Transizione epocale: Studi sul Concilio Vaticano II

This collection of Alberigo's writings on the council opens with a warm tribute to him by Cardinal Karl Lehmann, archbishop of Mainz. In it Lehmann affirms that Alberigo's name will be associated in future generations with the Second Vatican Council as firmly as his mentor's, Hubert Jedin, is associated with the Council of Trent. Lehmann's is a sage judgment. Even aside from Alberigo's masterminding the five-volume History of Vatican II, the scholarship displayed in Transizione epocale validates Lehmann's assessment. As the readers of this journal will understand, the assessment is an implicit rejoinder to Cardinal Camillo Ruini's comparison of Alberigo not with Jedin but with Paolo Sarpi, whose history of Trent, 1619,promptly ended up on the Index. The semi-official disparagement of Alberigo's work that Ruini articulated very much saddened Alberigo's last months.

The topics in the volume range from detailed examination of particulars to the general assessment of the council that Alberigo wrote for the final volume of the History. Alberigo's study of the Regolamento, the document setting the procedures for the Council, is a fine example of a master historian taking a neglected and, in this case, a somewhat disdained subject and showing its crucial importance. Alberigo establishes, for instance, how the Regolamento was designed precisely to ensure a certain outcome of the Council. He goes further to reveal the theological presuppositions governing the document as first devised. These were precisely the presuppositions the majority of prelates at the Council later tried to overturn

The volume is rich in similar studi. Of special note is the longest, "Giuseppe Dossetti al concilio Vaticano II."Aside from its other merits, it displays the privileged place Alberigo had in studying the council. Trained by Jedin, he not only had easy access to him, an official peritus at the council, but almost from the moment the council was announced he, a young layman, became an important player on the "Bologna team" (la squadra bolognese) led by Cardinal Giacomo Lercaro and much inspired by Dossetti. Even before the council opened this team, plus Jedin, produced the extremely valuable collection of decrees of previous councils, Conciliorum Oecumenicorum Decreta, presented to Pope John XXIII in 1962, on the eve of Vatican II.

Of all Alberigo's accomplishments, the History is the one for which he will be most remembered. He conceived, organized, and finally brought to completion this monument of collective scholarship on an international scale. The multilingual publication of the History, which deftly incorporates the massive archival scholarship of the previous twenty years, has brought the interpretation of Vatican II to a new stage. It puts all commentaries on the final sixteen documents into a new framework. In 1995 Alberigo brilliantly laid out the hermeneutical criteria on which the History was to be based. That saggio opens this volume and thus deservedly enjoys pride of place in it.

Alberigo's conclusion to the final volume addresses, as mentioned, the large and exquisitely difficult question of what happened at the Council. It is perhaps the most important piece in the volume. It reads so smoothly and presents its conclusions so persuasively that it almost conceals the profound knowledge of the sources and the grasp of the issues that alone could produce such a subtle and judicious assessment of that massively and stubbornly complex phenomenon known as the Second Vatican Council. When Alberigo describes what the Council hoped to accomplish in the deceptively simple words a "reversal of priorities," he captures the paradigm shift the Council hoped to induce. In this conclusion, Alberigo the historian shows himself to be also Alberigo the theologian.