On that windy Wednesday morning, Dec. 8, 1965, the Second Vatican Council came to an end.
In the presence of more than 2,300 Council Fathers, mostly bishops, and some 300,000 faithful gathered in St. Peter’s Square and the surrounding streets, Pope St. Paul VI presided over the solemn ceremony in which he formally declared the grand undertaking to be over and called for its decisions to be “religiously observed by all the faithful.”
The moment was a festive one for the crowds who gathered in Rome, who erupted into joyous applause at the end of the ceremony, and for the millions worldwide who followed the event via television. The day before, at the public session in which he approved the assembly’s final documents, the Pope had expressed his sincere conviction that the Council had accomplished the ambitious task his predecessor, Pope John XXIII, had entrusted to it: that of defending and presenting Christian teaching in a more effective way, keeping in mind the circumstances of the contemporary world.
The last 60 years, while they have not contradicted Paul VI’s assertion nor erased the motives for elation, have certainly made it difficult for many to feel such sentiments in relation to the last ecumenical council. Some, with compelling reasons, would call the Council a failure. Others might logically conclude that, given the immense amount of study and implementation of Vatican II that has taken place over the last six decades, the topic has exhausted its possibilities.
As someone who has extensively researched and written about the Council, allow me to respectfully disagree with such views. The subject of Vatican II is not over as a theme for reflection, neither within nor outside the Church.
In some ways, we are only starting to fully appreciate what happened during the Council and the meaning of this event for the Church’s life. One can think, for example, of the effort in recent years to emphasize “synodality,” a mode of collegiality officially described as “a further act of reception of the Council.”
The Catholic Church today shows no sign of lessening its attention to this theme. In his very first speech, Pope Leo XIV called the College of Cardinals to join him in renewing “our complete commitment to the path that the universal Church has now followed for decades in the wake of the Second Vatican Council.” In these first months of his pontificate, the Holy Father has made frequent reference to the Council documents, and his teaching has been firmly grounded in the attitudes of dialogue and concern for the world that were singularly manifested in Vatican II.
Such persevering insistence on a topic should not be surprising. The Church, a 2,000-year-old institution, is well aware that ideas can take decades and sometimes centuries to set in. The passage of time, in fact, allows for a more balanced discernment of the authentic meaning of the Council, distinguishing this sense from the various superficial or outright false notions of Vatican II that have often held sway in the media and the popular imagination.
Certainly, historical study is an essential part of such authentic reception. The tradition of Catholic biblical scholarship reminds us that a text needs to be understood within the historical context in which it was produced, without reducing it to that context. The Council documents, while a primary and authoritative reference point, are more richly understood within the perspective of the living and grace-filled experience of the Council that gave rise to them. On many occasions, the various Conciliar bodies provided explanations of the Council’s teaching, which, along with the official acts of Vatican II, are a significant aid in enriching our comprehension of the Council documents.
The most prominent figure in historical research on Vatican II is no doubt the Italian Church historian Giuseppe Alberigo (1926-2007). The work of Alberigo and the “School of Bologna” associated with him has been the object of criticism for the way the Italian scholar and his colleagues portray the Council as a break from previous Catholic teaching. Pope Benedict XVI, in a well-known 2005 address reflecting on the 40th anniversary of the Council’s end, warned against “a hermeneutic of discontinuity and rupture” that would create a “split between the pre-conciliar Church and the post-conciliar Church.” These words have been widely seen as an implicit criticism of the approach associated with the School of Bologna.
Such a rupture between the pre-conciliar and post-conciliar Church can indeed be found in Alberigo’s view of the proverbial “spirit of the Council,” which contrasted with the teaching found in the Council documents. This opposition was due, according to him, to the fact that the apparent “new sensibility” held by a majority of Council Fathers could not fully express itself within draft texts that were, at least in part, antiquated.
Such a theory is part of a vision of the Council that looks critically on some of the Church’s postconciliar teaching. Nonetheless, the critics of Alberigo’s project were not able to match the historical depth achieved by the international team of scholars brought together by the Italian scholar with the sponsorship of the Institute for Religious Sciences in Bologna. Even taking into account the critiques, the comprehensive five-volume history of the Council edited by Alberigo remains a valuable means of understanding the “Conciliar event” — to use a term particularly dear to him — in its historical context.
However, the Council — like all events connected with the life of the Church — remains a reality whose deeper workings go beyond purely historical considerations. Certainly, there was no shortage of moments in the history of Vatican II that present certain resemblances with the confrontations between “liberals” and “conservatives” that we are accustomed to in the civil sphere.
Still, the Council was much more than simply a battleground between competing interests and theological schools. The overwhelming majorities with which the 16 Council documents were approved are eloquent testimonies to this reality. The Council’s declaration on religious freedom, one of the most highly contested texts of Vatican II, was approved on the Council’s penultimate day with 2,308 in favor and 70 voting against it.
Such statistics, while just one indicator, point to something that differentiates the Church from civil institutions. The Church, whose very identity was a key subject of discussion during the Council, lives not just according to a unity formed by political struggle, compromise or even grand ideals, but rather according to a communion rooted in the spiritual dimension.
Such was the communion profoundly manifested in the historic gathering that occurred in St. Peter’s Basilica over the course of four “periods,” from October 1962 to December 1965. The Council attracted the interest not simply of Catholics around the world, but also of many Christians, Jews, followers of other religions and nonbelievers. The gathering would respond decisively to this attention by reaching out in dialogue, in an unprecedented manner, to all of these groups of persons. Never before had the Church addressed in such a direct way issues so pressing for the world as hunger, poverty, war and racism, within the spiritual framework that guides it.
The Council had and still has something important to say to us. In an age of ever-greater polarization and uncertainty about life’s fundamental questions, Vatican II continues to give us points of reference that foster fruitful cooperation among all peoples toward the common good and nurture the human desire for truth and meaning. This vital source of wisdom and spiritual truth offers a radiant light that continues to guide the steps of the Church in its pilgrim journey — and will do so ever more profoundly with the passage of time.