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Pacifica 26(2) 134–154 ! The Author(s) 2013 Reprints and permissions: sagepub.co.uk/journalsPermissions.nav DOI: 10.1177/1030570X13489647 paa.sagepub.com Article Vatican II and the history of Vatican II Alberto Melloni Bologna, Italy Abstract This article provides a critical account of the historical reception of Vatican II, identifying key questions that relate to the question of the history of the Council and its ongoing meaning and significance. A description of the five-volume History of Vatican II is followed by consideration of the critical responses to that work and subsequent phases of Vatican II historical scholarship. The article argues that this ongoing historical work is an essential dimension of the wider task of discerning the Council’s meaning and sig- nificance today. Keywords Giuseppe Alberigo, hermeneutics, history, reception history, Vatican II Introduction Vatican II, as with each and every church Council, has a peculiar profile. History may see different things in it. Vatican II was a surprise. One may say that it was totally unexpected. No one in the college of cardinals elected Patriarch Roncalli for this purpose. When John XXIII said to his Secretary of State that he wanted to gather a Council, Domenico Tardini did not understand that the old man was serious and he was shocked, as were many others, when six days after the Pope announced a Council he invited ‘the other churches to take part with us in this banquet of grace’. 1 Vatican II was also an achievement: it was long awaited. 2 Generations had been waiting, not for a new Council, but for a session to properly close Vatican I, which Corresponding author: Alberto Melloni, Fondazione per le scienze religiose Giovanni XXIII, via san Vitale 114, Bologna, 1-40125, Italy. Email: [email protected] 1 A. Melloni, ‘Prodromi e preparazione del discorso d’annuncio del Vaticano II (‘Questa Festiva Ricorrenza’, 25 gennaio 1959)’, Rivista di Storia e Letteratura Religiosa 28 (1992), 607–643. 2 H. J. Sieben, Katholische Konzilsidee im 19. und 20. Jahrhundert, (Paderborn: F. Scho¨ningh, 1993).

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Pacifica

26(2) 134–154

! The Author(s) 2013

Reprints and permissions:

sagepub.co.uk/journalsPermissions.nav

DOI: 10.1177/1030570X13489647

paa.sagepub.com

Article

Vatican II and the historyof Vatican II

Alberto MelloniBologna, Italy

Abstract

This article provides a critical account of the historical reception of Vatican II, identifying

key questions that relate to the question of the history of the Council and its ongoing

meaning and significance. A description of the five-volume History of Vatican II is followed

by consideration of the critical responses to that work and subsequent phases of

Vatican II historical scholarship. The article argues that this ongoing historical work is

an essential dimension of the wider task of discerning the Council’s meaning and sig-

nificance today.

Keywords

Giuseppe Alberigo, hermeneutics, history, reception history, Vatican II

Introduction

Vatican II, as with each and every church Council, has a peculiar profile. Historymay see different things in it.

Vatican II was a surprise. One may say that it was totally unexpected. No one inthe college of cardinals elected Patriarch Roncalli for this purpose. When JohnXXIII said to his Secretary of State that he wanted to gather a Council, DomenicoTardini did not understand that the old man was serious and he was shocked, aswere many others, when six days after the Pope announced a Council he invited‘the other churches to take part with us in this banquet of grace’.1

Vatican II was also an achievement: it was long awaited.2 Generations had beenwaiting, not for a new Council, but for a session to properly close Vatican I, which

Corresponding author:

Alberto Melloni, Fondazione per le scienze religiose Giovanni XXIII, via san Vitale 114, Bologna, 1-40125, Italy.

Email: [email protected]

1 A. Melloni, ‘Prodromi e preparazione del discorso d’annuncio del Vaticano II (‘Questa

Festiva Ricorrenza’, 25 gennaio 1959)’, Rivista di Storia e Letteratura Religiosa 28(1992), 607–643.

2 H. J. Sieben, Katholische Konzilsidee im 19. und 20. Jahrhundert, (Paderborn: F.

Schoningh, 1993).

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was simply interrupted in 1870.3 Others were waiting for a Council of condemna-tion, like the one envisaged by Pacelli in the early 1940s,4 a sort of ‘super-Denzinger’ that would be a summation of all the condemnations of the ‘PiusPopes’, from Pius IX to Pius XII.5 Many hoped for a Council of unity, as sketchedout in the encyclical published by Constantinople in 1921 and absorbed in the workfor the World Council of Churches or elsewhere.6

Vatican II was pastoral, where ‘pastoral’ did not mean something less thandogmatic, but a new way of understanding the truth, or even a reform of thevery idea of revelation. So this says that Vatican II was an event.7

For decades, scholars thought that to understand Vatican II, all one had to dowas to validate a corpus or to ‘print’ the documents. This refers not to the corpusprepared by the Roman Curia (69 useless documents that were cast aside withoutdiscussion, in the very first moment of the Council) but to a corpus prepared inorder to satisfy theologians and their hermeneutical efforts. From the perspectiveof the historian, however, Vatican II was an event that has to be studied not forwhat it produced, but for what it meant.

One of the most striking differences between the Council of Trent and Vatican IIis the role of the papacy.8 After Trent the Pope kept the documents on the Councilas a closely guarded secret reserved for a special commission of the Roman Curiafor its interpretation. After Vatican II, Paul VI decided to open all the archives tohistorical research. This choice, however, did not mark the first phase of the recep-tion of Vatican II. The concern of the faithful, the bishops and the theologians was

3 G. Caprile, ‘Pio XI e la ripresa del concilio Vaticano’, Civilta Cattolica 117 (1966),27–39 and ‘Pio XI, la Curia romana e il concilio’, Civilta Cattolica 120 (1969),

121–133, 563–575.4 G. Butturini, ‘Per un concilio di riforma: una proposta inedita (1939) di C.Costantini’,

Cristianesimo nella Storia 7 (1986), 87–139.

5 G. Caprile, ‘Pius XII. und das zweite Vatikanische Konzil’, in H. Schambeck (ed.), PiusXII. zum Gedachtnis (Berlin: Duncker and Humblot, 1977), 649–691. The subject is alsomentioned in the reports on the Council by Civilta Cattolica, gathered by G. Caprile in

Il Concilio Vaticano II (4 vols; Roma: 1966–68).6 For the most recent research, see A. Mainardi (ed.), Il Concilio di Mosca del 1917–1918

(Bose: Qiqajon, 2004).7 For an example of the ways in which rumours of a possible Council circulated at this

time, see the conversation between Cardinal Frings and his secretary, which took placeon the return voyage from the conclave, in J. Kard. Frings, Fur die Menschen bestellt:Erinnerungen des Alterzbischofs von Koln (Koln: J. P. Bachem, 1973), 247. For other

references see Melloni, ‘Questa festiva ricorrenza’.8 See A. Melloni, ‘Vaticano I, Vaticano II. L’edizione dei concili in eta contemporanea’,

Annali dell’Istituto storico italo-germanico in Trent /Jahrbuch des italienisch-deutschen

Instituts in Trient 29 (2003), 495–510; V. Carbone, ‘Genesi e criteri della pubblicazionedegli Atti del Concilio Vaticano II’, Lateranum, 44 (1978), 579–595, ‘L’Archivio delConcilio Vaticano II’, Archiva Ecclesiæ 34/35 (1991/92), 57–67; cf. G. Lefebvre, ‘Les

Actes du Concile du Vatican’, Revue Theologique de Louvain, 11 (1980), 186–200,325–351.

