Abstract
Sixty years later, is there really anything new to say about the Second Vatican Council? Have not swimming pools of ink been spilled on reams of paper in multiple languages, dissecting the preparation, the event, the main players, the documents, and the reception? Some senior scholars certainly warned me along these lines when I was beginning work on yet another overview of the Council several years ago.
Many folks, especially disenfranchised progressive Catholics, would argue that the reform-minded within the Church and sympathetic onlookers without need to face the music: the Council failed. Perhaps the text itself was always stillborn—fatally compromised due to concessions to intransigent bishops of the Minority bloc. Regardless, Good Pope John’s dream of aggiornamento did not survive the nearly thirty-five years of John Paul II and Benedict XVI. Not even Francis, the surprising outsider, the well-meaning “pope of the poor,” could salvage the initial promise of the conciliar springtime. Perhaps counter-intuitively, Bergoglio actually seemed to talk about Vatican II less than Wojtyla or Ratzinger, who were both present and active at the Council. For Pope Francis, Vatican II was simply taken as read. As an ordained minister, he knew no Church but the post-conciliar Church.
On the other hand, some Catholic conservatives, not to mention traditionalists, would prefer we all shut up about Vatican II for different reasons. Some argue it was problematically ambiguous—maybe even intentionally so—unlike the Council of Trent (or rather a mythical version of it) which allegedly spawned no real interpretative rigmaroles. Others would point out it was “merely” a pastoral council, and one which either failed or was at least badly implemented. None could contest the claim that Vatican II “defined no [new] dogma,” or that it was merely one of twenty-one ecumenical councils recognised by the Catholic Church. Nor, however, could anyone dispute that Vatican II was, in certain ways, deeply idiosyncratic and novel, not least in its enormous attendance and the sheer volume of text it produced—as Norman Tanner pointed out, Vatican II’s word count is twice that of the first seven ecumenical councils put together.
Luckily for readers of English, strong networks of industrious Catholic scholars do not concur with these assessments and are continuing to produce scholarship on Vatican II and its enduring relevance. We consider two below. First, an enormous tome edited by the ecumenist Catherine Clifford of St Paul’s University (Ottawa) and longtime Villanova professor Massimo Faggioli, who recently took up a post in the Loyola Institute at Trinity College Dublin. Clifford and Faggioli assembled a team of over forty men and women from all over the Catholic (and non-Catholic) world to produce The Oxford Handbook of Vatican II (2023). This work belongs in rarefied company, alongside such mainstays as Alberigo’s History of Vatican II, John O’Malley’s What Happened at Vatican II, and the two great German commentaries published by Herder. The sprawling new Handbook totals 44 individually authored chapters organized in five parts, prefaced by an introduction co-written by Clifford and Faggioli.
Unlike my forays into Alberigo’s History, the Conciliar Acta, and the Herder commentaries, I read this new Oxford Handbook cover-to-cover. That is surely not the way most readers will engage with the text (much less instructors and students), but it was necessary for my preparation for this review. I found this sequential approach to be a rewarding experience, though readers probably do need background in Vatican II studies to comprehend the volume as a whole (e.g. familiarity with the documents and completion of an overview like O’Malley’s, for example). It is not possible in this short essay to mention each chapter and author, but I will attempt to give readers a sense of the significance of each section.
Part I: Context and Sources is made up of seven chapters, and includes such stalwarts as Faggioli, Norman Tanner, Peter Hünermann, and the late O’Malley (to whom the Handbook is dedicated, alongside the German priest Joachim Schmiedl, another important scholar of Vatican II who passed away recently). For those who research Vatican II, the chapters by the Italians Piero Doria (on archives) and Federico Ruozzi (on “other sources” for Vatican II: journalism, diaries, mass media) are indispensable aides. Ruozzi explores how media and advances in communication, among other things, helped to lift “the veil on a Roman minority that was ultimately surprised to see itself as such” (p. 94).
