Second Vatican Council

Two currents in earlier twentieth-century Catholic thought fed directly into the council's work. The first was a renewal of biblical scholarship. Pope Pius XII's 1943 encyclical Divino afflante Spiritu had encouraged Catholic exegetes to use the original Hebrew and Greek texts of scripture and the methods of modern critical scholarship, rather than working exclusively from the Latin Vulgate, and gave ecclesiastical sanction to a generation of biblical scholarship that would inform the council's later teaching on revelation in Dei verbum.^[5]

The second was a theological movement, associated above all with French and Belgian Dominicans and Jesuits, that called for a return to the Bible, the early Church Fathers, and the liturgical sources of the tradition rather than the manual-based scholasticism that dominated seminary teaching. Historians commonly call this movement ressourcement; its leading figures included Henri de Lubac, Yves Congar, Jean Daniélou, Marie-Dominique Chenu, and Hans Urs von Balthasar.^[6] This movement provoked real institutional conflict. Pius XII's 1950 encyclical Humani generis criticised theological tendencies the pope considered dangerous, without naming individual authors, and in its aftermath several of these theologians were removed from teaching posts or barred from publishing.^[7][8] This was strinkingly reversed by John XXIII as he appointed both de Lubac and Congar as council experts, and other theologians who had been under a cloud in the 1950s, they became architects of the documents on revelation, the Church, and ecumenism.^[9]

Vatican II also inherited unfinished business from its predecessor. The First Vatican Council opened in December 1869 but was suspended in September 1870 after the Italian army captured Rome during Italian unification, before it had addressed the theology of the episcopate or the place of the laity in the Church; it had completed only its teaching on papal primacy and on the relationship of faith and reason.^[10] Bokenkotter treats the theology of collegiality and the laity as among the questions Vatican I left open for its successor to take up.^[11] Paul VI made the same connection explicit in his 1964 encyclical Ecclesiam Suam, describing Vatican II as continuing work Vatican I had been unable to finish.^{[12]: Paragraph 30}

John XXIII announced his intention to call an ecumenical council on 25 January 1959, addressing a small group of cardinals at the Basilica of Saint Paul Outside the Walls; the announcement, delivered less than three months after his election, appears to have taken even senior churchmen by surprise.^[13][8] He framed the council's purpose around three related aims: renewing the internal life of the Church, advancing the cause of Christian unity, and enabling the Church to speak more effectively to contemporary social and political problems.^[14][15]

Formal preparation took nearly three years. An antepreparatory commission, appointed in May 1959, surveyed bishops, universities, and Curial departments for topics the council might address; in June 1960 this gave way to ten preparatory commissions, most of them attached to a department of the Roman Curia and chaired by its head, which drafted the texts, or schemas, that would form the basis of debate.^[16][17] The council was formally convoked by the apostolic constitution Humanae Salutis on 25 December 1961. The draft texts that emerged from this process varied considerably in character: those produced by the liturgical commission and by the Secretariat for Promoting Christian Unity leaned toward substantial renewal, while several others largely restated existing manualist theology and drew sharp criticism once debate opened on the council floor.^[18]

John XXIII opened the council on 11 October 1962 with the address Gaudet Mater Ecclesia, delivered to an assembly beginning with a procession of some 2,400 bishops across St Peter's Square on a morning after heavy rain, watched by observers from other Christian communities and representatives of eighty-six governments.^[19][20] In the speech John XXIII distanced himself from what he called "prophets of doom" who saw only decline in the modern world, and urged the bishops to favour "the medicine of mercy" over condemnation in the documents they would produce.^[21]