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to implement Vatican II or to hope for Vatican III. And the risk – very visiblearound the mid-1980s – was to discuss empty ideas of the Council and to strugglewith false dichotomies.9

The history of Vatican II

Since 1988, a programme to develop a history of Vatican II was implemented inBologna.10 Professor Giuseppe Alberigo and an international team started theresearch project based on the idea that the historical core of the Council was theonly object of the research. Indeed, this very core was capable of interpretingthe event in all its potential.11 Five volumes were published between 1995 andthe 2000s in Italian, and later in English, German, Spanish, Portuguese, French,Russian (and hopefully Chinese and Polish), based on thousands of archives, jour-nals, diaries, diplomatic reports, TV sources, newspapers and memoirs.12 The result

9 M. Bohnke, ‘Wider die falschen Alternativen: Zur Hermeneutik des ZweitensVatikanischen Konzils’, Catholica 65 (2011), 169–183; M. Faggioli, Vatican II. TheBattle for Meaning (New York: Paulist, 2012), 125–133. Cf. a semi-lefebvrian point

of view in B. Gherardini, Quod et tradidi vobis: La Tradizione, vita e giovinezza dellaChiesa (Frigento: Casa Mariana, 2010), and a warning against oversimiplification in E.Fouilloux, ‘Histoire et evenement: Vatican II’, Cristianesimo nella Storia 13 (1992), 515–

538, and J. Komonchak, ‘Interpreting the Council: Catholic Attitudes toward VaticanII’, in M. J. Weaver and R. Scott Appleby (eds), Being Right: Conservative Catholics inAmerica (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1995), 17–36.

10 I will refrain from constantly referring to the Storia del concilio Vaticano II (5 vols.;

Bologna: Mulino, 1995–2001), mandatory reading for an exhaustive reconstruction ofthe Council and its historiography. In this preliminary overview I will provide only themore essential or recent bibliographic references.

11 S. Schloesser, ‘Against Forgetting: Memory, History, Vatican II’, Theological Studies67 (2006), 275–319; Komonchak, ‘Interpreting the Council’.

12 A. Melloni, ‘Les journaux prives dans l’histoire de Vatican II’, in M.-D. Chenu (ed.),

Notes quotidiennes au Concile (Paris: Cerf, 1995), 7–54. The principal edition isY. Congar, Mon journal du Concile (Paris: Cerf 2002). Collections of letters writtenby Lercaro and Camara during the Council have also been published, see G. Lercaro,Lettere dal concilio 1962–1965 (Bologna: Dehoniane, 1984), and Helder Camara,

Vaticano II: Correspondencia conciliar. Circulares a famılia do Sao Joaquim, ed. LuizCarlos Marques (Recife: Editora Universitaria UFPE, 2004). Other diaries have alsobeen published, see n. 48 below. On the sources see C. Soetens, J. Fameres,

L. Hulsbosch and E. Louchez (eds), Concile Vatican II et eglise contemporaine -Archives de Louvain-la-Neuve (4 vols; Louvain-la-Neuve,: Peeters, 1989–95); A.-M.Abel and J.P. Ribaud (eds.), Documents pour une histoire du Concile Vatican II.

Inventaire du Fonds J. Le Cordier (Paris: Institut Catholique, 1993); L. Lazzaretti(ed.), La documentazione bolognese per la storia del concilio Vaticano II. Inventariodei fondi G. Lercaro e G. Dossetti (Bologna, 1995); P. Lafontaine, Inventaire des

Archives conciliaire et du Fonds Paul-Emile Leger (Montreal: Ed. des Parternaires,1995); R. Desreumaux and A.-M. Abel, Inventaires du Fonds Henri Dupon et Adrien

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of this research was closely commented upon by several journals, and it deservedmuch reflection: all this is now a corpus constantly monitored by the ‘Bollettino’published by Massimo Faggioli in Cristianesimo nella Storia.13

In what follows I describe the history of that history of Vatican II. I will try tounderstand the reactions of distress and fear caused in some specific circles by thehistory of Vatican II. Immediately after the publication of the first volume in 1995,the daily newspaper L’Osservatore Romano published two full pages dedicated tothe History of Vatican II. Longer than an encyclical, the review was signed by anex-nuncio, who was originally from Vicenza and a student of monsignor MicheleMaccarrone, lecturer in ecclesiastical history at the Lateran University. The author,Agostino Marchetto, was a name that only the most faithful readers of Apollinariscould recall. His critical review of the historical work takes the form of a warning, asort of ne audeatur or a Clint Eastwood-style ‘go ahead, make my day’ phrasing.The concern was not with the basic documentation of episodes, conflicts, decisionsand events, but for having ‘ignored’ the necessary identity between Councils andpapal teachings, and having described Vatican II as an ‘event’. This indignation,for having avoided a presumed ‘obligation’, remained almost identical in analogousreviews published by the Vatican newspaper following the issue of volumes 2, 3 and4, in which the reviewer presented a presumed ‘official’ defence of the Holy See andproposed, in essence, a type of Council ‘Docetism’.14 Similar to those doctrines thatclaimed the illusory nature of the passion of Christ, the reality of Vatican II wasreduced to an illusory appearance. According to Marchetto, the dialectics, theconflicts, the turning points had never existed, neither in the preparation (1959–62) nor afterwards. To evoke, with documentation at hand, its semblance, philo-logically narrate its pragmatics, and to underline the intention of John XXIII of aCouncil speaking without condemnation, created indignation for the polemicist:how could a history book dare say that what occurred in the Council actuallyoccurred? With what level of audacity could it claim that Vatican II should not

Grand (Paris: Institut Catholique, 2001); L. Declerck and W. Verschooten (eds),

Inventaires des papiers conciliaires de mgr Gerard Philips, secretaire ad. de laCommission docitrinale (Leuven: Peeters, 2001); F. Alvarez Alonso, ‘Claretiani alConcilio. Arcadio M. Larraona, Arturo Tabera e Anastasio Gutierrez. Inventario

dei fondi documentari sul Concilio Vaticano II’, Centro Vaticano II. Ricerche e doc-umenti 2 (2002), 85–186; Peter Pfister-Guido Treffler (ed.), Schriften des Archivs desErzbistums Munchen und Freising, Bd. 6: Erzbischofliches Archiv Munchen – JuliusKardinal Dopfner. Archivinventar der Dokumente zum Zweiten Vatikanischen Konzil

(Munchen–Freising: Schnell and Steiner, 2004).

13 M. Faggioli, ‘Concilio Vaticano II: bollettino bibliografico’, Cristianesimo nella Storia24 (2003), 335–360, on the years 2000–02; 26 (2005), 743–767, on the years 2002–05; 29

(2008), 567–610, on the years 2005–07; 31 (2010), 755–791, on the years 2007–10. Cf.the broader synthesis in M. Faggioli, Vatican II: Battle for the Meaning (Maryknoll:Orbis, 2012).

14 His reviews are gathered in A. Marchetto, Il Concilio Ecumenico Vaticano II.Contrappunto per la sua storia (Citta del Vaticano: Editrice Vaticana, 2005).

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be interpreted as a deed in which the bishops deliberated upon that which the popedesires (and vice versa), without ripples and in any case without events of anysignificance? Such insolence, from his perspective, demonstrated the low level ofquality of almost all scholars of the Council; liable to errors, prejudices, faults, forwhich the ‘school of Bologna’, i.e. Giuseppe Alberigo and his colleagues, were theorigin and the synthesis.

The attack of 1995 and its iterations retained, however, significance that wentbeyond the grotesque style and gratuitous verbal violence that were utilized. Thosewho sympathized with the historiographical operation that was underway couldnot fail to be astonished at the emergence of a polemic of such strength and per-sistence (‘not even Hitler’ deserved such a treatment, commented an importantreader of the Vatican newspaper in 2003). Those who did not appreciate such abrutal approach became immediately aware of the fact that reconstructing thehistory of the Vatican II Council was, ipso facto, a problem. What kind of historywas the history of Vatican II to be? A biography of leaders? A history of ideas? Allthese operations are needed but the history of a synodical event is more than this. Itis the understanding of its collective identity as a body.