David Grumett’s exploration of ressourcement movements (chapter three) is particularly noteworthy, especially when read after the election of the first pope from the Order of St Augustine. Grumett points out that Augustine is the most-cited church father in the conciliar corpus. The Doctor of Grace is referenced 50 times, while Aquinas, somewhat surprisingly, is a distant second with only 21. Even more remarkable is the fact that Ignatius of Antioch, never cited before at an ecumenical council, comes in third with 18 citations. The “golden-tongued” John Chrysostom is fourth with 15 (see pp. 51–53). This reliance on patristic sources and a ressourcement theological method is what yielded Dei Verbum’s break with the rather wooden understandings of scripture and tradition as discrete carriers of data. Expounding upon prescient remarks by Joseph Ratzinger, a key disseminator of ressourcement theology as a Council peritus, Grumett comments that “the opposing view of Tradition as self-grounding was Gnostic, because it relied on the authority of a source that, unlike Scripture, was not publicly accessible to all” (p. 55). We see again the intimate connection between the council’s internal struggles over the theology of revelation and ecclesiology and the “external” stimulus of ecumenism, in this case ecumenical observers who wished for clearer indications that Catholicism regarded the church as under the Word of God.
Part two’s twelve chapters retread the familiar ground of the council documents, but yield fresh and rewarding insights along the way. Students of the council will recognize a number of doyens of Vatican II studies: some living (Alberto Melloni, John Baldovin SJ, Clifford, John Borelli); a number recently deceased (Gerald O’Collins SJ, Rick Gaillardetz, O’Malley, Schmiedl). Alberto Melloni (chapter nine) argues that the Message to the World (20 October 1962) was a true product of the council. This is one reason that Melloni refers to the sixteen purportedly official documents of Vatican II as “an imaginary classification” (p. 136). The Message to the World should be regarded not as a flourish but as an “expunged text,” since it was indeed voted on, and by an even more traditional method of measuring assent at an ecumenical council—standing up or remaining seated (p. 136). The Message was all the more remarkable since it was authored by Marie-Dominique Chenu and Yves Congar, two ressourcement-minded French Dominicans who had, until very recently, been “bêtes noires” of the Holy Office. In his exposition of the council’s theology of revelation, the recently deceased Australian theologian Gerald O’Collins makes a few thinly veiled defences of his old friend and fellow Jesuit Jacques Dupuis, who clashed with Ratzinger at the turn of the millennium over the letter and spirit of Vatican II and the postconciliar magisterium that received and implemented it. O’Collins’s even tone is admirable, given that he sat with Dupuis in the CDF during that investigation, a bungled affair that really did epitomise the unresolved tension between the two predominant and quasi-official hermeneutics of the council—too often unhelpfully and inaccurately called a hermeneutic of “continuity” vs. “discontinuity.”
The eight essays in part three, “Catholic Reception,” help students and scholars press beyond the binaries that occlude more than they illuminate. Gilles Routhier, French Canadian authority on the council, points out the “Cyprianic” nature of the conciliar theology of reception (in the sense of St Cyprian of Carthage’s thought). Salvador Pié-Ninot (Chapter 21: “The History of Catholic Reception”) quite rightly points out that Benedict XVI was concerned not with strict material continuity but with the question of the continuity of the Church as a whole (what Ratzinger called in his famous 2005 Address “the one subject-Church which the Lord has given to us” and “the one subject of the journeying People of God”). Pié-Ninot also observes that Pope Francis rarely quoted Vatican II and was in no hurry to offer a systematic take, though he also intriguingly offers Amoris Laetitia as evidence of an effort by Francis “to overcome a certain latent skepticism concerning Gaudium et Spes” (pp. 356–57). Nor did Francis speak in terms of two competing hermeneutics. Of course, this is not to say that Bergoglio was unconcerned with Vatican II. Quite the contrary. As I remarked earlier, Francis simply took the council as a given. I would also add that he seemed markedly uninterested in debating it. For Bergoglio, the Vatican II train had left the station. This is unlike his immediate predecessors, who not only experienced a stark before-and-after as ordained ministers, but themselves participated in the actual debates in the aula! Philippe Roy-Lysencourt, who has done the most to advance systematic academic study of Catholic traditionalism at and after Vatican II, draws upon his prolific research to sketch an overview of a phenomenon of increasingly urgent importance in the United States, France, and several other contexts. Finally, Paul Murray’s overview of the reception of Vatican II in systematic theology deserves to become a mainstay in graduate seminars and seminaries.
