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"I'm Not Infallible,
You Know!"
Robert Blair Kaiser
Covering Vatican Hill was like covering Capitol Hill, only harder.
On Capitol Hill, they spoke English in their meetings (which were open
to the press) and they all answered phone calls from a man with Time magazine.
On Vatican Hill, they spoke Latin inside the Council, which was closed
to the press. They labeled their documents sub secreto and people
had a hard time answering their phones because the phones usually didn't
work.
I started developing a network of bishops and theologians who were pleased
to discover that Time had room almost every week to report the radical
things going on inside the Council. Pretty soon a lot of things weren't
secret any more.
Archbishop T.D. Roberts, SJ, from Bombay, came to dinner one night and
stayed two years, and he started inviting his friends over for dinner,
mainly missionary bishops from Africa and Asia and Latin America.
The sit-down dinners turned into buffet suppers for 70, courtesy of Time,
and an invitation to Sunday nights at the Kaisers' soon became the hottest
ticket in town. Some tope theologians came to those parties, to lay
plans for the coming week, and some Protestant and Jewish observers
became active reformers, too, once they were caught up in the exciting
battle to bring the Church into the real world.
What we all had in common was a love for Blessed John XXIII, who won our
hearts not by asserting his power but by making fun of it. I made
friends with two Vatican monsignors who were close to him, and one of them
told me Papa Roncalli liked to say, "I'm not infallible, you know."
The day the pope told me he wanted to see an end to the crusade against
Communism, I knew I was covering a revolution. |