All of this was at stake in the reception of Vatican II: the abandoning of theLefebvrian gamble that, in 1988, had deluded itself that it could recruit John PaulII in the ‘anti-Council’ faction; the revision of the Code of Canon Law thatassumed the communion ecclesiology as a standard hermeneutic criterion;15 andthe Extraordinary Synod of 1985 that resumed, through the Walter Kasper report,a (reductive) ecclesiology of the church as a universal sacrament of salvation.16 Inthe light of all the above, the bare historical work became intolerable to those whothought they mastered Vatican II. The full and integral historicization of the con-ciliar works – more than any possible systematization – supplied a key for a moresevere interpretation of the event than the commentary on the texts.17

The simple act of preparing a history of Vatican II with first-hand sources wasan attempt to mark a step from the generation of bishops of the Council to thegeneration of bishops who had been priests during it and who, in some cases,became disillusioned with hindsight. The very idea of recovering the overall doc-trinal complexity and institutional structure of the Council, based on a documen-tary foundation, instigated a reaction of unforeseable violence amongst thosein power.

15 E. Corecco, ‘Aspetti della ricezione del Vaticano II nel Codice di Diritto Canonico’, in

G. Alberigo and J.-P. Jossua (eds), Il Vaticano II e la chiesa (Brescia: Paideia, 1985),333–397; L. Orsy, Receiving the Council. Theological and Canonical Insights andDebates (Collegeville MN: Liturgical, 2009).

16 W. Kasper, Theologie und Kirche (Mainz: Matthias-Grunewald, 1987).17 O. Rush, Still Interpreting Vatican II: Some Hermeneutical Principles (New York:

Paulist, 2004); M. Bredeck, Das Zweite Vatikanum als Konzil des Aggiornamento

(Paderborn: F. Schoningh, 2007); G. Routhier and G. Jobin (eds), L’Autorite et lesAutorites. L’hermeneutique theologique de Vatican II (Paris: Cerf, 2010).

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Open questions

The volumes of the History of Vatican II were based on a series of studies of thesources, the editorial aspects of the major documents, the wider environmentalfactors and key groups. This historical work highlighted several research questionsthat were still unresolved.

The first issue pertains to Paul VI’s role. The decision of John Paul II to proceedwith the beatification of John XXIII, separately from that of Pacelli, contributed,between 1993 and 1999, to creating a dramatic disparity in documentation betweenthe two popes of Vatican II.18 Access to the Roncalli papers was always moreextensive and made available, to all parties, materials of enormous importancefor the history of the Council: texts of Papal speeches and even the personal diariesof the Pope. The situation for Paul VI was reversed. An Institute in Brescia, hadhidden the papers of the pope for years, yet, in a sign of bitter irony, had madeavailable to all the documentation on Vatican II. Submerged by a level of discre-tion without rules, the sources on and about Montini in fact remained marginalizedfrom scientific work. This exceptional situation led historians to evaluate a body ofinformation on the attitude of Paul VI derived from collaborators, correspondence,hearing notes, the articles of Don Carlo Colombo, who was his trusted theologian,as well as the correspondence with the major leaders of the Council.19 This effortyielded significant results despite the gap that separates a first-hand source fromindividual rumours.

A second issue that became fundamental in the preparation of the final volumesof the History of Vatican II related to the reception of Vatican II before its com-pletion. The approval, in 1963, of major liturgical reforms – the new Mass, the useof the vernacular, the desire for intercommunion, the desire of assemblies to be inthe limelight,20 adoption of new musical and artistic languages – contributedtowards understanding the breaking of the majority that marked the year 1965.The issue was raised, with a certain degree of historiographical success, that thecompletion of Vatican II certainly did not result in the victory of a majority over anaggrieved minority, as had occurred with Vatican I.21 The end of the Council, onthe contrary, resulted in the emergence of tensions within the majority itself: partlydisappointed by the lack of binding decisions; partly tired of that search for

18 E. Galavotti, La Causa di Canonizzazione di A. G. Roncalli (1965–2000) (Bologna:Mulino 2005).

19 F. G. Brambilla, ‘Il Card. Montini e l’inizio del Concilio Vaticano II. Una

Ricostruzione Storico-teologica. I-II’, La rivista del clero italiano 83 (2002), 504–519,600–614, and ‘Carlo Colombo e G. B. Montini alle Sorgenti del Concilio’, La ScuolaCattolica 130 (2002), 221–260.

20 J. Lamberts, ‘L’evolution de la Notion de ‘‘Participation Active’’ dans le MouvementLiturgique du XXe Siecle’, La Maison-Dieu 241 (2005), 77–120.

21 For the particular situation of the Church in Latin America, S. Scatena, In Populo

Pauperum. La Chiesa Latinoamericana dal Concilio a Medellın (1962–1968) (Bologna:Mulino, 2008).

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unanimous consent that Paul VI had required in the hope of counteracting theconservative subversion; and partly worried about an unrest in which an uncon-trollable rebellious spirit seems inherent. The capacity for mutual listening, whichwas the key to Vatican II, was broken when theologians and bishops resumedfollowing their own path. Some theologians feared the transformation of theCouncil reforms into a superficially interpreted breakdown with past. Forothers the lack of courage with respect to decisive themes (collegial institutions,reform of the curia, contraception, celibacy of the clergy, nuclear deterrence),which Paul VI deferred and which crushed him, was enough to diminish thevalue of Vatican II.22

A third issue is that during the course of Vatican II, the internal cracks andantagonisms within the Holy See became increasingly clear. They are perhaps onlyperceived in the first volumes of the History of Vatican II, or perhaps highlightedby the development of Council events, for which historical/critical narration servesas a sensor.

A fourth issue concerns the role of local churches. I totally disagree with the ideathat the role of the churches is established by the simple fact of their existence. Thepurpose of the historian is not only to document what really existed, but also togive weight and meaning, and this is vital for the reception of Vatican II as well asfor the event as such.

The attempted ‘Sarpization’ of Alberigo

The intellectual vigour of the discussion that was generated by Vatican II and by itshistoricization was consistent with the expectations of those who had worked on it.Even the polemical violence triggered by the specific ecclesiastical aspects citedabove had a target that was not related to the historical/critical work, but hadto do with the intrinsic connection between Vatican II and its history.

The aim of the type of assault mentioned above was to attempt an assimilationof Alberigo’s work with the earlier History of the Council of Trent by Brother PaoloSarpi. The work by the Venetian Servite, who was the victim of an assassinationattempt in which he recognized the stiletto of the Roman Curia (‘agnosco stylumromanæ curiæ’ was his notorious phrase), had been stored as a pro-Lutheran workthat deserved loathing as a negative example of ‘political use’ of history. AgainstSarpi – slightly after the mid-17th century (following the deaths of Terenzio Alciatiand Felice Contelori) – the Jesuit Paolo Sforza Pallavicino was called upon toreact. In a similar way, Marchetto aimed to be a modern-day Pallavicino inorder to introduce Alberigo as a new Sarpi. The ‘Sarpization’ of Alberigo and ofthe five volumes that were incorrectly identified as the ‘school of Bologna’ had only

22 J. A. Komonchak, ‘Augustine, Aquinas or the Gospel sine glossa: Divisions overGaudium et Spes’, in Austen Ivereigh (ed.), Unfinished Journey: The Church 40

Years after Vatican II. Essays for John Wilkins (New York: Continuum, 2003),102–118.

