Vatican II: A Sociological Analysis of Religious Change (review)

In her Introduction, Wilde says that Vatican II represents the most significant example of institutionalized religious change since the Reformation. By the time it was finished on Dec. 8, 1965, it had “turned the Church on its head.” Included in these dramatic changes was that the Roman Catholic Church relinquished its claim to be the one true church, had abdicated claims to power over nation-states and reinterpreted its identity from a hierarchical authority to a church as the people of God. Among the hundreds of books that have been published in the past 40 years that describe and analyze the factors behind this dramatic event, none, in my opinion, is as analytically astute as Wilde’s book.

Based on primary documents from the Vatican Secret Archive that have recently been released and a reanalysis of transcripts of interviews with more than 80 of the most important bishops and theologians at Vatican Council II, conducted by Rocco Caporale, Wilde constructs an argument to explain how far-reaching institutional change occurred in the face of the initial disadvantages faced by the progressive bishops. In the first of four council sessions held over the span of three years (1962–1965), they won their first battle when they refused to elect members to the counciliar commissions as requested by the powerful Roman Curia, a conservative group in charge of the council agenda. Their second “win” came shortly thereafter when the issue of liturgical reform was supported by the majority of the bishops. These two early successes on the part of the progressives encouraged them to organize, and provided hope that change was possible. This argument is laid out in Chapter One.

While the progressives were able to make significant changes in many aspects of the Roman Catholic Church, there were issues on which they were not successful and on which they lost to the conservative block of bishops at the council. In Chapter 2, Wilde turns her attention to the questions of which of the bishops wanted what and why. She categorizes the bishops into four groups, each with different interests: those from European Catholic monopolies such as Italy and Spain who wanted no change; those from non-monopolistic countries in Europe and North America who prioritized ecumenism; those from Latin America who prioritized economic justice and reaching the poor and unchurched in their countries; and those from Africa and Asia who wanted the Church to grow in their missionary countries. Comparisons among these four groups, and the story of how issues coalesced, allows Wilde to isolate the factors that drove the bishops’ priorities at the council and ultimately determine votes.

Chapter 3 makes the argument that a major explanatory factor behind the progressive bishops successes at the council is that they built a more extensive and flexible organization than did their conservative counterparts and thus were able to negotiate compromise positions that the bishops were able to support. They believed in collegiality and thus built an effective, consensus-based structure in contrast to a hierarchical one developed by the conservative bishops.

Chapters 4, 5 and 6 consist of case studies of three specific council proposals. The first one, the Declaration on Religious Freedom, was approved by the bishops and became an official decree of Vatican II. The next two, a proposal to elevate the status of the Blessed Virgin Mary and one to allow Catholic laity to use artificial birth control, failed to be passed. Wilde uses these three chapters to “test” the argument that she puts forth in the earlier chapters by illustrating how the variations in the bishops’ priorities and the progressives’ organizational advantages determined the success or failure of these three specific proposals.

By drawing on current theories of organizational change, social movements and economic sociology, and creatively using interviews conducted at the time of the council and votes taken by the bishops who attended, Wilde presents a story of institutional change that is both fascinating and convincing. Unlike...