Part Four, “Reception by other Christians and non-Christians,” features ten essays, including a number by non-Catholics who take us on a tour of the reception of Vatican II by the Orthodox, Anglicans, Lutherans, the Reformed, Methodists, and Evangelicals. Relations with Jews, Muslims, and Asian religions round out the chapter, authored by Catholic experts on those particular dialogues. The eminent theologian of interreligious dialogue, Peter Phan, makes the important point that it was a pre-Vatican II Asian ecclesial gathering—the First Plenary Council of India in Bangalore (1950)—that emphasised it was in the world religions themselves, and not just in people, that goodness and truth outside the Church is found (pp. 603–4), an affirmation confirmed by Pius XII and later taken up in the Vatican II corpus.
The chapters by interlocutors from other Christian traditions yield some quite interesting insights. Mark D. Chapman, an authority on Anglicanism, relays the amusing story of John XXIII remarking to Bernard Pawley, the first Anglican representative in Rome, that theologians “have got us into this mess” and “practical men” like himself and Pawley needed “to deliver us from it” (p. 509). While there is no verification of this exchange apart from Pawley’s report soon after the meeting, it certainly sounds like something John XXIII (or Francis) would have said. Intriguingly, Chapman, citing the work of Paul Avis, wonders if the “lasting influence of the Gallican tradition” can explain the openness of some of the French bishops to the sui generis Anglican Church, in marked contrast to English Catholic bishops like Cardinal Godfrey of Westminster, who was far less irenic (p. 513). Evangelical scholar Tim Perry offers the surprising thesis that the thawing of antipathy towards Catholicism in the 1960s was due not to Vatican II but to the warmth of John XXIII’s personality and his obvious Christian authenticity as well as the nascent stirrings of the culture wars. Scholars of the council will also find Peter De Mey’s opening chapter on non-Catholic observers a particularly useful resource.
The Handbook is completed by a fifth and final section titled “Global Reception.” Matthew Shaddle opens with a very interesting chapter on the church and international affairs since Vatican II. Then, scholars from around the world address conciliar reception in Asia, Africa, Latin American and the Caribbean, North America, Europe, and Oceania. These are all rich and important chapters. Hopefully, they will find their way onto many university and seminary syllabi. They could also be good material for intellectually inclined parish reading groups interested in global Christianity. Nigerian Jesuit Agbonkhianmeghe Orobator’s chapter on Africa explodes misconceptions and offers a measured and highly textured story of reception. Leuven church historian Mathijs Lamberigts educates readers on the much more uneven and indeed tumultuous nature of conciliar reception in Eastern Europe, a story increasingly forgotten in the Anglophone world, with the exception of the usual evocations of Wojtyla’s Poland.
Speaking of the post-conciliar situation more generally, Lamberigts comments that the “autonomy of local bishops and episcopal collegiality were . . . rediscovered [by Vatican II] after having fallen into oblivion after Trent” (pp. 720–21). One is reminded of Francis Oakley’s account of the “politics of oblivion” waged by ultramontanists against the conciliarist tradition, a process which was only really complete well into the nineteenth century. Vatican II, even in its boldest moments, could only partially confront this legacy. It would thus be difficult to argue with Lamberigts’s contention that “the implementation of collegiality can thus be considered the Achilles’ heel of the council” (p. 722). Pope Francis’s vision of synodality—which Leo XIV seems to stand by in principle—is radical not just because it goes further than Vatican II’s letter, but also because it is in certain respects in contrast with the quite recent de facto implementation of the council by the very same authority, the papacy. As Lamberigts notes, “although the [post-conciliar] synods were intended to increase the reciprocity between centre and periphery, one gets the impression that they gradually became a means for communication from the centre to the periphery” (p. 721). How such a situation can truly be reversed is difficult to envision, but it is enheartening that consecutive popes are trying to do so.