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been explicitly invoked once, on 22 June 2005, by Cardinal Camillo Ruini.23

No rational person would argue for a link between Alberigo and Sarpi, but the‘sarpization’ was not a historiographical theory and had nothing to do with thehistory of the 16th–17th or 20th centuries. The not always explicit, and perhaps noteven conscious, plan was to render the event of the Council as entirely evanescent; amachine of disciplinary standing, and a body for decree-making that was, by neces-sity, ideologically superfluous and bearer of a quantite negligeable in theologicalterms.

In this process of oblivion, the preferred line of argumentation is that of intro-ducing false dichotomies: those relative to the Council itself (dogmatic versus pas-toral Council); those relative to the container of their meanings (letter of theCouncil versus spirit of the Council); that relative to the type of sources of histor-ical work (acts vs. diaries) and trends (celebration vs. reception); and that relativeto intentions (beginning vs. the end).

A Second Quest?

The supreme and most recent dichotomy was obtained by stripping the 2005 speechby Benedict XVI, an exchange of Christmas wishes with the Holy See, of all subtle-ties of meaning. Despite the fact that the pope, when speaking of the single churchentity from an ontological perspective, had created an exchange between thedouble concept of continuity and reform with that of discontinuity and rupture,a group of uneducated individuals vulgarized the continuity/discontinuity dichot-omy in a manner that was inconceivable from a historical perspective and incom-patible with the theological point that was so specific to Ratzinger’s ecclesiologyand that underlies that statement.24

Although the polemic aimed to request an ‘authentic’ interpretation of theCouncil from the supreme authority (an action that was not even contemplatedby the popes of the 20th century) the result was not attained in a useful time period.The ecclesiastical bitterness that wanted to burden the research on the ‘Council ofhistory’, obtained an ephemeral result. In practice, the first years of the 21st centuryresulted in what could be generously defined as a type of problematic SecondQuest. The Second Quest was recognizable because it recommended an interpret-ation of the ideological polemic on the basis of that which can and cannot be said,

23 G. Ruggieri, ‘Ricezioni e Interpretazioni del Vaticano II: Le ragioni di un Dibattito’, inA. Melloni and G. Ruggieri (eds), Chi ha Paura del Vaticano II? (Roma: Carocci,2009), 17–44.

24 A. Melloni, ‘Breve Guida ai Giudizi sul Vaticano II’, in Melloni and Ruggieri, Chi haPaura?, 107–145, and J. A. Komonchak, ‘Benedict XVI and the Interpretation ofVatican II’, Cristianesimo nella Storia 28 (2007), 323–337. Cf. N. Ormerod, ‘Vatican

II: Continuity or Discontinuity? Toward an Ontology of Meaning’, Theological Studies71 (2010), 609–636.

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and of historical/critical work on the basis of sources, as two equivalent polaritiesfrom which one should dissociate with equal levels of grace.

In this ‘middle way’ are included works that are primarily secondary sources andstudies that are significantly more solid, but which end up granting the ‘occurrence’of the Council to one side and allowing the others to move the dialectics of recep-tion outside of Vatican II. The Canadian scholar Gilles Routhier was a protagonistof this idea: of a fragmented reception amongst the multiple players and playingfields, as well as amongst the multiple entities that are all legitimate targets forstudy, and cases that are obviously unique.25 The risk is of making receptions ofopposite types equivalent from a historical perspective, and of making choicesbetween them on principle, or on the basis of a ‘theory’ of what the receptionshould be, rather than on the basis of what the Council itself was.26

Moving towards a Third Quest?

The scholarly discussion of the History of Vatican II therefore created the founda-tion for what was beginning to be depicted as a Third Quest for Vatican II: ahistoricization that was capable of integrating the doctrinal shifts within historicalreconstruction, without being intimidated by the technicalities of theological lan-guage, and remaining firmly set on its objective. Its meaning, in fact, goes beyondformulas in both realms. The problem was not to label the Council as an event in anominalistic manner. This would not have required much work, nor even anyhistorical research: it would have been enough to recall Canon 218 of the Pio-Benedictine code in order to remember that, according to Catholic doctrine (andmore generally for Christian experience), the Council is the seat of full and supremepower given that, according to Christian tradition, it is the assistance of the HolySpirit in the event that supports the decisions, and not the other way around. In1909, the encyclopedia Catholicisme wrote that no new Council was necessary tothe Roman Catholic Church, after the approval of the constitutions on infallibilityand primacy of the Roman Pontiff, at Vatican I. Vatican II proved thatCatholicisme was wrong. The History of Vatican II says why.

De facto the publication of The History of Vatican II opened the way to a realchange in how the Council was interpreted and played a major role in shaping thecondition of the Church of Rome today. Strange as it may seem, there has not beena single dispute in the past 10 years that was not a consequence of Vatican II, whichshows how its potential and effectiveness have endured. The idea of Vatican II as,on the one hand, an event, and its pastoral meaning on the other, are at the core ofthe research presented here. Recent publications by John O’Malley, Christoph

25 G. Routhier (ed.), Receptions de Vatican II: Le Concile au Risque de l’Histoire et desEspaces Humains (Leuven: Peeters 2004), and G. Routhier, ‘Le Reseau Dominicain:Vecteur de la Reception de Vatican II au Canada’, Science et Esprit 63 (2011),

385–408.26 G. Routhier, Vatican II: Hermeneutique et Reception (Montreal: Fides, 2006).

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Theobald, Peter Hunermann, and Giuseppe Ruggieri have brought out differentaspects of Vatican II, and a new type of Ecumenical Council is now easier tocontemplate than it used to be. But until we have come to fully know the potentialof Vatican II, the ‘updating’ undertaken by John XXIII cannot yet be said to haveplayed itself out in the church’s present and future.

The very category of evenement has a historicity of its own. If we want to evoke itwithout running the risk of falling into the generic, we always need to specify whattakes place, where, and for whom. Seeing Vatican II as an event only has meaningfor the historian to the extent that it helps us to understand the dynamism of thereal, within the limits of the information obtainable from the sources. Precisely thisdynamism itself points those who hold that mandate to consider the church asthough it were a subject in itself; but it is not the task of this church-as-subject toreflect on its own persistence. In the case of Vatican II its task is to give substance towhat the Holy Spirit was saying to the churches between 1959 and 1965.

It is on this point that the part of the scholarly debate that came into existenceafter the publication of The History of Vatican II, and thanks to it, has taken anumber of significant steps forward, of which the evidence can be seen in newinventories (which in historiographical terms are the building blocks withoutwhich nothing can be constructed), and in new editions of the source documentsthat make known the results of new investigations into the different sectors andproblems of the assembly. In my view these publications include three particularlyimportant works.

Did the Council happen?

In the late 1980s John O’Malley, a scholar of the Council of Trent who has for along time been professor at the Weston School of Theology, had already drawnattention to the historicity of the nexus between transition and tradition at VaticanII; a topic to which he returned with even greater incisiveness after the end ofWojtyla’s pontificate.27 In 2006 he wondered whether anything actually tookplace at Vatican II.28 This was not his sarcastic way of settling a controversybetween prelates, but of asking a question that had become historically decisive,comparable to the question Hubert Jedin asked himself (warum so spat?) in relationto the delay in starting the Council of Trent. Not long afterwards, O’Malley’squestion was to become the guiding thread of a seminal book in which he discussedwhat did happen at Vatican II.29 Taking the long view, he situates Vatican II within

27 J. W. O’Malley, Tradition and Transition: Historical Perspectives on Vatican II(Wilmington, DE: Michael Glazier, 1989).

28 J. W. O’Malley, ‘Vatican II: Did Anything Happen?’, Theological Studies 67 (2006),3–33, and D. G. Schultenover (ed.), Vatican II: Did Anything Happen? (New York:Continuum, 2007).