The first session, running to 8 December 1962, quickly exposed the fault line that would run through the whole council; as a majority of bishops waned the preparatory schemas substantially rewritten, while a Curial minority, including Cardinal Alfredo Ottaviani of the Holy Office, preferred to keep closer to the prepared texts.^[22][23] Reform-minded bishops who took a leading role in the debates included Cardinal Augustin Bea of the Secretariat for Promoting Christian Unity, Cardinal Achille Liénart of Lille, Cardinal Josef Frings of Cologne, Cardinal Bernardus Alfrink of Utrecht, Cardinal Leo Jozef Suenens of Mechelen-Brussels, and the Melkite Greek Catholic patriarch Maximos IV Sayegh; more conservative positions were associated with Ottaviani, Cardinal Michael Browne, Cardinal Giuseppe Siri of Genoa, Cardinal Ernesto Ruffini of Palermo, and Archbishop Marcel Lefebvre.^[22] Theologians serving as periti--expert advisers to the bishops--included several figures who had faced restrictions a decade earlier, among them de Lubac and Congar, alongside Karl Rahner, the American Jesuit John Courtney Murray, Edward Schillebeeckx, and the young Joseph Ratzinger, later Pope Benedict XVI.^[9]

John XXIII died on 3 June 1963, between the first and second sessions and therefore the council was suspended in accordance with Canon Law until the next pope decided whether or not it would continue. John's successor, Paul VI, confirmed the day after his election that the council would continue, that it would be his "chief work", ^{[citation needed]} and that it would reconvene that September.^[24]

The second session (29 September – 4 December 1963) produced the council's first completed document, the Constitution on the Sacred Liturgy. The third session (14 September – 21 November 1964) approved the Constitution on the Church and the decree on ecumenism, among others, and saw the admission of the first women auditors.^[25][26] The fourth and final session (14 September – 8 December 1965) was the busiest by far, promulgating eleven of the sixteen documents, including the two most contested: the declaration on religious freedom and the pastoral constitution on the Church in the modern world. The council closed on 8 December 1965 with ceremonies in St Peter's Square.^[25]

The council's teaching is contained in sixteen documents: four constitutions, nine decrees, and three declarations.^[3] Most passed by overwhelming majorities; several of the more contested texts nonetheless drew opposition in the hundreds.

Elaborate traditional papal vestments became less common after Vatican II as simpler styles gained favour. Pictured top to bottom are Pope Paul VI, Pope John XXIII, and Pope Francis^[a]

The changes ordinary Catholics actually experienced in the pews were only loosely dictated by the council's own text. Sacrosanctum Concilium permitted, but did not require, the vernacular, and said nothing at all about the priest facing the congregation, about standing rather than kneeling to receive Communion, or about removing altar rails; each of these became widespread only through implementing decisions taken in the two years after the constitution was approved.^[50]

The vernacular spread in stages set nationally rather than by a single worldwide date. In the United States, the bishops' conference decided in April 1964 how far English would be used and had the decision confirmed by Rome that May; the vernacular took effect there on the First Sunday of Advent, 29 November 1964, a change contemporary diocesan papers such as The Criterion of Indianapolis announced on their front pages under headlines like "'New' Mass Liturgy to Begin This Sunday."^[50][51] Other countries moved on their own timetables: the Irish bishops issued a pastoral statement on the change on 8 November 1964, but the first vernacular Masses were not celebrated in Ireland until 7 March 1965.^[52] The instruction Inter Oecumenici, issued by the Sacred Congregation of Rites on 26 September 1964 to implement the constitution, was the source of several practices popularly associated with the council even though the constitution itself never mentioned them: it recommended, without making obligatory, that new altars be built free-standing so that Mass could be celebrated versus populum, facing the congregation, rather than ad orientem, the traditional orientation shared by priest and people.^[53][54] Because the instruction applied only to new or renovated altars and only recommended rather than required the change, older churches were not obliged to alter existing sanctuaries, though in practice a great many did so over the following decade.^[55]

