[Review] What Happened at Vatican II?
"I believe, rather, that the true time of Vatican II has not yet come, that its authentic reception has not yet begun" - Joseph Ratzinger in The Ratzinger Report, pg. 40
I recently spent the last several weeks reading Fr. John W. O'Malley's book What Happened at Vatican II? Before that, I had read his book Vatican I: The Council and the Making of the Ultramontane Church, which I had read with great interest. It was the same for this work. Vatican II can easily be called the definitive event in the Catholic Church of the 20th century. Even though the council closed nearly sixty years again now, it looms large in the minds of many Catholics. Everyone has an opinion on it and its legacy. Even as I write this, it has just come out in the news that Archbishop Carlo Maria Viganò has been charged by the Vatican with the crime of schism, for rejecting the Second Vatican Council and for rejecting the legitimacy of Pope Francis. Even with many of the Eastern Orthodox I communicate with (being a former Eastern Orthodox catechumen myself), it can often seem like Vatican II is somewhat of a stumbling block. The commonality of such responses is, of course, the idea of a 'hermeneutic of rupture' warned about by Pope Benedict XVI. This is the commonality between the traditionalist critics of Vatican II, and the Modernists who often seem to act as if Vatican II represented a definitive break from the past, and look with disdain at what came before. Thus, the council remains perennially relevant for us today, and it is important to be educated on the topic given the diversity of the opinions and discourse going about, often with a high degree of intensity.
This post is a book review in one sense, but like with my post on O'Malley's book on Vatican I, I will also use this post for dwelling on some historical information I have discovered while reading the book, and of course some of my own personal thoughts and reflections.
One thing I have enjoyed in reading O'Malley's books on the two Vatican councils is his focus on context. As one saw in the previous review on Vatican I: The Council and the Making of the Ultramontane Church, the First Vatican Council simply must be read in the context of the French Revolution, the competition between residual Gallicanism / Conciliarism, and Church-State struggles in the 18th and 19th centuries, and the phenomenon of looking to Rome for stability amidst the upheavals rocking the local episcopates during the turmoil of the era. Just as the Lord entered into history, the Church itself is a thing of history, in a sense, and thus a phenomenon with a greater context in which it is embedded. O'Malley does the same thing here in this book.
To understand Vatican II, we must look at the history of the Church since the French Revolution, or even more so, since 1870, with the end of Vatican I and the fall of the Papal States until the time of Pius XII's death in 1958. The history of the Catholic Church was already covered by me at some length in the previous post I made on O'Malley's book on Vatican I, as I mentioned very briefly above, so anyone wanting an overview of the situation between 1789 and 1870 is encouraged to go read the previous post, as I will not rehash it here. The situation underlying Vatican II is very difficult for me to lay out in any sort of concise manner, but to break it down, it seems like O'Malley emphasized the following leitmotifs:
Modernity
The relationship between the papacy and the rest of the episcopate
Aggiornamento, Ressourcement, Development
The Liturgical Movement
Since the Industrial Revolution, the world has changed drastically, and with every decade, it seems to change more and more, whether we are talking about new ways of social organization, new forms of technology, the influence of secularism, and numerous other factors. The Church itself was massively affected by these influences as well, needless to say, and during the course of the 19th century we gradually saw the traditional alliance between the altar and the throne displaced, or at least majorly called into question. The Church increasingly could not count on governments to support the prerogatives of the Catholic Church, and even in the Papal States, the political situation increasingly deteriorated until 1870 when Rome was captured and absorbed into the new Italian state. Almost everywhere, it seemed, the Church was besieged by hostile and assertive anti-clerical regimes, one example being France, which in 1905 under the influence of the Masonic Prime Minister Émile Combes, successfully carried through the separation of Church and state, and less than a decade later similar events occurred in Portugal in 1910. Paradoxically, however, in all of these situations, the Catholic Church was remarkably vigorous and was by all accounts flourishing, with O'Malley saying that
"In almost every Catholic country vocations to the priesthood began to climb to pre-Revolutionary levels. The religious orders of men and women, which were virtually extinct by 1800, grew at an astounding rate. Missionaries from Europe arrived in Asia and Africa in unprecedented numbers and reported many conversions.
