The Power of the Periti

Am I attempting to exculpate the Council from all responsibility? Definitely not! What, then, went wrong? Two things, but two things that are very closely connected. Briefly, this is what happened. The documents of Vatican II were drafted not by the bishops themselves but by the experts they brought with them, the notorious periti. Peritus is a Latin term meaning "expert adviser." Many of these experts were men of advanced views, or, to put it bluntly, crypto-modernists. Since the Council, some have come out into the open and are quite clearly not Catholics; Hans Küng, Gregory Baum, and Edward Schillebeeckx provide typical examples. Bishop Lucey of Cork and Ross, Ireland, one of the Council Fathers, admitted that the experts were the people with the real power. Cardinal Heenan of England was acutely aware of this danger. He warned that phrases were being inserted into the documents capable of both an orthodox and modernist interpretation. "I fear the periti," he said. "God forbid," he added, "that they should be allowed to interpret the mind of the Council to the world." But this is precisely what happened. When the Council was over committees were set up to interpret its various documents. These committees were chosen largely from the ranks of the periti. Thus, the very men who had inserted ambiguous texts into the Council documents were given the power to interpret these key passages after the Council in precisely the manner they had intended to interpret them. All this is fully documented in my book, Pope John's Council.

I am going to cite Cardinal Heenan again. This is an important quotation, which summarizes accurately what I have been trying to put over to you. Cardinal Heenan was the Primate of the Catholic Church in England and Wales, a good scholar, and one of the most active Fathers during the Second Vatican Council. He knew what he was talking about. Here is what he had to say concerning the debate on the Liturgy Constitution:

It might be more accurate to say that the bishops were under the impression that the liturgy had been fully discussed. In retrospect it is clear that they were given the opportunity of discussing only general principles. Subsequent changes were more radical than those intended by Pope John and the bishops who passed the decree on the liturgy. His sermon at the end of the first session shows that Pope John did not suspect what was being planned by the liturgical experts.