It would be unseemly to end on this sobering ecclesiological note. The strengths of this resource are manifold, but I must limit my final comments to highlighting only two of them. First, the Handbook combines the bonafides of sustained attention to the council text and use of indispensable sources such as the Acta, Roman archives, diaries, and the writings of the Council’s major players. But it does so in constant and dynamic conversation with global receivers and interpreters of the council, including non-Catholics. This is apparent in the sources and discussions considered in the essays, and in the actual authors of many chapters themselves (as in Part IV). Second, in a way that has probably only become possible recently, the Handbook gives readers of English a singular launching point for the study of global reception in the words of representative international experts themselves (e.g. Orobator, Schickendantz, Rush, etc. in Part V).
The second, and far briefer of our two subjects, is The Legacy and Limits of Vatican II in an Age of Crisis (Liturgical Press, 2025). This volume was edited by four well-known veterans of conciliar studies: Clifford; Faggioli; Kristin M. Colberg (SJU/CSB), a member of the recent Synod on Synodality’s theological commission; and Edward P. Hahnenberg, Breen Chair at John Carroll University in Ohio. The volume, a digestible length of seventeen chapters, is well suited to a Theology or Catholic Studies graduate seminar. It features a diverse team of men and women, from some established scholars of Vatican II to emerging academics.
The five chapters forming part one address “Hermeneutics of the Council in an Age of Crisis.” The crisis envisioned is ecclesial, global, and in some cases national. Clifford opens with an interim report on the Synod of Synodality—by definition dated, but an interesting snapshot from a seasoned scholar with an insider view during an exciting moment in church history. Martin Madar’s reflections on the “Spirit of Vatican II” today opens with a discussion of “the pontificate of John Paul II (1978–2013) and its effort to counteract the centrifugal forces unleashed by the council” (p. 21). This amusing typo is followed by the quite correct observation that at “by the end of Pope Benedict XVI’s pontificate [2013], the ‘spirit of Vatican II’ was deemed a persona non grata” (p. 21). To what extent the “spirit of Vatican II” is a useful category (Madar argues it is) and its connection to the Synod on Synodality (a strong one) are the objects of the essay. Madar is right to suggest that a “neglect” of the study of “the event character of the council” in seminaries is a reason for “the tumultuous reception of the council at present” (p. 34). This is especially the case, I would add, in the United States. Daniel A. Rober acquaints readers with a topic most would prefer to ignore, but which is done so at our peril, and that is the revival of Catholic “integralism,” and a consequent undercutting or outright rejection of one of the most important achievements of the Council, the declaration on Religious Liberty Dignitatis Humanae. Würzburg theologian Florian Klug offers readers a glimpse of his fascinating study of the Abel motif throughout church history [cf. his book Beyond the Visible Church (Liturgical Press, 2024)], in order to comment on contemporary questions of ecclesiology without falling “prey to the unsound temptation of simplistic answers (p. 71).” William G. Kuncken rounds out a stimulating first section by pointing to a sobering “limit” of Vatican II—the council’s wide-ranging concern for global human solidarity did not extend to the planet as such (plants, animals, the environment).
I have one minor quibble. Klug opens his chapter by noting that Vatican II “in contrast to all previous councils . . . was not prompted by a specific threat of heresy” (p. 53). This claim has been repeated so many times it may be unassailable now in Catholic consciousness, but I do not believe that the historical record has actually established this. The claim is certainly true of the earlier (Nicea, Chalcedon, etc.) and later (e.g. Trent) councils that are well known and often studied. But were each of the ten ecumenical councils between Lateran I (1123) and Lateran V (1512–1517) “prompted by a specific threat of heresy”? Heresy was certainly an important and recurring topic, but the prime agenda item, if not the proximate cause, was often something else: calling crusades, the reform of the clergy, healing schisms, or dealing with the mess of rogue antipopes and domineering emperors. This is perhaps an idiosyncratic quibble, but I hope this common claim is retired. There is enough about Vatican II that was unique and unprecedented.