Programs of catechical instruction got under way that resulted by the mid-twentieth century in perhaps the best-catechized Catholic population in the history of the church. An almost incalculable number of popular magazines and learned journals were launched, and Catholic schools at every level of instruction sprang up wherever Catholics were present in any numbers." [1]
Likewise, as with the aftermath of the French Revolution, the authority and prestige of the papacy actually increased with the final triumph of Ultramontantism over Gallicanism at Vatican I, and with the definitions of papal infallibility. This is reflected as well in the 1917 Code of Canon Law, which in canon 222, for example, mandates that "An Ecumenical Council cannot be held that was not convoked by the Roman Pontiff", or canon 329, which says that bishops are freely appointed by the Roman Pontiff. Thus, as O'Malley says, "the code of 1917, when viewed in its full scope, marked "the culmination of the process of centralization in the life of the church"" [2].
This culmination of centralization on the person of the Roman Pontiff had been a particular acute issue since Vatican I's Pastor Aeternus. For example, after Vatican I some had thought that the age of ecumenical councils had actually come to an end, due to the definitions of primacy and infallibility defined at the council, even through the Code of Canon Law of 1917 did allow for them in canon 228 "An ecumenical council enjoys supreme power over the universal church", yet in canon 222, "There is no such thing as an Ecumenical Council unless it is convoked by the Roman Pontiff... It is the right of the Roman Pontiff to preside at the council either in his own person or through others designated by him. It is also his right to establish and designate the matters to be treated and the order to be observed, and it is his right to transfer the council, suspend it, dissolve it, and affirm its decrees" [3]. It was evidently felt by some, however, that the exact nature of the relationship between the Roman Pontiff and his brother bishops was somewhat ambiguous, whether to the bishops themselves in some cases, or even to outside observers. Otto von Bismarck, a fierce anti-Catholic, serves as one good example of this. Bismarck in 1874 published a circular letter in which he maintained that definitions of the First Vatican Council reduced the bishops into no more than mere tools (Werkzeuge) of the pope, who now had more power than any absolute monarch of the past. This was answered, however, by the German bishops in an 1875 joint statement which stressed that the pope was not akin to an earthly king, and that the decrees of the council did not lessen the authority of the bishops, and that infallibility extended only to Scripture and Tradition [4]. This was apparently endorsed by Pius IX as well, thus avoiding the situation warned of by Pope St. Gregory the Great (590-604) in his spats with the Patriarch of Constantinople over the title of 'Ecumenical Patriarch', a term which, St. Gregory argued, was not permissible, and was indeed a forerunner to the Antichrist in claiming to be, in effect, the 'universal bishop'. Regardless, however, the situation in the wake of the council left some in confusion, and thus the issue of collegiality would become a hot topic of debate at Vatican II.