Two further changes are often run together but had distinct histories. Standing to receive Communion, and the parallel removal of altar rails, spread in the same period as the vernacular and facing-the-people changes and, like them, rested on national and diocesan implementation rather than on any single conciliar or papal mandate.^[50] Communion in the hand followed a different and later path. The practice began spreading informally in a handful of Western European countries, the Netherlands, Belgium, France, and Germany foremost among them--in the years immediately following the council, without prior authorisation from Rome.^[56] Concerned by the trend, Paul VI in 1968 asked the world's bishops for their views and a clear majority favoured retaining the traditional practice of Communion on the tongue.^[57] The Congregation for Divine Worship's instruction Memoriale Domini, issued 29 May 1969, accordingly reaffirmed reception on the tongue as the norm for the whole Latin Church, while allowing that where the newer practice had already become established, an episcopal conference could petition Rome for permission, subject to a two-thirds vote of its own members and to safeguards spelled out in an accompanying instruction, En réponse à la demande.^[58] Such permissions, known as indults, followed quickly in the countries where the practice was already widespread--Belgium at the end of May 1969, France and Germany that June, the Netherlands and Bolivia that autumn, Canada the following year--while other episcopal conferences declined to request one, so that reception on the tongue has continued as the sole authorised practice in some parts of the Latin Church down to the present.^[59] None of this applied to the Eastern Catholic Churches, whose own eucharistic discipline was not addressed by these Latin-Church instructions.

The liturgical books themselves were revised more slowly than the earliest changes in practice might suggest. After the work of the Consilium made the Novus Ordo Missae, Paul VI promulgated the reformed Roman Missal by the apostolic constitution Missale Romanum on Holy Thursday, 3 April 1969, adding three new Eucharistic Prayers alongside the traditional Roman Canon--the first departure from a single, invariable eucharistic prayer that the Roman rite had maintained for some fifteen centuries—along with an expanded set of prefaces; the revised order of Mass took effect on the First Sunday of Advent, 30 November 1969, though the full Latin text of the new Missal itself was not published until the following year.^[60][61] A companion reform, the Ordo Lectionum Missae, replaced the single one-year cycle of Mass readings used before the council with a three-year cycle of Sunday readings and a two-year cycle for weekdays, substantially increasing the proportion of the Bible read aloud at Mass over time.^[62] The same reforms extended the occasions on which lay Catholics could receive Communion under both the consecrated bread and wine, a practice that had been reserved to the clergy in the ordinary Latin-rite Mass since the late Middle Ages, though Communion under both species at every Mass did not become general practice even afterward.^[63]

The council's effects have been grouped into three broad categories:

• Shifts in emphasis running through several documents at once
• Specific textual departures from earlier teaching
• Practical changes requiring new institutions or new habits^[38]

Among the shifts he identifies as most consequential are the description of the Church as the People of God, a renewed prominence for scripture, an acknowledgment of legitimate diversity within the Church, and a changed understanding of other Christians as standing in real, if incomplete, communion with Catholics rather than simply outside the Church altogether.^[38] Among the specific textual departures, he points to the teaching on episcopal collegiality, the statement that the Church of Christ "subsists in" the Catholic Church rather than being simply identical with it (LG 8), the recognition of a universal right to religious freedom (DH 2), the condemnation of antisemitism (NA 4), and the condemnation of weapons of mass destruction used against civilian populations (GS 80).^[38] Practical changes included vernacular worship, the wider restoration of Communion under both kinds, the revival of the permanent diaconate as an order open to married men, and the growth of national and regional episcopal conferences as a normal feature of Church governance.^[38]

In a December 2005 address to the Roman Curia, Pope Benedict XVI proposed that the council be read through what he called a "hermeneutic of reform," combining continuity with renewal, and warned against a "hermeneutic of discontinuity and rupture" that treated Vatican II as a rupture with everything that preceded it.^[64] The address has itself become a point of reference in the wider scholarly dispute over how to read the council rather than a resolution of it; A study of the interpretive debate situates Benedict's 2005 remarks as one intervention among several competing schools, organised loosely around whether the council marked continuity or rupture with prior Catholic teaching, and around whether the council is best understood through its final texts or as an open-ended historical "event" in Komonchak's sense.^[65][4]

• Consilium ad exsequendam Constitutionem de Sacra Liturgia -- the special commision who implemented Sacrosanctum Concilium into the Novus Ordo Missae
• Preconciliar rites after the Second Vatican Council
• History of the Catholic Church (1962–present)
• Hermeneutics of the Second Vatican Council