Part Two “Contemporary Crises and the Limits of Vatican II” is the bulk of the book: three chapters covering sexual abuse, two on sexism, and five on race and colonialism. These first two subsections would each form an excellent basis for seminar discussion. Agnès Desmazières tackles the awful irony that Vatican II—the “pastoral” council par excellence— was silent on sex abuse. Josephine Laffan offers a nuanced and empathetic, but no less devastating, evaluation of episcopal responses to abuse in Australia, while Bernard G. Prusak considers the abuse crisis as a case of “institutional vice”—an important heuristic that could help frame academic and ecclesial discussion. Mary Kate Holman, an emerging scholar in ecclesiology, considers the stories of three noteworthy women at the council to outline a “feminist ecclesiology of Vatican II.” Theresa Gardner traces this inquiry further into the synodal process and the North American reception of Vatican II regarding women.
The next subsection offers a good answer to our initial question: is there really anything new to say about Vatican II? Five authors, grouped under the heading “Racism and Colonialism,” offer an excellent corpus of fresh and relevant essays. Jaisy Joseph argues that Catholic antiracism is a necessary expression of Vatican II’s renewed soteriology. She opens with a disturbing and highly educative portrait of Portuguese slave trading, then moves into a discussion of the “blood-purity logics” undergirding the racist system of colonialism with which the Catholic Church was so strongly intertwined. Tuan Hoang, Evgeniia Muzychenko, and William I. Orbih provide fascinating portraits of conciliar reception in South Vietnam, postcolonial India, and Africa. Muzychenko’s exploration of “Brahminization” in India raises questions about vernacularisation, liturgical reform, and popular devotions that break from European and North Atlantic expectations, expanding and challenging commonplace views of church reform. Matteo Caponi rounds out part two with “Becoming Antiracist: Post-Vatican II Catholicism and the ‘Sin of Racism,’” one of the most simulating essays I have read in recent years. Caponi narrates what was in fact a profound development in Catholic thought on racism in a span of only a few decades: from the “legitimacy” of a “sound” and “moderate racism” that was “compatible with natural law” (pp. 256–57) to the postconciliar commitments to “interracialism,” civil rights, and ultimately antiracism. Caponi puts forward a striking claim: “ultimately, the ecumenical moment invented a tradition, that of Catholic antiracism, which did not exist before, strictly speaking” (p. 266).
The volume concludes with a brief part three on “Ecclesial Responses,” with essays from the co-editor Hahnenberg on lay agency, and Timothy Hanchin on higher education. Hahnenberg makes the sweeping claim that unlike all previous councils (!), reform at Vatican II was not about tightening discipline but loosening it (p. 282). Sweeping claims deserve suspicion, but he may well be right, and I was stunned that nobody had put this basic observation in this concise, specific way (though O’Malley, as Hahnenberg cites, spoke about more general cultural shifts signalled by the council’s “epideictic” language). Hahnenberg also points out quite presciently that “no one can escape the burden of individual choice” in our contemporary world, not even traditionalists. Citing Peter Berger: “For them tradition is not simply given, they have chosen it” (p. 286). Sometimes, I would add, this choice occurs primarily online, leaving the new acolyte stunned when he (usually he) encounters the tedium of real-life ecclesial community, fraught with compromise and routine, rather than the “based” product he was sold on social media. Hanchin’s essay combines some evocative theological content, well-known to students of theology (Balthasar on Holy Saturday) with a timely and stimulating discussion of the “culture of contempt” afflicting our civic and ecclesial spaces. This essay could serve as an excellent discussion piece for a priests’ retreat or a staff retreat of educators.