O'Malley also spends some time dwelling on three important concepts / trends in the background of Vatican II:
- Aggiornamento
- Ressourcement
- Development
Much could be said about all of these, but they are best viewed as approaches to present, past and future, respectively. Aggiornamento comes from the Italian word for updating / modernizing, especially in relation to current situations and circumstances. Aggiornamento in itself is nothing new to the history of the Church, one example of this can be seen at Lateran IV in 1215:
"It should not be judged reprehensible if human decrees are sometimes changed according to changing circumstances, especially when urgent necessity or evident advantage demands it, since God himself changed in the new Testament some of the things which he had commanded in the old Testament." [5]
True as this may be, however, O'Malley points out that "no previous council had ever taken the equivalent of aggiornamento as a leitmotif, a broad principle rather than as a rare exception" [6]. This idea can be seen all throughout the documents of Vatican II. For example, in St. John XXIII's opening address to the council in 1962, Gaudet Mater Ecclesia, he says:
What is needed is that this certain and unchangeable doctrine, to which loyal submission is due, be investigated and presented in the way demanded by our times. For the deposit of faith, the truths contained in our venerable doctrine, are one thing; the fashion in which they are expressed, but with the same meaning and the same judgement, is another thing. This way of speaking will require a great deal of work and, it may be, much patience: types of presentation must be introduced which are more in accord with a teaching authority which is primarily pastoral in character" [7]
We see that the idea of aggiornamento is by itself nothing revolutionary, at least in the sense of upending the deposit of faith and corrupting it. This is not its goal or purpose. At Vatican II, aggiornamento It is often tied wit the idea of progress and development of doctrine, which, understood in its proper sense, has a long history in the Church, and can be seen in the 23rd chapter of the Commonitory of St. Vincent of Lérins:
But some one will say, perhaps, Shall there, then, be no progress in Christ's Church? Certainly; all possible progress. For what being is there, so envious of men, so full of hatred to God, who would seek to forbid it? Yet on condition that it be real progress, not alteration of the faith. For progress requires that the subject be enlarged in itself, alteration, that it be transformed into something else. The intelligence, then, the knowledge, the wisdom, as well of individuals as of all, as well of one man as of the whole Church, ought, in the course of ages and centuries, to increase and make much and vigorous progress; but yet only in its own kind; that is to say, in the same doctrine, in the same sense, and in the same meaning. [8]
In this sense, St. John XXIII is saying nothing different than St. Vincent did over a thousand years earlier, though he is focused on adaptation to the present in means of presentation.
The idea of development arguably came to influence the council fathers of Vatican II through the influence of St. John Henry Newman, whose 1846 book An Essay on the Development of Christian Doctrine famously investigated and discussed this aspect of Christian dogma. The book, though received with suspicion in Catholic circles when it was first published, was by the beginning of the council in 1962 accepted as close to the definitive book on the subject [9]. We must be careful to distinguish the development of doctrine as discussed by St. John Henry Newman and St. Vincent from the heretical ideas of the Modernists, who claimed that dogmas themselves could evolve and change in meaning from age to age, something which was condemned by St. Pius X in the Oath Against Modernism.
Finally, there is the notion of ressourcement, an idea that is really not a new one at all, either. Every period of reform in the Church was in a sense looking back at the past, skeptical of certain aspects of the present, and attempting to make changes in the present to make it better conform to aspects of the past. It uses the past as a norm for judging the present. This, in a nutshell, is ressourcement. It's little different than the initial influences of humanists such as Erasmus of Rotterdam (1466-1536) in the idea of returning to the sources - Ad fontes! Only when this impulse is run amok does it become one that is dangerous. This, essentially, is what happened in the Protestant Reformation, when the Reformers desired to strip Christianity of 'Papist' corruption, and to return to the pure Gospel, stripped of accretions and corruptions that had piled up over the centuries under the aegis of the Roman Church. Arguably, ressourcement was an influence in the debates on collegiality at Vatican II, but even more so on the changes that were made to the liturgy.
The Liturgical Movement is quite important for the background of Vatican II. We covered Prosper Guéranger (1805-1875) a little bit in the previous essay, especially for his Ultramontane connections, criticism of the liturgical norms of the French church during his day and efforts in revitalizing Gregorian chant. When Guéranger founded the Abbey of Solesmes in 1833, his idea was to provide
[A] model of Christian community united around the liturgy of the church, whose beauty would raise to God the souls of all who participated in it or witnessed it. In doing so, Guéranger made the official liturgy of the church— the Mass and the liturgical hours like Lauds and Vespers—the center of worship and moved piety away from the many other services and devotions like novenas and Stations of the Cross that had proliferated in Catholicism since the late Middle Ages [10]
This idea was not entirely new, and could be found in the writings of 18th century Catholic Enlighteners such as Ludovico Muratori (1672-1750), who also emphasized the role of lay participation in the offering of the Mass as opposed to devotions and similar things. In the following decades, more monasteries more or less modeled on Solesmes would appear throughout Europe and North America which would be important in the history of the Liturgical Movement, reviving the notion of "the monk-scholar whose life outside the hours spent celebrating the liturgy were spent on the study of texts, which made some of the monks formidable historical scholars... As the texts were studied, the patristic era began to replace the Middle Ages as the normative liturgical model" [11].
