Event · 1962

Second Vatican Council

The twenty-first ecumenical council of the Roman Catholic Church, held in Rome from 1962 to 1965. Pope John XXIII opened it and Paul VI closed it.

History

Causes

When John XXIII announced a council on 25 January 1959, few expected one. The First Vatican Council (1869–70) had defined papal infallibility, and many assumed that popes would no longer need councils. The Catholic Church John inherited was still shaped by the Council of Trent and by a century of defensive teaching against modernity. Pius X had condemned “Modernism” in 1907, and an anti-modernist oath bound clergy until 1967. Pius XI’s Mortalium Animos (1928) forbade Catholics to take part in the ecumenical movement and said unity could only mean other Christians returning to Rome.

Under that surface, several movements had been building for decades. The liturgical movement wanted lay people to pray the Mass rather than watch it, and Pius XII’s Mediator Dei (1947) partly endorsed it. His Divino Afflante Spiritu (1943) allowed Catholic scholars to use historical and literary methods on the Bible. French and German theologians such as Henri de Lubac, Yves Congar and Jean Daniélou called for ressourcement, a return to the Church Fathers behind the textbook scholasticism of the seminaries. Rome had disciplined several of them in the 1950s; at the council they became advisers. Two world wars, the Holocaust, decolonisation and the Cold War added pressure from outside.

John XXIII named his aim with the Italian word aggiornamento, bringing up to date. In his opening speech of 11 October 1962, Gaudet Mater Ecclesia, he rejected the “prophets of doom” (profeti di sventura) who saw only ruin in the modern world, and said the Church now preferred “the medicine of mercy rather than the weapons of severity” (Italian text, translation mine). He also distinguished the unchanging deposit of faith from the way it is expressed, a distinction both sides of later debates would claim.

Proceedings

About 2,400 bishops attended, far more than any earlier council, and for the first time large numbers came from Africa, Asia and Latin America. Theological experts (periti) included Karl Rahner, Joseph Ratzinger, Congar, de Lubac, Hans Küng, Edward Schillebeeckx and the American Jesuit John Courtney Murray. Protestant and Orthodox observers sat in the hall, among them Oscar Cullmann, Edmund Schlink and George Lindbeck, and the Russian Orthodox Church sent observers from the first session.

The council met in four autumn sessions, 1962 to 1965. The first was a contest over the preparatory drafts, written mostly by the Roman Curia under Cardinal Alfredo Ottaviani of the Holy Office. Northern European bishops, the “Rhine” group in Ralph Wiltgen’s phrase (The Rhine Flows into the Tiber, 1967, Archive.org), led the bishops in setting them aside. The test case came on 20 November 1962, when a majority voted to drop the draft On the Sources of Revelation. The vote fell short of the two-thirds the rules required, and John XXIII withdrew the draft anyway and sent it to a mixed commission. Contemporary readers followed the struggle through the New Yorker letters of “Xavier Rynne” (Letters from Vatican City, 1963, Archive.org).

John XXIII died in June 1963. Paul VI, elected that month, continued the council but steered it toward near-unanimous votes, often by adding clarifications to win over the conservative minority, organised from 1964 as the Coetus Internationalis Patrum around Archbishop Marcel Lefebvre. The “black week” of November 1964 showed the method: Paul VI attached an explanatory note to the chapter on bishops in Lumen Gentium, postponed the vote on religious freedom, and made last-minute changes to the decree on ecumenism. The council closed on 8 December 1965. The day before, Paul VI and Patriarch Athenagoras of Constantinople jointly committed the mutual excommunications of 1054 “to oblivion” (joint declaration), a gesture toward healing the Great Schism.

Influence

The council produced sixteen documents: four constitutions, nine decrees and three declarations. Their effects reached almost every part of Catholic life. The Mass of Paul VI (1969–70) replaced the Tridentine rite in most parishes, celebrated in local languages with the priest usually facing the people. Catholic dialogues with Lutheran, Anglican, Reformed and Eastern Orthodox churches began in the following years; the Lutheran–Catholic dialogue led eventually to the Joint Declaration on Justification (1999). The Latin American bishops at Medellín (1968) applied the council’s call to read “the signs of the times” to poverty and oppression, and Gustavo Gutiérrez’s A Theology of Liberation (1971) followed, launching Liberation Theology.

