The Long Shadow of Vatican II: Living Faith and Negotiating Authority since the Second Vatican Council ed. by Lucas Van Rompay et al. (review)

In the decades since the Second Vatican Council, scholarship has generally focused on diachronic and synchronic studies of the council texts. This volume, originating in a Duke University-sponsored lecture series, contributes to a growing body of Council literature exploring its ongoing reception.

Catherine Clifford’s essay stands at the thematic center of the volume, sketching out the Council’s shift from a centralized and juridical understanding of authority to a biblical vision of authority as service. At the same time, she demonstrates a key theme running through the essays in this volume, arguing that the postconciliar period has seen a markedly inconsistent implementation of the council’s ecclesial vision. Several other essays in this volume will demonstrate the postconciliar tension that has existed between the hierarchy’s own understanding of its authority and the liberating vision of authority embraced by theologians and laity.

Leo Lefebure maps out a parallel shift in the Council’s attitude toward non-Christian religions, marking a movement from suspicion and prejudice to a fundamentally positive attitude toward those religious traditions. He outlines the textual history and import of Nostra aetate and Dignitatis humanae, while also noting textual support for this shift in other council texts. Yet, as with Clifford’s account on authority, Lefebure recounts an uneven reception of this shift in postconciliar Catholicism. One must acknowledge important advances in the Vatican document Dialogue and Proclamation and key papal gestures (such as John Paul II’s and Benedict XVI’s groundbreaking visits to mosques in Damascus and Istanbul) without overlooking the missteps reflected in the CDF document Dominus Iesus and Benedict’s regrettable anti-Islamic gaffe in his 2006 Regensburg address.

The three remaining essays in this volume offer a welcome complexification of postconciliar reception. The church historian Leslie Woodcock Tentler notes the series of crises that afflicted the American Catholic Church after the Council. Yet she exposes the post hoc ergo propter hoc fallacy of commentators who would blame these crises directly on the council. Tentler insists that the destabilizing shifts in the postconciliar period were largely inevitable, due to the social forces in the post–World War II period that were breaking down the Catholic subculture. More educated laypersons were bound to become more active agents in the construction of their Catholic identity, leading to predictable ambiguities in the appropriation of council teaching. That the interpretation and reception of the Council texts would take on a life of its own is evident in Jill Peterfeso’s essay. She recounts how the postconciliar movements for the ordination of women often took inspiration from select conciliar texts, such as Gaudium et spes’ condemnation of sexism, while drawing conclusions often at odds with those of the bishops charged as the Council’s official interpreters. The volume concludes with a fascinating study of conciliar reception in material culture. Hillary Kaell reports on the changing meanings and associations attached to the wayside crosses that can be found along the thoroughfares of Quebec today. These crosses have their origins in a traditional French Canadian Catholic devotionalism. Yet many contemporary Quebec Catholics still cherish and care for these crosses while now attaching to them Council-inspired meanings. These new meanings privilege a personal relationship with God and the enduring value of being Catholic even when that Catholic identity is estranged from institutional Catholic affiliation and sacramental practice.

Taken together, these five essays, accompanied by a helpfully contextualizing introduction and conclusion, add much to a thicker account of the reception of the Council. They combine conventional theological scholarship with more empirical and ethnographic sources to demonstrate the ambiguity and promise of the Council for the Church today.