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  • Catholic History for Today’s Church: How Our Past Illuminates Our Present by John W. O’Malley
  • William L. Portier
Catholic History for Today’s Church: How Our Past Illuminates Our Present. By John W. O’Malley, SJ. Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 2015. 235pp. $24.95.

“Style is . . . the ultimate vehicle of meaning . . . the interpretive key par excellence” (130). Thus O’Malley concludes his discussion of the documents of Vatican II. In reviewing his present book, it seems appropriate, then, first to identify its genre. This is not an ordinary historical work by O’Malley but rather a collection of occasional writings “for a general Catholic readership” (3). It has an index but no notes and no bibliography. And, speaking of style, O’Malley’s is always engaging and witty with a refreshing touch of irreverence. He divides the book into three parts: 1) The Papacy and the Popes, 2) Two Councils: Trent and Vatican II, and 3) The Church at Large. To readers with neither the time nor the inclination to tackle Four Cultures of the West (2004),What Happened at Vatican II? (2008), or Trent: What Happened at the Council? (2013), O’Malley here offers the results of his work as a historian to help make sense of contemporary events from papal elections and Pope Francis to clerical celibacy. As O’Malley puts it, he hopes that good history will “expand our horizons, enable us to see that it was not always thus, and thereby suggest that it need not always be as it is in the present – indeed to show that it certainly will not be as it is in the present” (16). This is truly history at the service of the church.

Two examples stand out. The first involves a term O’Malley himself has coined within the past two decades, papalization. Popes did not always choose bishops, write encyclicals, convoke councils, and declare saints. He describes the “growth of papal authority” as the “most salient [End Page 79] development” during the past millennium of church history (7). The second provides a clear summary (125–132) of O’Malley’s interpretation, inspired by his archival research on Renaissance sermons, of “what happened at Vatican II.” Like most brilliant insights, it seems so obvious after you see it. It’s a matter of style! It’s the rhetorical shift from the juridical, legislative style of the canon that characterized previous councils to the panegyric style, “the painting of an idealized portrait in order to excite admiration and appropriation” (129). It deals in persuasion rather than legal coercion. Along the way, we learn what the Council of Trent did and did not do, about the overpainting of Michelangelo’s Last Judgment, and that Vatican I was the “first council in the history of the church to exclude the laity from participation” (152).

O’Malley’s ability to render his deep learning and ecclesial wisdom into accessible style makes this a book that can be used with undergraduates or with adult parish discussion groups. An added bonus is the memoir aspect of the book that pops up here and there and is the explicit subject of the last chapter. Here students can find a self-deprecating account of what it’s like to be a world-class historian. They can trace O’Malley’s path from the Vatican Archives and the sermons of the early sixteenth-century Augustinian reformer Giles of Viterbo to an original and illuminating insight into how to understand the twentieth-century event of Vatican II. O’Malley’s description of the effects of writing his dissertation, as well as the praise of teaching that closes the book, offer encouraging balm to prospective scholar-teachers. This is a delightful and intelligent book and I recommend it highly.

William L. Portier
University of Dayton
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