29 J. W. O’Malley, What Happened at Vatican II? (Cambridge, MA: Harvard UniversityPress, 2008).

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the history of the Council as an instrument of church government and reform, andbrings the reader up to date on the variety of forms these Councils have taken andthe modifications that some of their traditional aspects – such as the participationof princes – underwent during the centuries of modernity. He devotes particularattention to exploring the ‘long 19th century’ of the church: the struggle of thepapacy against modernity and the ecclesiological consequences that the battle hadfor the image of the papacy, the appointment of bishops and the spiritual life. InO’Malley’s view Vatican II responded to this by renouncing definitive condemna-tions and final judgments; an approach that compelled the entire episcopate tobegin the proceedings without any defined agenda, meeting as they did in a hallwhere the shadows of Popes Pius IX and XII, of Marx and Freud, Lagrange andRosmini, De Maistre and Lamennais were lurking in the background. So theapproach of Vatican II became one of seeking and, as O’Malley rightly says, thisexplains why the majorities and minorities were unstable during the preparatory phaseand during the initial part of the Council itself. After 1962, when the first period ofVatican II was over, work began on preparing for the adoption of an epideictic formof rhetoric, which had to gain the consensus of the listener from within.

In his account of the phases of Vatican II, O’Malley suggests a periodizationthat is not the same as that given in Alberigo’s History of Vatican II. Alberigopresents the second period, which took place in the autumn of 1963, as the affirm-ation of a ‘Council that had reached maturity’; but only a year later during thetempestuous days that led to De Ecclesia it experienced a profound rift. O’Malleydiscovered that those two moments were a unique amalgam of ‘triumphs andtribulations’. Although liturgical and ecclesiological reform remained interdepend-ent, there was still a minority that was anything but placated by the approval ofSacrosanctum Concilium and the five guiding votes on ecclesiology in October 1963,which explains why, in the months that followed, taking advantage of the possi-bilities of filibustering that were allowed by the regulations, it mounted a siegeagainst Paul VI and the Council. According to O’Malley, this tactic of resistanceon the part of a small minority was a gamble based on the fact that even thoughPaul VI was in favour of several changes, it was not his intention to make structuralmodifications to the centre of government of the Church of Rome itself. Yet forboth Roncalli and Montini it was the three undisputed pillars of the Council –updating, development and ressourcement – that determined the physiognomy ofVatican II, which manifested itself in the form of a new language of humility andreciprocity in which the concrete experience of the bishops also had a place. Wellacquainted as he is with Tridentine dynamics, O’Malley thus ferrets out the com-monplaces about the Council and its aftermath that influenced the debate. Withoutbitterness he shows how the 20th-century Council can be rendered incomprehen-sible by ignorance of the 16th-century Council: for instance, the so-called prota-gonism of the theologians (who actually appear to have been much less influentialat Vatican II than they were at Trent) or the role of the minority (which farmore than at any time during the previous four centuries of Council history wascapable of mounting a challenge to some points of the ecclesiological discussion

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and, I would add, to the doctrine of the poverty of the church and the question ofpeace).

Back to the source

A year after O’Malley, Christoph Theobald, in a weighty tome, showed that theinterpretations of Vatican II had been incisively affected by the work of the his-torians. According to Theobald the great transformations brought about by theglobalization of Christianity, which Vatican II wanted to take upon itself, affectedits very understanding of revealed truth. Its effort to be seen to perform the act ofembracing tradition was determinant on how the Council was conducted and on itsafter-effects. This was the challenge it had to face.

As Theobald sees it, the question of what came after Vatican II is not a matter ofextrinsic periodization, of material geographies, or of locating what happenedbetween significant dates, one of which, 1968, hangs like a nightmare (or a com-plex) over the heads of those who are unable to say what Vatican II actually was.30

The issue should be seen as closely related to the ‘power to shape’ that marks thewhole great tradition of the Councils and the intention of John XXIII. Roncalliwas not simply a tired pope bringing to an end the long centuries of waiting forVatican II to happen. Nor was he a lucky gambler at the table of history who bysheer good luck had spotted the right moment at which to play the winning num-bers. By virtue of his role as primus he posed the questions: what was the theo-logical identity of the Council itself, and what was the meaning of its existence asan institution?

So Vatican II was not a workshop in which to manufacture an ecclesiology leftunfinished by Vatican I, but a way for the church to ‘be’ in the light of revealedtruth; a question that concerns the very nature of the Council as such and that asearly as 1961 had been at the centre of a dispute between the Swiss theologian HansKung and the Bavarian cardinal Joseph Ratzinger. Theobald recalls that in orderto determine the physiognomy of Vatican II, Kung demanded that the churchshould state what a council is, whilst Ratzinger stressed that, unlike the church-as-subject, the council is an historical instrument whose nature is intermittent. Itwas the wise Karl Rahner who cut through this knot. According to Rahner, since itseems evident from history that it is not necessary that a council take place, the veryfact that a council is convocated acquires a decisive position, facing towards thetruth. Each council has its own changing connotations precisely because it occursat this hermeneutic level: it sets itself the problem of receiving the Word andmaking it audible for its own day.31 So, for Theobald the central theological

30 C. Theobald, La Reception du Concile Vatican II, I: Acceder a la Source (Paris: Cerf,2009), 514–515, 666–667. On Revelation at Vatican II see C. Theobald, ‘Dans les traces. . .’ de la constitution ‘Dei Verbum’ du concile Vatican II: Bible, Theologie et Pratiques

de Lecture (Paris: Cerf, 2009).31 K. Rahner, ‘Zur Theologie des Konzils’, Stimmen der Zeit 169 (1962), 321–339.

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point of John XXIII’s Vatican II ‘was to bring out this radicalization of the theo-logical identity of the Council as an institution, because now that the Church hasbecome globalized and plural, the identity and truth of Revelation, and how toreceive and transmit that identity and truth, are both brought into question’.32

If this is true then the reception accorded to Vatican II is neither an issuerestricted to the post-conciliar period nor is it an experience that only beganafter Vatican II started, but a premise. Vatican II decentralized the theologicalexperience of hearing the Word of God in the liturgical assembly by implicatingand involving those who were the direct receptors of that experience, before thetextual outcomes of Vatican II were published (and whilst the Council was actuallyin session). In Theobald’s view, this is why we must ask what is the historicity thatis immanent in the body of texts, and what is its theological status. The body oftexts produced by Vatican II is in fact a corpus that is both open and closed: ‘open’because it presupposes that the churches, and Christians, do have a living future;and ‘closed’ because it marks one particular stage in the long history of Christianityand of the living faith in tradition. So the ‘hermeneutics of reform’ – a formulationthat became fashionable after 2005 – does help us to understand the meaning ofVatican II, on condition that we include in that definition a reform of the hermen-eutics of tradition.

In Theobald’s view it is not enough to talk about how Vatican II was received,as though this were a process in which its decisions were accepted and assimilated,because the ‘kerygmatic and practical’ level that this connotes does not appear inthe Montinian phase (which on the one hand sees the institutional figure ofCatholicism transformed, and on the other sees the manifestation of a reflectionof synodal life in the local branches of the church), not in the Wojtylian phase (inwhich relationships with others experience sudden drops and unexpected acceler-ations), and not in the Ratzinger phase (in which the position of the pontiff has aweight that is not at all ‘conservative’).33 It could be said – and this is the mostprovocative thesis of Theobald, at least so far as the historian is concerned – thatthe reception of Vatican II is to be understood not by tallying up a profit-and-lossaccount of its outcomes, but because from a strictly historical point of view, there-fore, the Council-in-itself does not exist; it is always situated in an unsurpassablehermeneutic circuit between the historian and the conciliar intrigue that constructsit. This strengthens the argument, several times defended by scholars, that it isimpossible to separate the identity of the Council itself from the historical processof its reception.34

32 Theobald, La Reception, 265.33 Theobald, La Reception, 512 in dialectic with with P. Hunermann, ‘Der ‘‘Text’’: Eine

Erganzung zur Hermeneutik des II. Vatikanischen Konzils’, Cristianesimo nello Storia

28 (2007), 339–358.34 Theobald, La Reception, 532.