In reaction to this environment and the phenomenon of profane music being used in the liturgical celebration of the Mass, St. Pius X in 1903 would publish a document called Inter Sollicitudines which called for the use of Gregorian chant in ordinary parishes and for the congregations participation in singing it, as well as commmending sacred polyphony. More meaures would follow, such as the document Sacra Tridentina Synodus in 1905, which advocated for a more frequent reception of the Eucharist as a norm of Catholic piety. At the time of publication, most Catholics would receive the Eucharist only once, twice or a few times a year, but following the document, regular reception would rapidly increase. The goal of these documents was to increase the active participation in the Mass, and away from the more passive activities such as praying novenas, or praying the rosary during Mass.
Just recently I myself had gotten a bit of a taste of the old ways when I went to St. Joseph Oratory in Detroit. The church is run by the Institute of Christ the King Sovereign Priest, and thus celebrates the Tridentine Mass. As is typical when I go to a Latin Mass, unfortunately, at some point I got lost in following along with the missal, and in a moment of frustration, I gave up on following along, and resorted to praying the rosary while the Mass went on around me. It was not a bad experience, but merely me resorting to a pre-Vatican II tradition, in a way. It showed me the experience of the liturgy in a language I did not know, and what a blessing it is to be able to worship in the vernacular nowadays, as much as I do enjoy the Tridentine Mass from time-to-time.
Regarding vernacular missals, however, I was also surprised to learn that these themselves were a product of the Liturgical Movement in many ways. To simply quote O'Malley:
"Inspired by the Belgian example, other countries translated the Missal into the vernacular. By the early decades of the twentieth century, therefore, the movement was having an impact on ordinary Catholics, who were exhorted to "pray the Mass", that is, follow the words and actions of the ceremony and not use the time to read other prayers or simply day-dream. In 1932 Joseph F. Stedman, a priest of the diocese of Brooklyn, published My Sunday Missal, an inexpensive and easy-to-use little volume that fast became a best seller. By the 1940s it had found its way into the hands of millions of English-speaking Catholics around the world. Soon translated into all the major European languages, as well as into Chinese and Japanese, it (and the other books like it), began a momentous shift in how ordinary Catholics understood what they were doing when they "attended Mass". For many people, the next logical step after reading the prayers of the Mass was to ask why the priest was still required to read them in Latin" [12]
In November 1947, Pius XII published the document Mediator Dei, the first papal encylical devoted entirely to the liturgy. "[T]he pope in effect gave his blessing to the Liturgical Movement" [13], stressing active and individual participation, but not fully endorsing some of the changes that were being advocated for, saying:
The Church is without question a living organism, and as an organism, in respect of the sacred liturgy also, she grows, matures, develops, adapts and accommodates herself to temporal needs and circumstances, provided only that the integrity of her doctrine be safeguarded. This notwithstanding, the temerity and daring of those who introduce novel liturgical practices, or call for the revival of obsolete rites out of harmony with prevailing laws and rubrics, deserve severe reproof. It has pained Us grievously to note, Venerable Brethren, that such innovations are actually being introduced, not merely in minor details but in matters of major importance as well. We instance, in point of fact, those who make use of the vernacular in the celebration of the august eucharistic sacrifice; those who transfer certain feast-days - which have been appointed and established after mature deliberation - to other dates; those, finally, who delete from the prayerbooks approved for public use the sacred texts of the Old Testament, deeming them little suited and inopportune for modern times. [14]
I think this part of the document is interesting because it shows that in fact, just as if with the abuses in sacred music in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, that the Mass before Vatican II itself was being abused as well in certain circles. There is an unfortunately a myth that everything was just perfectly fine before Sacrosanctum Concilium and the liturgical reforms of St. Paul VI. For more evidence of this, everyone should go check out this view from the Conventual Sisters of St Dominic in response to the documentary 'Mass of the Ages', as it addresses this topic a bit:
