Religion: A Cardinal Carabiniere

Alfredo Ottaviani: 1890-1979

His personal motto was Semper idem (always the same) and he lived up to it with matchless rigor. Prior to the liberalizing Second Vatican Council, Alfredo Cardinal Ottaviani was one of the most feared and powerful princes of the Roman Catholic world. His authority as a ranking doctrinal watchdog came from his influence within the Holy Office. Ottaviani was half blind but, the Vatican saying went, “sees more with one eye than most see with two.” Armed with a steely mind and consummate dedication, he became in his own word, a “carabiniere” (policeman) of orthodoxy. Even after the windows of the Vatican were finally opened to change, he never ceased to resist innovation. When he died last week of bronchial pneumonia at age 88, most of the reforms he had fought against—among them ecumenism, religious tolerance, the new Mass, the softening of censorship—were secure.

The Holy Office was charged with matters of apostasy, heresy and the regulation of doctrinal matters regarding faith and morals. It once acted as censor too. At various times Ottaviani tried to silence a Who’s Who of 20th century Catholic theologians, including Karl Rahner, Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, Yves Congar and John Courtney Murray.

His power seemed to evaporate in one humiliating and dramatic day. At Vatican II’s first session in 1962, he was orating against liturgical reform and ran well beyond the ten-minute limit on speeches.

When the presiding officer ruled him out of order, a wave of applause by the assembled fathers of the council suddenly swept the Basilica. Deeply shocked, Ottaviani boycotted the proceedings for ten days thereafter. When he returned, the fathers rejected his main doctrinal proposal at the first session.

The following year, Ottaviani’s own domain came under attack when Germany’s Josef Cardinal Frings charged that the Holy Office’s secretive methods were “an object of scandal” to the world. Pope Paul VI, just after the council closed, ordered a sweeping liberalization of the Holy Office.

The son of a poor Roman baker, Ottaviani, a brilliant canon lawyer, joined the Vatican Secretariat of State in 1928.

Seven years later, he shifted to the Holy Office, becoming its No. 2 official by 1941.

In Ottaviani’s era the Holy Office also had a voice on external matters. In 1949 he signed the decree excommunicating Catholics who joined or aided the Communists, but with very little effect. In a 1953 speech that outraged Protestants, Ottaviani declared that rulers of predominantly Catholic states had a duty to protect “the religious unity of a people who unanimously know themselves to be in secure possession of religious truth.” Vatican II rejected such thinking. Years later, he publicly denounced Pope Paul’s reformed Mass as “nearly heretical.”

In private life the Cardinal was a witty, charming and humane man. During World War II he personally sheltered a number of Jews. But he will be remembered for his official acts to ward off the influence of the modern world, which he felt threatened piety and the church, and which he described as “prey to an ardent rage for novelties.” Ottaviani once said: “There is only one principle which counts. The church as service. And to serve it means to be faithful to its laws. Like a blind man. Like the blind man I am.”