December 8, 2025, is quickly approaching, a date marking the sixtieth anniversary of the close of the Second Vatican Council in 1965. A budding teenager at the time, I paid scant attention to the event, not realizing that it would dominate most of my life. As with many theologians, I have spent most of my career studying the council, explaining its documents, and entering into the debates that the great synod ignited.
A few years ago, while researching a book on Vatican II, I came to an even deeper appreciation of its work. The theologians tasked with drafting and editing the documents were priests and bishops who were dedicated to the faith, both intellectually and spiritually. Studying their journals—I am thinking of men like Yves Congar, a conciliar expert, and Gérard Philips, draftsman of Lumen Gentium and moderator of the crucially important Theological Commission—one quickly realizes that these theologians had devoted their lives to Christ, the gospel, and the Church.
For this reason, I am bewildered when I run across articles that call the council into question, insisting it had been the work of theological revolutionaries hell-bent on remaking the Church in the image of the modern world.
Of course, there were a few who did hope that the council would be radical and subversive. If one consults the memoirs of the Swiss theologian Hans Küng—and I identify him since younger readers may not recognize the name—one sees a blistering critique of the Dogmatic Constitution on the Church and of Philips in particular, accusing him of kowtowing to the Roman Curia. In Küng’s view, the Constitution mistakenly upheld the Church’s hierarchical structure when it should have endorsed a purely egalitarian communion, a fellowship of equals that, allegedly, one finds in (selected) Pauline letters. In truth, Küng’s view had no traction either in the Theological Commission, which drafted the conciliar decrees, or in St. Peter’s Basilica, where the Catholic bishops of the world voted upon them.
How about other documents? Did they betray the Catholic tradition? Take a close look at the Decree on Ecumenism (Unitatis Redintegratio) or the Declaration on Non-Christian religions (Nostra Aetate). Is Christianity renounced? Is faith in Jesus Christ diminished? Is the Catholic Church regarded as simply one tradition among many? Not a chance that any of these questions could be answered in the affirmative.
But what did occur at Vatican II—and I think this is the authentic “spirit of the council”—is a decided turn toward analogical thinking. Rather than condemning the perceived errors of others—which had been common prior to the council—Vatican II placed an emphatic accent on the analogical similarities existing between Catholicism and other Christian churches, other religions (Judaism in particular), and the world at large.
On December 4, 1962, in the opening months of the council, Cardinal Leo Joseph Suenens delivered a speech, reviewed beforehand by John XXIII, that stressed the need for the great synod to open a dialogue with the Catholic people, with the separated brethren, and with the contemporary world. This proposal had a programmatic effect on the council’s orientation, for Vatican II would insist that other Christians, those of other religions, and human beings generally were, in different degrees, fraternally and analogically related to the Catholic Church.
And let us not forget the conciliar Sitz im Leben. The most prominent theologians and bishops at Vatican II were, with few exceptions, Europeans. They had recently seen their homelands destroyed by World War II. They recognized that, shamefully, the Holocaust had taken place in the heart of Christian Europe. And they were living in the middle of a nuclear Cold War between the United States and the U.S.S.R. Was this the time to condemn errors, adding to human disunity? Or was this a time to emphasize comity among all people? To build bridges toward others? As Suenens had said in an earlier speech, Vatican II should stress “what unites Catholics with others, not what separates them.” Analogical thinking allowed the council to emphasize the common bonds existing between Catholicism and all others.
Just two years after the council ended, Yves Congar wrote, “It could be shown . . . that St. Thomas, the Doctor communis, furnished the writers of the dogmatic texts of Vatican II with the bases and structure of their thought. We do not doubt that they themselves would make this confession.” I am convinced that, by invoking Aquinas, Congar was referring to the decided role that analogical and participatory thinking played at Vatican II. Other churches, other religions, and those merely seeking truth and justice participated, formally and substantially, in the plenitude of revealed truth subsisting in Catholicism.
Twenty years after Vatican II concluded, Congar gave a series of interviews touching on conciliar themes. He noted that the council intended to overcome certain theological “isolations”—such as the pope being isolated from other bishops and Mary being isolated from other saints. Among the council’s achievements, he claimed, was that the pope had been returned to the episcopal college—as its head, but always as a member. And Mary, rather than being treated as an isolated individual, had been restored to the mystery of Christ and the Church.
Congar could have added that the council also took pains to overcome the isolation of Catholics from other Christians, from Judaism, and from modernity itself. And it did this by accenting analogical relatedness at every possible point, but without compromising the exceptionalism of Christ and the Church.
The achievements of Vatican II are legion: on ecumenism, interreligious dialogue, religious freedom, church-state relations, Scripture and tradition, the role of the laity, and more. Sixty years after the council’s conclusion, the major documents still read clearly and coherently, addressing not only Catholics but all people with thoughtfulness and theological precision. One can look back on the event as one guided by God’s providential hand—and one that will likely bear good fruit far into the future.