What Happened at Vatican II (review)

Each scholar has a secret list of books that will remain among the classics of historical research and religious studies, such as Martin Grabmann on Scholasticism, Roger Aubert on twentieth-century theology, Francis Dvornik on the Schism of 1054, Brian Tierney on conciliarism, and Jean Leclercq on L’amour des lettres—those books considered essential for students. John O’Malley’s What Happened at Vatican II seems to be one of those books. His history of the Second Vatican Council is similar to the five volumes directed by Giuseppe Alberigo and written by some forty scholars between 1995 and 2001. Actually, in terms of facts and roles, details and names, procedures and archival trouvailles, O’Malley’s research does not bring new elements that may substantially correct the broader picture.

Nonetheless, the book offers a coherent description of Vatican II as a part of the larger history of the Roman Catholic Church: before and while taking into account the different phases of Vatican II, O’Malley offers the reader a precise picture of a wider panorama. In page after page the historian recalls the tridentine precedents of each and every step of Vatican II and mostly gives a superb description of the unfinished agenda of the papacy’s antimodern attitude presented before the largest assembly of equals ever gathered on Earth. O’Malley is right: In St. Peter’s, beside the thousands of Fathers who took part in the council preparation and celebration from 1959 to 1965, we should realize that Pius IX and Pius XII, Marx and Freud, Lagrange and Rosmini, and De Maistre and Lamennais were there, listening to the infinite debate that changed the church “style” (a key word recently explored by Christoph Theobald).

O’Malley underlines three aspects of Vatican II, which in his view are fundamental for the interpretation and a correct historical hermeneutic: aggiornamento, development, and ressourcement are the three pillars of an event that gave origin to an unprecedented form of council, which was able to avoid the usual paths of condemnation. In some of the best pages of his book the historian underlines its importance for a language who abandoned the rhetoric of condemnation and anathematism, and adopted an epideictic rhetoric—namely a discourse whose goal is to win internal assent in the listener (a perspective different from Peter Hünermann’s idea of the “constitutional” status of Vatican II decisions, but very close to it in the idea of a brand-new type of concilar discourse). A new language is made of words of reciprocity, of humility, of interiority, which gives a peculiar style to the decisions of Vatican II. At the same time it must be emphasized that the very event of Vatican II was made of factual and actual reciprocity, humility, and interiority that was experienced by the bishops: and such an experience was the meaning of the adjective pastoral so dear to Pope John XXIII in his effort to name the peculiarity of Vatican II.

Thanks to his knowledge of the Council of Trent, O’Malley does not hide his ideas about a controversial point regarding the reception of Vatican II: if a reductive hermeneutic of the Council suggests that the excessive protagonism of the theologians is at the origin of the postconciliar “crisis,” O’Malley explains that the role of theologians was more reduced at Vatican II in comparison with the sixteenth-century council. Therefore, the consent expressed by the Bishops was the result of a tense dynamic, a rude dispute, which divided a majority from the minority. However, the fingerprints of the minority may be traced in some crucial passages of the final phase like the Nota explicativa prævia, the structure of the Synod of Bishops (studied by Antonio Indelicato in Il sinodo del vescovi: La collegialità sospesa [Bologna, 2008]), and the doctrine on peace—things that made the final phases of Vatican II less joyful in capite et in membris.

Through O’Malley’s account (which rests on...