Having covered all of these issues about modernity, collegiality, aggiornamento, ressourcement, Development and the Liturgical Movement long enough, readers will have a good idea of what influences existed on the immediate background of the Second Vatican Council. Now we can turn to the council itself. The council was the biggest ecumenical council in the history of the Church. There were 2,850 invitations sent out to persons with a right to participate fully, 85 cardinals, 8 patriarchs, 533 archbishops, 2,131 bishops, 26 abbots, 68 superior-generals of religious orders of men. All but a few hundred impeded by ill-health or their governments refusal to let them attend showed up. Generally, there were some 2,400 fathers participating at any given time [15]. Attendees hailed from some 116 different countries. To get a size of the council, it is best to compare it with previous councils. There were some 750 bishops at Vatican I, while the Council of Trent opened up with only 29 bishops (!), and later sessions of the council barely had more than 200 voting members. The Council of Nicaea, by contrast, is traditionally said to have had some 318 bishops in attendance.
As O'Malley covered all of this, I was honestly quite impressed with the sheer scale and logistics involved in the convocation and day-to-day running of this massive multi-year event. Not only this, but this council, more than any other in the history of the Catholic Church, was truly global. Sure, it is true that some areas were less represented proportionally than others, but in terms of sheer numbers and geographical breadth, no other council in history has even come close to this. I dwell on this for a very important reason, and it has to do with the authority of Vatican II. If Vatican II was truly an 'robber council' of some kind, it is truly unbelievable to me that the Catholic Church would be the true Church founded by Jesus Christ, as it is impossible for me to believe that the entire global Catholic episcopate gathered around the Roman Pontiff could go completely into error. One might as well become Eastern Orthodox as this point, truly. The Holy Spirit could not let an ecumenical council of this scale be in manifest error. One must make a distinction here, however. It is obviously clear from writing this, that I support the teaching of the Catholic Church that has come out of Vatican II, but I consider it undoubtable that there is indeed a false spirit of Vatican II which has put the Church in a state of crisis since the 1960s. Part of the reason for this has to do with the cultural changes sweeping the West in the 60s, interpreting the council through a hermeneutic of rupture rather than continuity with the past, and of course, poor implementation of the council. Nothing I'm saying here is particularly profound or original though, needless to say, as it is little different than what is said in the Ratzinger Report. As O'Malley points out regarding implementation,
"With the new ease of communication, Vatican II's decisions could be implemented with a speed and directness no previous council could ever come close to mustering, even if it had wanted to. As it turned out, some of the decisions had an immediate impact on the life of the ordinary believer. This again, was something special to Vatican II." [16]
This ought to be kept in mind. Another thing that I appreciated that O'Malley dwelt upon was the issues of the authority of the documents and the style that the documents are written in. I found this to be a fairly unique and refreshing approach, especially in relation to the latter. Essentially, it is O'Malley's contention that that Vatican II essentially eschewed the language of Scholasticism, and rather opted to adopt a sort of panegyric or epideictic genre, which is a rhetorical style that has its goal as the winning of internal assent by the reader or listener, painting an idealized portrait in order to excite admiration and appropriation [17]. Overall, the documents of the council are consistently written in a pastoral style (another leitmotif of the council), it is presented in a rhetoric of invitation and dialogue, encouraging conversion and interior changes, as opposed to a more authoritarian and juridical style that is seen at previous councils. It is noteworthy in this regard that Vatican II did not lay down any anathemas as did previous councils. It is true that in a sense, a shift in style equals a shift in value system.
