I was generally impressed by Oxford historian Diarmaid MacCulloch’s history of the Reformation. And I’ve read less than one-quarter of his new book, Christianity: The First Three Thousand Years — so I’m far from being able to express a judgment about all 1,161 pages of it. (There must be a lot of good material in it: Few books, after all, get enthusiastic blurbs from both Archbishop of Canterbury Rowan Williams and the beloved conservative historian Paul Johnson.) But one statement in it has shocked me. From pages 970–71: “One bishop amidst the crowds who found the whole proceedings [i.e., Vatican II] thoroughly uncongenial and dismayingly chaotic, and whose vote was consistently in the small minority against such statements as Gaudium et Spes, was a Pole who during the council’s sessions became Archbishop of Cracow, Karol Wojtyla.”
I am near-certain that this statement is literally, factually false. I’m having trouble tracking down the list of who voted for and against Gaudium et Spes, which was approved by a margin of 2,307 to 75. But here are some relevant factors making it virtually impossible that MacCulloch is correct on this.
One: Wojtyla was actually one of the authors of Gaudium et Spes. Now, it can happen in our Congress that someone will vote against a bill he has cosponsored, but this behavior is uncommon even there.
Two: In his later writings, as Pope, Wojtyla quoted from Gaudium et Spes frequently. George Weigel, in his classic biography Witness to Hope, puts it as follows: “Gaudium et Spes . . . would retain a privileged place in the thinking and affections of Karol Wojtyla for the rest of his life. He had worked very hard on the development of the text. He had defended the necessity of such an innovative document. . . . Thus it is no surprise that two of its sections are among the most quoted citations from the Second Vatican Council in his papal teaching. In Wojtyla’s interpretation of Vatican II, Gaudium et Spes 22 was the theological linchpin of the entire Council.”
Three: For years, I have been reading attacks on Wojtyla by Traditionalist Catholics, who accuse him on selling out the eternal principles of Catholic dogma in favor of the Vatican II modernist/ecumenical/Protestantizing heresies. (Here’s a typical one: “‘Pope’ Wojtyla has not wavered one iota from the blasphemous nonsense he spouted at Vatican II.”) Now: If Wojtyla had actually voted against Gaudium et Spes, wouldn’t these opponents have ferreted out the fact and used it to argue against his later, more liberal views? Yet I didn’t run across that argument, in years of reading Trad literature.
If someone out there has access to the vote tally, please let me know if I’m wrong on this.