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The Council as a ‘constitutional text’ of faith

In the case of Peter Hunermann, his position was related to the work of historiciz-ing Vatican II, at which he had been a participant. Not only that, Hunermann wasthe editor of the great Herder commentary and author of a number of importanttheological writings. For Hunermann it is precisely knowledge of the dynamics ofthe event that makes essential a ‘global’ interpretation of the corpus produced by it.Far from supposing that it possesses a homogeneity (which does not in fact exist), itis constituted as a system of relations. This question of the ‘global’ interpretationsof Vatican II had already intrigued the distinguished canonist Giuseppe Dossetti in1965.35 More than 40 years after Dossetti, Hunermann identifies only four inter-pretations. The most ideological was upheld with schismatic determination by thetraditionalists, who thought they saw a ‘modernism’ creeping into the Council’sdictums, that in their view had to be eradicated by an act of the ordinary magis-terium – whether interpretive, by replacement, or both – renouncing the statutethat Vatican II possessed and that it claimed to possess. The second ofHunermann’s four ‘global’ readings was historiographical. As in Alberigo’sHistory, it saw the Council as an event. Alongside this reading and in relation tothe fourth way, expressed by Theobald, is the reading of Vatican II as a ‘consti-tuting’ text of the faith.

As Paolo Pombeni suggested, in a 1996 essay, that there was a possible analogybetween that formulation and the relationship between constitution and ordinarylegislation,36 Hunermann insisted on it. For him, this analogy helps to understandtwo turning points: the relationship between reforming acts of the churches andtheir fundamentally important ‘chart’ on the one hand, and the way in whichVatican II is situated within the aspiration to freedom of which constitutionalismis the effect and the characteristic attribute on the other.37 This thesis ran upagainst the immediate resistance of Alberigo himself, who, having known andfought against the prospect of a Lex Ecclesiæ fundamentalis, saw in the veryassumption of this language a dangerous return to that ghost of the 1970s. Inresponse to Alberigo’s objection, Hunermann showed how it helps to understandthe dynamism of liberty that the Council aims to express in the here and now. Forhis part, Benedict XVI, in his oft-quoted 2005 Christmas discourse to the RomanCuria, also attacked Hunerman’s thesis because he saw in it the outlines of that‘historic value’ of Vatican II that, according to an old theory of his, could not beaffirmed until holy persons, exercising a ‘free and personal commitment’, hadcreated something ‘vital and new’. Hunermann responded by explaining that the

35 G. Dossetti, Il Vaticano II: Frammenti di una Riflessione (Bologna: Mulino 1996).

36 P. Pombeni, ‘La Dialettica tra Evento e Decisioni nella Ricostruzione delle GrandiAssemblee: I Parlamentari e le Assemblee Costituenti, in Maria Teresa Fattori,A. Melloni (eds.), L’Evento e le Decisioni: Studi sulle Dinamiche del Concilio

Vaticano II (Bologna: Mulino, 1997), 17–49.37 Hunermann, ‘Der Text’.

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‘constitutional’ character of the text does not limit its authority and does not negatethe previous (and even dogmatic) magisterium, but simply puts it in the correctorder in relation to those texts that propose to take on that ordering taskthemselves.38

It seems to me that in this case, too, we see how a theological reading is madepossible by the historian using the historian’s methods and tools to work on thesources, and also how theological reflection, opened up by global hypotheses ofinterpretation that are in competition with each other can suggest new and purelyhistorical directions of inquiry.

The church ‘in actu’ and the Council

In a series of interventions that were recently summarized in a book on the Councilas Pentecost, Giuseppe Ruggieri offers another perspective on Vatican II thatbuilds on the previous historical work and, in my view, opens up a new area.39

Along with Hunermann and Theobald, Ruggieri was one of those who contributedto The History of Vatican Council II. However, his book does not retrace thathistory and does not theoretically address the question of the statute – of tradition,revelation, or text – which is centrally important for both Hunermann andTheobald.

For Ruggieri there is one constituent fact about Vatican II, written into thevery fact of its convocation and present in the intention of Pope John XXIII: tohold a Council that is ‘new’ in a very specific sense. As was perfectly obvious,and as has been repeated here more than once, Vatican II had to have a physi-ognomy. Each event of the Council, as a whole and in every detail, presentsspecificities that differentiate it from the other Councils. So whatever its futuredestiny might turn out to be, Vatican II would also have to have its own char-acter. So John XXIII adopted terminologies that were anything but infantile:pastorality; the nexus between the book and the chalice; the signs of the times;unity as a banquet of grace shared by the churches; the dialectic between sub-stance and form; the icon of the new Pentecost. This language had an effect onthe process of giving Vatican II its own character and orientated the Council tobe an act of re-presentation of the gospel, in the time that makes the churchmanifest in actu.40 In this opening to history that the Council, as an event,

38 P. Hunermann, ‘Quo Vadis? Au Sujet de l’importance du Concile Vatican II pourl’Eglise, l’œcumenisme et la Societe aujourd’hui’, Recherches de science religieuse 100

(2012), 27–44.39 G. Ruggieri, Ritrovare il Concilio (Turin: Einadi, 2012).40 G. Ruggieri, ‘L’Esdeveniment Conciliar com Ecclesia in actu’, in La relacio entre

Esglesia i mon d’avui a la llum del Concili Vatica II (Barcelona: Facultat de Teologiade Catalunya, 2011), 15–41.

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experienced, it transcended the language of the modern and the language of‘dialogue’ and came face to face with the overarching need for the church toreceive all revelation and all tradition. Benedict XVI has rightly said that ‘VaticanII embraces the entire doctrinal history of the Church’ because it adopts a livingconception of tradition itself that is exposed to the signs of the times, anddeciphers those signs within the actual human condition.41 The traditions ofthe other churches, which were represented at Vatican II by their own voices,are fully entitled to enter this living conception of tradition. And with a weightnever known before, public opinion in its widest sense also enters, along with theactual life of the communities, whose role certainly cannot be underestimated.Underlying this way of being of the church in actu in Vatican II are the individ-ual decisions taken by the Council, which do not constitute a corpus that isrendered monolithic because they are given formal approval, but are a complexstructure of more or less mature thoughts whose theological weight cannot bedetermined a priori or temporalized mechanically, but are destined to developand come to completion over time.42

According to Ruggieri, the study of the source documents relating to VaticanII shows that (historically, in the awareness of those who were present and wholeft in it some trace of themselves) it was an event for listening to the gospel, inthe expectation of a communication of the Word itself that would be appropriatefor the needs of the time. It is precisely this double polarity that constitutes theCouncil as a liturgical act that, as in an offertory, brings forth the consensus thatsanctions its deliberations.43 This perspective has immediate repercussions forhistorical interpretations of Vatican II because it bars the way to any possibilitythat there might be a return to political machinery or engineered documents. It isbanal and obvious that a Council does possess a political machinery and that itsprocess of engineering documents has to adhere to criteria of compromise andnegotiation that need to be analytically reconstructed. But just as the historiandoes not attempt to explain the meaning of Michelangelo’s Pieta by talking aboutthe route taken by the block of marble from a particular point in the quarry to aparticular point in Rome, so the historian of Vatican II knows that the existenceof this path does not exempt them from their obligation to have another under-standing, in which theological intentions inscribed in the real life of people and

41 Benedict XVI, Letter to the Bishops, 3 March 2009, para. 4. Online: http://www.vatican.va/holy_father/benedict_xvi/letters/2009/documents/hf_ben-xvi_let_20090310_remissione-scomunica_en.html.