Regarding authority, "although these documents are often lumped together without distinction or rank, theoretically they were not equal in dignity or in the authority to be attributed to them". The highest in rank were the four "constitutions" - Sacrosanctum Concilium, Lumen Gentium, Dei Verbum, and Gaudium et Spes. Indeed, "Twenty years after the council, in 1985, the Synod of Bishops meeting in the Vatican to assess the council singled out these four as providing the orientations according to which the remaining documents were to be interpreted" [18]. After this nine "decrees" on various topics, and finally, three "declarations", among them Nostra Aetate, and Dignitatis Humanae, perhaps some of the most controversial documents of the council, albeit of the lowest authority. Despite this, however, though they differed in rank, it is clear that some documents have had far more impact and influence than others, with the declarations of Nostra Aetate and Dignitatis Humanae perhaps exerting the largest and most lasting influence despite their status. I found this whole discussion on authority and differentiation within the documents to be very important. Personally, I was not aware of it.
Large portions of O'Malley's book are concerned with the sessions, debates, interventions and drama going on behind the scenes and during the council itself. I will not dwell on them much here in my review. Not because they are not interesting in themselves, but they are less what I found to be notable from the book. Readers interested in that can go check out the book for themselves. I want to only dwell on a few things that I found interesting that O'Malley chose to devote space to occasionally. One of these has to do with St. John XXIII's opening address to the council, which we have already seen, Gaudet Mater Ecclesia. In this address, the style of the council immediately becomes clear, as when he says "at the present time, the spouse of Christ prefers to use the medicine of mercy rather than the weapons of severity", also denouncing those who
"see only ruin and calamity in the present conditions of human society. They keep repeating that our times, if compared to past centuries, have been getting worse. And they act as if they have nothing to learn from history, which is the teacher of life, and as if at the time of past Councils everything went favorably and correctly with respect to Christian doctrine, morality, and the Church's proper freedom. We believe We must quite disagree with these prophets of doom who are always forecasting disaster, as if the end of the world were at hand." [19]
I admit I must chuckle to myself a bit reading these words nearly sixty years later. In 2024, seeing the absolute wickedness and depravity and religious indifferentism and madness that now passes as 'normal' or 'politically correct', am I wrong to say that these words are, in retrospect, naive in the extreme? It is easy to pronounce judgment with the benefit of retrospect, but in many ways, it seems as if the "prophets of doom" have been more vindicated than the optimism that runs through Vatican II. We must of course, though, not abandon the world, and we must of course not pretend that the modern world has not given us good things as well as bad, but this pastoral direction may not be the direction the Church should follow forever, for the good of souls, and to adopt again a more realistic view of the situation we find ourselves in vis-à-vis the world.
Another thing I am appreciative of O'Malley covering several times was the Eastern Catholics who were at Vatican II, particularly the Melkites and Patriarch Maximos IV Saigh. The voice of Maximos throughout the proceedings of the council provided the council fathers present a good reminder that the Church is not merely Latin. To give a few examples, the Melkite bishops would insist that Latin was not the language of the universal church, but of the Western expression of the Church. Similarly, the Melkite bishops had never really lost contact as much with the collegiality of the early Church, and saw it as more consonant with the tradition than the more monarchical expression that increasingly developed in the West. Similarly, methods such as Scholasticism were never as influential among them, nor had they had to define themselves against the Reformation. Their theological tradition was solidly patristic, without a need for ressourcement [20].
Even before the council opened in 1962, Cardinal Tardini in 1959 had sent a request for items for the council’s agenda to the Melkite bishops. They responded by saying that the first concern for the Church was to work for Christian unity, particularly with the Orthodox churches. What was the major cause of disunity? They expressed it in no uncertain terms:
"The principal cause of the evil, we believe, is the tendency of most Latin theologians and canonists to concentrate all authority Christ granted to his church in the one person of the Sovereign Pontiff and to make him the source of all power and, consequently, to give practically sovereign and completely centralized power to the Roman curia, which acts in his name. In this perspective it is difficult to see in the apostolic authority of the patriarchs and bishops anything except a pure and simple delegation of the supreme authority of the pope, which he can limit and revoke at will" [21]
Surely this is all very shocking to Latin ears! I appreciated the focus given to the Eastern Catholics in O'Malley's narrative, and they are still relevant to dealing with the issue of collegiality and primacy today, especially in the light of the first millennium Church. To a large extent, however, the issues were dealt with well at Vatican II, I believe.