Disagreement about what the council meant began almost at once. The journal Concilium (1965) gathered theologians who saw the council as a starting point; Communio (1972), founded by Ratzinger, de Lubac and Hans Urs von Balthasar, read it in continuity with the earlier tradition. Mass attendance, priestly and religious vocations fell steeply in Western Europe and North America from the late 1960s, and each side blamed the other’s reading of the council. Lefebvre’s Society of St Pius X rejected parts of the council outright, and his consecration of four bishops without papal mandate in 1988 drew a declaration of excommunication from John Paul II in Ecclesia Dei.

Key ideas and contributors

The liturgy belongs to the whole people. Sacrosanctum Concilium (1963), the first document passed, asked for the “fully conscious, and active participation” of the faithful (§14). It kept Latin as the language of the Latin rites while allowing the vernacular (§36), gave Gregorian chant “pride of place” (§116), and ordered a revision of the rites. Bishops of mission countries and the liturgical movement pushed hardest for it. The text left open how far the reform should go, which later made the actual Mass of Paul VI a matter of dispute.

The Church as mystery and people of God. Lumen Gentium (1964) opened with the Church as a mystery and a sacrament of union with God, and put a chapter on the whole people of God, lay and ordained, before the chapter on the hierarchy. It taught that the one Church of Christ “subsists in the Catholic Church,” adding that “many elements of sanctification and of truth are found outside of its visible structure” (§8). It said that people who do not know the gospel “through no fault of their own” can be saved if they sincerely seek God (§16). It also proclaimed a universal call to holiness for all Christians, lay people included (ch. 5).

Bishops as a college. The third chapter of Lumen Gentium taught that bishops form a college that, together with and never without the pope, holds supreme authority in the Church (§22). This rebalanced Vatican I, which had defined the pope’s Papal Primacy and infallibility but left the bishops’ role undefined. The explanatory note added at Paul VI’s order stressed that the pope can still act alone. The council also restored the permanent diaconate and encouraged national bishops’ conferences, a partial turn toward Conciliarity within Episcopal Polity.

Scripture, tradition and the teaching office. Dei Verbum (1965) replaced the rejected draft that had spoken of “two sources” of revelation. It presented revelation as God’s self-disclosure in Christ, handed on through Scripture and Holy Tradition, which “flowing from the same divine wellspring, in a certain way merge into a unity” (§9). The Magisterium “is not above the word of God, but serves it” (§10). Scripture teaches “without error that truth which God wanted put into sacred writings for the sake of salvation” (§11), a phrase later argued over by Catholic writers on Biblical Inerrancy. The document urged all the faithful to read the Bible, reversing centuries of caution, and endorsed the historical study of the Gospels.

Unity with other Christians. Unitatis Redintegratio (1964) called Protestants and Orthodox “separated brethren” rather than heretics, admitted that “men of both sides were to blame” for the divisions (§3), and spoke of a “hierarchy” of truths that vary in their relation to the foundation of faith (§11). It grounded the work on Jesus’ prayer “that they may all be one” (John 17:21). Cardinal Augustin Bea and his Secretariat for Promoting Christian Unity carried the document.

Religious freedom and other religions. Dignitatis Humanae (1965), drafted largely by John Courtney Murray, taught that every person has a right to religious freedom, grounded “in the very dignity of the human person” (§2), so that no state may coerce belief. It claimed to leave “untouched traditional Catholic doctrine on the moral duty of men and societies toward the true religion” (§1). Nostra Aetate (1965) said the Church “rejects nothing that is true and holy” in other religions (§2) and that Christ’s death cannot be “charged against all the Jews, without distinction, then alive, nor against the Jews of today” (§4).

The Church in the modern world. Gaudium et Spes (1965), the longest document and the only one addressed to all people, opened with the line that “the joys and the hopes, the griefs and the anxieties” of the age, “especially those who are poor,” are those of Christ’s followers (§1). It taught that by the incarnation the Son of God “has united Himself in some fashion with every man” (§22), a sentence John Paul II quoted constantly. It treated marriage and family, culture, economics, war and peace, and urged Christians to read “the signs of the times.”