42 G. Ruggieri, Das II. Vatikanum: Ereignis von Weltkirche, in P. Hunermann (ed.), DasII. Vatikanum: Christlicher Glaube im Horizont globaler Modernisierung (Paderborn:Schoningh, 1998), 31–44.

43 G. Ruggieri, ‘L’Officina Bolognese et Vatican II’, Recherches de Science Religieuse 100(2012), 11–25, here p. 22.

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time have a weight that is not secondary and that must be traced by putting thesources, in the fullness of their substance, back at the centre. So in the end, aperspective of this kind also redounds on how the post-conciliar period is to beinterpreted and exists where the need to represent the gospel is received; notwhere some issue or other, or an abstract hermeneutics, is debated with or with-out vigour.44

Conclusion

Earlier I mentioned the dense historical work that, in the form of inventories,essays and monographs, is continuing with great intensity, re-editing the majordocuments of Vatican II and investigating the major issues underlying thedebates,45 the participation of the protagonists who were part of the organs, ofthe assembly, or of the vast world surrounding the hall.46 The ‘preparatory’ weightof the great Catholic renewal movements and of extremely small intellectual fer-ments in even tiny places such as Dombes or Seelisberg are not to be overlooked.47

44 Ch. Theobald, ‘L’Hermeneutique de Reforme Implique-t-elle une Reforme del’Hermeneutique?’, Recherches de Science Religieuse 100 (2012), 65–84.

45 For example, M. Faggioli, Il Vescovo e il Concilio: Modello Episcopale eAggiornamento al Vaticano II (Bologna: Mulino, 2005); S. Scatena, La fatica dellaLiberta (Bologna: Il Mulino, 2008; N. Lamdan and A. Melloni (eds), Nostra Aetate:Origins, Promulgation, Impact on Jewish-Catholic Relations (Munster: LIT 2007); M.

Attridge (ed.), Jews and Catholic Together: Celebrating the Legacy of Nostra Aetate(Ottawa: Novalis, 2007); G. Routhier and G. Jobin (eds), L’Autorite et les Autorites:L’Hermeneutique Theologique de Vatican II (Paris: Cerf, 2007); K. Schelkens, Catholic

Theology of Revelation on the Eve of Vatican II: A Redaction History of the Schema ‘DeFontibus Revelationis’ (1960–1962) (Leiden: Brill, 2010); C. Antonelli, Il Dibattito suMaria nel Concilio Vaticano II: Percorso Redazionale sulla Base di Nuovi Documenti

d’Archivio (Padova: Messaggero di Sant’ Antonio, 2009); C. Lorefice, Dossetti eLercaro: La Chiesa Povera e dei Poveri nella Prospettiva del Concilio Vaticano II(Cinisello B: Paoline, 2011).

46 For example, D. Donnelly, J. Fameree, M. Lamberigts, et al. (eds), The Belgian

Contribution to the Second Vatican Council (Leuven: Peeters, 2008); T. Eggenspergerand U. Engel (eds), ‘Mutig in die Zukunft’: Dominikanische Beitrage zum Vatikanum II(Leipzig: Benno, 2007); B. Xibaut,Mgr. Leon-Arthur Elchinger. Un Eveque Francais au

Concile (Paris: Cerf, 2009); M. Perroni, A. Melloni and S. Noceti (eds), Tantum AuroraEst: Le Donne al Vaticano II (Berlin: LIT, 2012).

47 For example, G. Routhier, P. J. Roy and K. Schelkens (eds), La Theologie Catholique

entre Intransigeance et Renouveau: La Reception des Mouvements Preconciliaire aVatican II (Leuven: Peeters, 2011); F. Bousquet, P. Gibert, E. Fouilloux, M. Fedouand B. Cholvy, ‘Les theologiens francais et la preparation de Vatican II’, Gregorianum

92 (2011), 737–827; S. Scatena, Taize: Le Origini della Comunita e l’Attesa del Concilio(Berlin: LIT, 2011).

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Nor are the meaning of diaries,48 the impact of communication via periodicals ornewspapers, and the political action to which the diplomatic source documentscontain pointers.49 In sum, there is now a new generation of historians and newpublications that are taking their place in the bibliographies, to which some con-ferences in 2012 have already begun to give a voice that will continue to be heard,at least up until the celebration of the fiftieth anniversary of the conclusion of theCouncil in 2015 under a new pope. These studies enjoy a solid position and even if,whether out of weakness or goodness, the magisterium were to bend to the

48 Beside the Congar diary (whose annex remains unpublished!) see: H. Camara,Vaticano II: Correspondencia Conciliar. Circulares a Famılia do Sao Joaquim, ed.L. C. Marques (Recife: Universitaria da UFPE, 2004) and Circulares Conciliares,ed. L. C. Marques and R. Faria (Recife: Universitaria da UFPE, 2008); L. Declerck

(ed.), Carnets conciliaires de Mgr Gerard Philips: Secretaire adjoint de la CommissionDoctrinale (Leuven: Peeters, 2006), and Carnets conciliaires de l’eveque de NamurA.-M. Charue (Leuven: Peeters, 2001); N. Edelby, Il Vaticano II nel Diario di un

Vescovo Arabo, ed. R. Cannelli (Cinisello B: Paoline, 1996); U. Betti, Diario delConcilio: 11 Ottobre 1962–Natale 1978, ed. V. Occhipinti (Bologna: Mulino, 2003);P. Poswick, Un Journal du Concile Vatican II par un Diplomate Belge: Notes

Personnelles de l’Ambassadeur de Belgique pres la Saint-Siege (1957–1968), ed. R. F.Poswick and Y. Juste (Paris: Cerf, 2005); J. Dopfner, Tagebucher, Briefe und Notizenzum Zweiten Vatikanischen Konzil, ed. Guido Treffler (Regensburg: Schnell-Steiner,

2006); H. de Lubac, Carnets du Concile, ed. L. Figoureux (Paris: Cerf 2007);T. Salemink (ed.),‘You will be Called Repairer of the Breach’: The Diary of J. G. M.Willebrands, 1958–1961 (Leuven: Peeters, 2009), and Les Agendas Conciliaires de MgrJ. Willebrands, Secretaire du Secretariat pour l’Unite des Chretiens, trans. and anno-

tated by L. Declerck (Leuven: Peeters, 2009); S. Siliberti (ed.), Mons. Carlo Ferrari‘Padre del Concilio’: Diario (1962–1965) (Mantova: Arti Grafiche Grassi, 2010); K.Schelkens (ed.), The Council of Edward Schillebeeckx (Leuven: Peeters, 2011), and The

Second Vatican Council Diaries of Met. Maxim Hermaniuk, C.Ss.R. (1960–1965),trans. Jaroslav Z. Skira (Leuven: Peeters, 2012); O. Semmelroth, DasKonzilstagebuch, ed. G. Wassilowsky (forthcoming); P. Giorgi (ed.), Il Diario

Conciliare di Ermenegildo Florit. L’Esperienza di un Vescovo Italiano al Vaticano II.Online: http://www.amiciziacristiana.it/diario.pdf; N. Egender, ‘Cinquante Ans deVatican II’, Irenikon 83 (2010), 41–91; K. Loussouarn, ‘Etat des Sources sur leConcile Vatican II dans les Fonds Conserves au Centre National des Archives de

l’Eglise de France (CNAEF)’, Chretiens et Societes, XVIe–XXIe siecles: Bulletin del’Equipe RESEA, no. 17 (2010), 195–214.

