What happened at Vatican II
John W O’Malley SJ
The Belknap Press of Harvard University, 2008
What Happened at Vatican II is a gem. O’Malley – as those who are familiar with his work will attest – has a remarkable ability to harness a huge amount of data and present it simply without harming the truth. His style is elegant. He is concise, always to the point. He is able to suggest the drama of the Council without losing anything of his objectivity. This book is a real tour de force.
There are seven chapters followed by a “Chronology of Vatican II,” “Council Participants Frequently Mentioned” and an extensive source of references.
The first three chapters (126 pages) give the context. O’Malley uses his considerable expertise as a historian to set the Council against the backdrop of both the extended history of Councils and the immediate history of the “long nineteenth century.” In particular, he notes the three intellectual currents that ultimately shaped the debates, despite vigorous opposition at times: Aggiornamento, Resourcement and Development of Doctrine. Underpinning these currents and, in a very real sense, giving birth to them, was a strong and emerging sense of history. O’Malley cites Marie-Dominique Chenu OP:
Since Christianity draws its reality from history and not from some metaphysics, the theologian must have as his primary conern … to know this history and to train himself in it.
The author gives a good summary statement of what happened at Vatican II:
Development and resourcement are both about corporate memory, the memory constitutive of identity. What is true for individuals is true for a social body. What such bodies choose to remember from their past makes them what they are. The great battles in the Council were battles over the identity of the church, not over its fundamental dogmas but over other aspects of its tradition, especially its more recent tradition. The great questions were: How malleable is the tradition of the church? What are the patterns of change related to it? What are the legitimate limits of those patterns? The way to dodge such troubling questions, of course, is to deny change. An underlying assumption of those trying to deal with change at Vatican II was that appropriate change meant not losing or changing one’s identity but enhancing it or even salvaging it from ossification. Such change entailed a process of redefinition that was both continuous and discontinuous with the past. (42-43)
The last four chapters (186 pages) take us through each of the four sessions of the Council. The discussion includes the procedural matters of committee structure and rules of debate and how the Council was to handle impasses and so on. This sort of discussion may not be entrancing but it is both necessary and fruitful. This writer was surprised to realise just how ill-prepared they were for the complexities of a meeting of that scale. But the process did not break down. Nor was the whole affair simply a formal rubber stamping of all that had gone before. Far from it. The process in fact provided an effective structure for quite an amazingly rich event in the life of the Catholic Church, an event that is still being realized.
Earlier in the book there is a brief section entitled, “Genre, Form, Content, Values: ‘The Spirit of the Council.’” The author observes that
“Vatican II … largely eschewed Scholastic language. It thus moved from the dialectic of winning an argument to the dialogue of finding common ground.”
This is key to understanding the documents of the Council. Again, the author notes a
“fundamental issue in the council – how the church was to operate in the future: continue its highly centralised mode of operation, with its top-down style of management and apodictic mode of communication, or somehow attenuate them by broader consultation and sharing of responsibility.”
The discussion also gently and honestly deals with some of the more dramatic confrontations of the Council. One of these is between Cardinal Frings – whose texts were largely written by Joseph Ratzinger – and Cardinal Ottaviani in the second session (see 192-93).
I thoroughly recommend this book to anyone who wants to understand the Council and promote the work of renewal of the Catholic Church begun there.
Michael Whelan SM