Key controversies

Continuity or rupture. The deepest dispute is over how to read the council as a whole. The “Bologna school” of Giuseppe Alberigo, in a five-volume History of Vatican II (1995–2006), treated the council as an event that broke with the Church’s defensive past, whose spirit reaches beyond the compromise wording of its texts. Benedict XVI answered in his Christmas address to the Curia (2005), rejecting a “hermeneutic of discontinuity and rupture” in favour of a “hermeneutic of reform,” which allows change in particular teachings while the underlying principles stay the same. John W. O’Malley’s What Happened at Vatican II (2008, Archive.org; secondary) argued that the council’s new style of language, pastoral rather than juridical, was itself a real change. Traditionalist historian Roberto de Mattei’s The Second Vatican Council: An Unwritten Story (2010) agreed that it was a rupture and judged that a bad thing.

Religious freedom and the earlier popes. The minority’s sharpest objection was that Dignitatis Humanae contradicted nineteenth-century teaching, especially Pius IX’s Syllabus of Errors (1864), which condemned the idea that every person is free to embrace the religion he thinks true. Defenders argued that the earlier condemnations targeted a liberal indifference to truth, while the council grounded freedom in human dignity and the nature of faith as a free act. Lefebvre’s declaration of 21 November 1974, refusing “to follow the Rome of neo-Modernist and neo-Protestant tendencies” that he saw at the council, made this the center of the traditionalist case.

“Subsists in” and salvation outside the Church. Pius XII’s Mystici Corporis (1943) had said the Mystical Body of Christ is the Catholic Church. Changing “is” to “subsists in” opened a long argument. Some theologians read it as saying the Church of Christ also exists in other churches. Rome rejected that reading in Dominus Iesus (2000) and in responses of 2007, insisting that the Church of Christ subsists fully only in the Catholic Church. Traditionalists hear “subsists in” and Nostra Aetate as weakening the old axiom that there is no salvation outside the Church; many Protestant and Orthodox partners found the 2000 document a step back.

The liturgical reform. The Mass of Paul VI went much further than many bishops had expected when they voted for Sacrosanctum Concilium: Latin largely disappeared, chant gave way to popular hymns, and altars were turned round. Cardinals Ottaviani and Bacci sent Paul VI a critical study in 1969 (the “Ottaviani Intervention”) charging that the new rite departed from Trent’s theology of the Mass as a sacrifice and weakened belief in Transubstantiation. Defenders answered that the reform recovered older patterns of worship and carried out the council’s own instruction. The question stayed live in papal law: Benedict XVI freed the old rite in Summorum Pontificum (2007), and Francis restricted it again in Traditionis Custodes (2021), calling the reformed books “the unique expression” of the Roman rite.

Collegiality and the papacy. Progressives regretted that the explanatory note on Lumen Gentium kept papal primacy untouched and that later synods of bishops stayed advisory. Eastern Orthodox observers welcomed the language of collegiality but noted that Vatican I’s dogmas on the pope stood unchanged, which remains the main obstacle to reunion. Conservatives in turn feared that national bishops’ conferences would erode both papal and diocesan authority.

Protestant assessments. Protestant observers were divided. Karl Barth, who was not present but visited Rome in 1966, wrote a sympathetic and probing set of questions in Ad Limina Apostolorum (1967, Archive.org). The Dutch Reformed theologian G. C. Berkouwer judged in The Second Vatican Council and the New Catholicism (1965) that the council had changed the tone of Catholicism without touching its core claims. On Scripture, Protestants noted that Dei Verbum still says the Church draws its certainty “not from Sacred Scripture alone” and asks that tradition be honoured “with the same sense of loyalty and reverence” (§9), so the divide with Sola Scriptura remained. Many Evangelical writers saw new openness to the Bible but no movement on justification, the Mass or the papacy, and the Reformation questions stayed where Trent had left them until the dialogues that followed.

Liberation and the signs of the times. Gaudium et Spes encouraged the Church to engage the world, but how far was disputed. The Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith under Ratzinger warned in 1984 that some liberation theologies borrowed Marxist analysis, while Latin American theologians argued they were applying the council faithfully to their own poor continent.

What remains unresolved

Sixty years on, Catholics still agree that the council was a true ecumenical council and still disagree about what kind of event it was. The argument usually comes down to how much its texts can be read apart from what followed them. Those who stress continuity point to the documents’ careful wording and their many citations of earlier popes and councils. Those who stress change point to how the council actually reshaped worship, ecumenism and the Church’s stance toward the world. The Society of St Pius X remains in an irregular canonical position, and the liturgy wars show the question is not only academic.