49 F. Ruozzi, Il Concilio in Diretta: Il Vaticano II in TV (Bologna: Mulino, 2012); P.-W.

Scheele, Als Journalist beim Konzil: Erfahrungen und Erkenntisse in der 3. Session. [Miteinem Beitrag von Karl Hillenbrand: Das Konzil und seine Folge] (Wurzburg: EchterVerlag, 2010); ‘Kirche und Leben’ is studied by M. Hartmann, Bistumpresse wahrend

des Zweitens Vatikanischen Konzils, ed. Thomas von Flammer, and Hubert Wolf(Munster: Dialogverlag, 2009); for the subsidia addressed to the preachers N. Weigl,Liturgische Predigt seit dem Zweiten Vatikanischen Konzil: Eine Untersuchung zur

Messfeier in der Sonntagspredigt anhand der Zeitschrift ‘Der Prediger und Katechet’(Regensburg: Pustet, 2009).

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blackmail of those who demand an ‘authentic’ interpretation of the Council, thehistorical case that Paul VI decided to incorporate into Vatican II can no longer beamputated from it. Thanks to these studies and the access to the sources they haveenjoyed, we are better able to see that the problems underlying the interpretation ofVatican II are the same as, or at least similar to, those that the Council itselfexperienced while it was in session.

In its great conciliar debates – on ecclesiology, ecumenism, religious freedom,revelation, Judaism, and the other religions – the assembly had in fact experienceddramatic hesitations. Listening to the discussions in St Peter’s, there was a dangerof thinking that the opposing positions were essentially balanced, almost as thoughthe bishops who endorsed Pope Roncalli’s update plan were balanced by a com-parable number of other bishops who associated themselves with the culture ofintransigence. It was precisely to reject this illusion that Paul VI in 1963 adoptednew regulations and decided to install moderators with delegated authority whocould bring the Council out of an impasse that was theologically intolerable. Onemight sometimes get the impression, historiographically speaking, that somethinglike this was bound to transpire, and it almost does appear that the historical-critical work and the disparaging expressions of sententiousness had been givenequal weight. Again, however, it is clear that no tyranny can place ideologicallimits, or worse, on the fallible but honest craft of historians. And no legitimationcan equate the judgement on the significance of Vatican II for the life of faith withthe doubts of those who feel they have a duty to minimize its significance and evenits existence. This is not merely an historiographical matter, and one does have toask whether, in the reception given to Vatican II, there really did exist dynamicsthat were not the same as those that moved the Council itself and that broughtagitation to its deliberations. In other words, whether the question of the receptionof Vatican II is inseparable from that of the Council itself, or whether there werehermeneutics of the Council that had not already revealed themselves. In thismutual overlapping between the Council and its reception, the cultural dislocationin which Christianity is immersed, and the succession of one generation afteranother, become decisive.

To sum up, it is evident that whatever new may have been said (and was actuallyvoiced) at Vatican II can be now be identified, thanks in no small measure to thework of historians. Traces of that work can even be found in the efforts of thosewho think they need to elaborate a history ‘that has never been written’, seen fromthe point of view of the opponents of the Council. By patient work the sourcesthemselves are once again placed at the centre. By finding the papers and compar-ing them, and interpreting them whilst refining as much as possible the doctrinalsensitivities needed to grasp their implications, we broaden the diachronic andsynchronic horizons in which the Council does not have to be situated, but actuallyis situated.

This is no different from any other ordinary work of the historian who, as avisitor to a different ‘present’ set in another time, is always limited by only beingable to rely on the documentary sources and who is also aware that, after the inrush

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of that gospel whose urgency is felt by whoever lives it, without ever neglecting itsweight and without ever being able to know where it originated, one can onlymeasure the footprints that remain. This backward gaze cannot fail to note that‘betraying the Council’ (a betrayal either perpetrated by the Council or, vice-versa,perpetrated by the ‘restorers’ to which the Council must succumb) is a leitmotifthat comes back into fashion every 10 years. Nor can it fail to note that, despite allthe prophecies of doom, Vatican II remains and still returns as a tool for a collo-quium with the future, similar to the colloquium with the future that was generatedby all the great Councils, and that is destined to endure until a new Council comesabout. Vatican II remains and returns because it was intended to position itself in aspecific location, not in front of the whole tradition as though contemplating alibrary, or in the heart-wrenching ruins of some lost pre-Romantic Christianity, butin the manner desired by Pope John: moving towards ‘the encounter with the faceof Christ’, having retraced the whole tradition until it arrives at an appointedmeeting place that marks the necessary beginning of a new pilgrimage.

It is another question as to whether Vatican II has so far succeeded in this task.But the necessarily nuanced judgement on its outcomes does not alter one fact: thatthis task, which by a primatial act was defined as ‘pastoral’ in a very substantialsense, has the same value that the formulation Spiritu Sancto legitime congregata,ecclesiam universalem repræsentans implied in the 15th century. Faced with thisfact, it is more than obvious that the Council does not belong to the everydayordinariness of the church, and that when a Council takes place, its significancecannot be diminished by the liturgical impermanence that is a necessary part of itsconstitution.50

Exactly like the act of worship, when a Council ‘takes place’ it measures itselfipso facto against a history. In the awareness of the 17th-century controversialistthis meant that a serial progression had to be constructed so that the Council as anevent could be strengthened by setting it within a chain of events that legitimatedit.51 But for the historian of today it is sufficient to know that Vatican II, like everyother great Council, was not exempt from the challenge that led it to confront aproblem that the proliferation of metaphors (the beginning of a beginning, theturning point, the end of an age, the epochal transition) can scarcely circumscribe.The work of the researcher does have need of simple knowledge in order toadvance, but, numquid Deus indiget vestro mendacio?, the magisterium of the theo-logian and of authority also needs exactly the same knowledge.52

50 K. Lehmann, ‘Hermeneutik fur einen kunftigen Umgang mit dem Konzil’, in Zweites

Vatikanum – vergessene Anstoße, gegenwartige Fortschreibungen (Freibugr i.Br.:Herder, 71–89, and ‘Das II. Vatikanum – ein Wegweiser: Verstandnis – Rezeption –Bedeutung’, in P. Hunermann (ed.), Das Zweite Vatikanische Konzil und die Zeichen

der Zeit Heute (Freiburg: Herder, 2006), 11–26.51 A. Melloni, ‘Concili, Ecumenicita e Storia: Note di Discussione’, Cristianesimo nella

Storia 28 (2007), 509–542.

52 Job 13 : 77 was quoted by Leo XIII in Depuis le Jour, 8 September 1899. See C.Semeraro (ed.), Leone XIII e gli Studi Storici: Atti del Convegno Internazionale

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Vatican II, therefore, must be included as part of this listening to what the Spiritsays to the church, and what time whispers to the church about the gospel. Soinevitably, the Council consists of what is gradually received of those things, in adynamism from which not even those who ask for it to be rejected or downgradedcan absent themselves; a dynamism that by now has become overlaid on the dec-ades that separate us from Vatican II and its history, and is now already implicit inthe decades that separate the Christians from a future in which conciliarity willreturn, and will once again propose itself as a contemporary of its own time, of thetraditio and of the future, as a summons to create the correct conditions in whichthe kerygmatic event can take place in all its dimensions, and with all itsconsequences.

Author biography

Alberto Melloni is Director of the John XXIII Foundation for Religious Studies inBologna, Italy, and Professor of the History of Christianity at the University ofModena and Reggio Emilia. He is the author of numerous books on the history ofVatican II.

Commemorativo (Citta del Vaticano, 30–31 Ottobre 2003) (Citta del Vaticano: EditriceVaticana, 2004).

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