Witness to Vatican II: Cardinal Leo Joseph Suenens
(Vatican Radio) Veronica Scarisbrick continues in her series focusing on some of those
to have taken part in the Second Vatican Ecumenical Council fifty years on since that
first session back on the 11th October 1962.
A Council which in terms of numbers
and representation worldwide was the largest and most ecumenical council in the history
of the church.
As Jesuit, Professor Norman Tanner writes in his Short History
of "The Councils of the Church": " The equilibrium, however, was less balanced than
the worldwide representation suggests. The principal initiative in rejecting the draft
decrees of the preparatory commmission and in composing the decrees that were eventually
approved came from a relatively small group of prelates and theologians mostly from
northwestern Europe"..
Among those we, here at Vatican Radio, interviewed
from this group was the late Belgian Cardinal Leo Joseph Suenens :