The Second Vatican Council: What’s the Big Deal?

It seems outlandish to say, but we are probably too close in time to the Second Vatican Council to view it with anything approaching objectivity. This is almost a rule of history: Only with time and emotional distance can we make sense of an event. Though no event can really be lived secondhand, at a distance, we may compensate by a wider range of experience than that granted to the participants themselves. Perhaps this is the primary justification for the study of history.

The novelist and historian Shelby Foote believed that only the passage of time — roughly a century — allowed him to write his history of the American Civil War with a measure of objectivity. Having grown up in Mississippi, he recounts imbibing invective against Abraham Lincoln at the schoolyard, so hated was that president’s memory in the former Confederacy. The Second Vatican Council was hardly a civil war, but we still may be several decades away from understanding it at a less emotionally charged level.

In the meantime, we can probably speak about what the council was and — perhaps more importantly —what it was not. For when we discuss the council, we are not merely or even primarily discussing its four sessions held over as many years. Simply to mention Vatican II is to conjure an emotional response, one not directly concerned with, say, the drafting of Gaudium et Spes, the council’s “Pastoral Constitution on the Church in the Modern World.” Whether we intend to or not, we use the council as shorthand for any number of things, some of which can only be tenuously linked to that event.

This becomes clear when we examine a different council, say the Council of Trent. To think of Trent is to think of the Protestant Reformation. And to think of the Reformation is to conjure a definite picture, a largely negative one for Catholics. We can argue against the justness of the term Reformation — just as we could make the case that the War Between the States is a better appellation for what was not quite a civil war — but it has been all but universally accepted and must do as a label. The salient point is that the Council of Trent was only one of the events subsumed under the Reformation’s larger heading.