The Second Vatican Council

John XXIII was elected at seventy-six and widely expected to do very little. Within three months he announced a general council, to the surprise of his own curia, and set as its aim aggiornamento, a bringing up to date, and a pastoral rather than condemnatory tone. He died after the first session, and Paul VI carried the council through three more, with more than two thousand bishops attending and observers from Orthodox and Protestant churches present throughout.

Its sixteen documents changed a great deal. The constitution on the liturgy permitted the vernacular and called for the active participation of the whole congregation, which within a decade transformed the experience of Catholic worship everywhere. The constitution on the church described the people of God before the hierarchy and taught the collegiality of bishops. The declaration on religious liberty stated that no one may be coerced in matters of belief, reversing a long tradition of teaching that error has no rights.

The most striking single act was Nostra Aetate, which rejected the charge that the Jewish people as a whole bear guilt for the death of Christ, condemned antisemitism, and spoke with respect of what the church holds in common with Muslims, Hindus and Buddhists. For a church that had taught otherwise for centuries, this was a reversal, and its authors knew it.

Almost as soon as the council closed, the argument shifted from what it decided to how it should be read. One school reads the documents as continuous with earlier teaching, developing it without breaking it, and treats the disruption of the following decades as a misapplication carried out in the council's name. Another reads it as a genuine and intended reorientation, and holds that reading it as mere continuity empties it. The vocabulary of continuity and rupture is now standard on both sides, and the argument is conducted at the highest levels of the church.

The documents themselves allow both readings, partly by design. Many were drafted to carry both a majority wanting change and a minority wanting none, and the resulting texts often set a traditional formulation beside a new emphasis without adjudicating between them. That is how the council achieved near-unanimous votes, and it is why the votes settled less than they appeared to.

A traditionalist movement rejected several documents outright, above all on religious liberty and the liturgy, and its founder ordained bishops without papal mandate in 1988, incurring excommunications later remitted while the canonical situation remains irregular. At the other end, movements that read the council as the beginning of a process that stalled have been equally persistent. Sixty years on, no reading commands general assent, which is itself a fact about the council worth recording.