The final issue I want to cover is aggiornamento for the sake of the 'separated brethren'. We can see this in Sacrosanctum Concilium:
"This sacred Council has several aims in view: it desires to impart an ever increasing vigor to the Christian life of the faithful; to adapt more suitably to the needs of our own times those institutions which are subject to change; to foster whatever can promote union among all who believe in Christ; to strengthen whatever can help to call the whole of mankind into the household of the Church. The Council therefore sees particularly cogent reasons for undertaking the reform and promotion of the liturgy." [22]
My question is 'Why'? Why is it the Catholic Church that must be sensitive to the opinions of the separated brethren, i.e. those baptized who are behind the boundaries of the Catholic Church, whether schismatic, heretical, or inculpably outside by virtue of birth, etc. Must not they conform to the Catholic Church? Or is the thinking something like what we see in 1 Corinthians 8 where St. Paul says: "Therefore, if food makes my brother stumble, I will never eat meat, lest I make my brother stumble"? I truly do not know, but it was something that had come to mind in a few places in this work.
In truth, I have much more I could say, but for sake of space, I do not think I should say much more or dive super deeply into the sessions of the council itself. I did not intend to run apologetics for certain documents or to deal with particular issues that are regularly raised by people. Overall, I enjoyed O'Malley's book, particularly in dwelling on issues such as context, rhetoric, style and the diverse influences and debates that we saw at the council, particularly from the Eastern Catholic bishops. Sometimes, it is true, the book felt like a bit of a slog here and there when dwelling on the minutiae of the sessions and the debates that raged within, but overall, I found the book an easy read, at least easy enough where I could go through the 380-some pages of the book in the course of a few weeks. The Second Vatican Council will continue to cause controversy and debates in the years and decades to come, and the best way to understand the council will be to read books like this, and to read the documents for yourself. I hope that this essay / review has helped you in that regard to some respect.
Sources
[1] O’Malley, What Happened at Vatican II?, pg. 53
[2] O’Malley, What Happened at Vatican II?, pg. 65
[3] O’Malley, What Happened at Vatican II?, pg. 31
[4] O’Malley, What Happened at Vatican II?, pg. 67
[5] https://www.papalencyclicals.net/councils/ecum12-2.htm
[6] O’Malley, What Happened at Vatican II?, pg. 38
[7] https://jakomonchak.wordpress.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/10/john-xxiii-opening-speech.pdf
[8] https://www.newadvent.org/fathers/3506.htm
[9] O’Malley, What Happened at Vatican II?, pg. 39
[10] O’Malley, What Happened at Vatican II?, pg. 71-72
[11] O’Malley, What Happened at Vatican II?, pg. 72
[12] O’Malley, What Happened at Vatican II?, pg. 74
[13] O’Malley, What Happened at Vatican II?, pg. 85-86
[14] https://www.vatican.va/content/pius-xii/en/encyclicals/documents/hf_p-xii_enc_20111947_mediator-dei.html
[15] O’Malley, What Happened at Vatican II?, pg. 21
[16] O’Malley, What Happened at Vatican II?, pg. 35
[17] O’Malley, What Happened at Vatican II?, pg. 47
[18] O’Malley, What Happened at Vatican II?, pg. 2
[19] https://jakomonchak.wordpress.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/10/john-xxiii-opening-speech.pdf
[20] O’Malley, What Happened at Vatican II?, pg. 125
[21] O’Malley, What Happened at Vatican II?, pg. 126
[22] https://www.vatican.va/archive/hist_councils/ii_vatican_council/documents/vat-ii_const_19631204_sacrosanctum-concilium_en.html