Council Archive had to carry out truly exorbitant demands in terms of workload, often with great difficulty especially with respect to deadlines.
Another aspect that must be remarked is the dispersion of the documents, observable even during the Council, but which does not necessarily mean that documents have been misplaced. Unfortunately, especially on the part of the Commission secretaries, they would take their work home although these were official documents. In some cases, these documents have been lost, but some were fortunately recovered.
I will simply cite two cases. The first concerns the registry protocols of the theological commission and the commission for the doctrine on faith and morals. This valuable research tool has been missing.
In 2006, I pointed out this deficiency to the Prefect of the Secret Archive who wrote the undersecretary for the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith. But the CDF replied it did not have the documents. Likewise, the investigation carried out by the Jesuits at the Pontifical Gregorian University, where Fr. Sebaastian Tromp***
had resided, turned up nothing.
***
[Sebaastian Tromp, SJ (1889-1975) was a Dutch theologian who assisted Pius XII in preparing his theological encyclicals and John XXIII in preparing for Vatican II. He was secretary of the Doctrinal Commission for the Council under Cardinal Alfredo Ottaviani, then the head of the Holy Office (which was renamed to Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith after Vatican II).]
The second example, fortunately positive, had to do with the documents from the preparatory commission
De sacra liturgia
a liturgia" which, as Cardinal Felici wrote to Ferdinando Antonelli, OFM, on March 4, 1967, were with Mons. Anibale Bugnini.
[One assumes Bugnini, the bugbear of liturgy, then turned them over to the Council Archive.]
Some recent excellent publications allow me, at this point, to introduce the topic of new methods of research. One must ask, in fact, whether, in order to reconstruct the Council dynamics, the documents published in
Acta documenta and
Acta Synodalis, as important as they are, continue to be sufficient - a question which can be asked as well of some very recent publications about Vatican-II, though one of them at least has dubious scientific value. Or whether deeper study of archival documents are necessary as a book by Mauro Velati and other scholars demonstrate.
Evidently, the answer, as far as I am concerned, is the second of the statements made above.
But I also wish to point out that
the Archive of Vatican-II contains a whole series of letters and documents that have not been explored till now and which have a very great value to understand both the true spirit of the Council and the correct interpretation of the documents , exactly the way they were approved by the bishops of the world assembled in St. Peter's Basilica during four annual sessions and by Pope Paul VI.
I did not realize until after I had translated the above OR article that Sandro Magister had a commentary about it in www.chiesa
chiesa.espresso.repubblica.it/articolo/1350239?eng=y
which sounds more alarming than the way Doria describes it.
The point that a whole mass of primary documents relating to Vatican II have yet to be explored is not surprising, considering the at-best erratic efforts in the past to archive these documents properly, and that they are still being catalogued and will obviously not be available to researchers until this catalog is complete.
I also wonder why Magister does not say anything about the source material used by Dossetti, Alberigo and the so-called 'school of Bologna' in their much-cited multi-volume history of Vatican II [having been the only one available for decades!] since they obviously did not have access to the materials in the Archive.
I can well imagine Benedict XVI, upon reading this article, placing a call to Doria and his boss at the Vatican Secret Archive, to find out more about the status of the work on the Vatican II Archive - that is, if he was not already abreast of it before the article was written.
We can certainly expect a flood of articles and perhaps new information about Vatican II during this, the 50th anniversary of its opening. John XXIII announced he was calling Vatican II on January 25, 1959, and the Council itself did not begin until Oct. 11, 1962. That means that almost three years were spent preparing for it - this is what Doria refers to as the ante-preparatory and preparatory phases of the Council, when the Vatican consulted (in writing) bishops around the world on key issues and their primary interests, which helped the Roman Curia to draft proposals (called schemata) for presenting the issues to be discussed at the Council.
[Modificato da TERESA BENEDETTA 07/05/2012 17:21]