The Road to Vatican II

The Second Ecumenical Council of the Vatican, the most important Catholic event since the 16th-century Council of Trent, was solemnly opened by Pope John XXIII 50 years ago, on Oct. 11, 1962. Commentators ever since have taken that date as the beginning of the Catholic Church’s engagement with modern society and culture. In fact, however, the Church’s grappling with modernity began 84 years earlier, with the election of Pope Leo XIII on March 3, 1878. That date marks the beginning of the transition from the Catholicism of the Counter-Reformation to the Catholicism of the New Evangelization. And in that process of transition, Vatican II played a crucial, accelerating role.

Vatican II is sometimes imagined to be an example of ecclesiastical parthenogenesis: the Council just happened, absent significant antecedents, in a decisive rupture with the past. That, too, is a misconception. Leo XIII paved the way to Vatican II by initiating his reform of the Church’s philosophical and theological life, by sponsoring Catholic biblical and historical studies, and by defining the basic principles of Catholic social doctrine. The Leonine reform was intensified by the Catholic intellectual and liturgical renaissance of the mid-20th century, which shaped the early, reforming-years-pontificate of Pius XII: the most-cited source (after the Bible) in the documents of Vatican II. No Leo XIII, no Liturgical Movement, no Catholic Action, no revival of Thomistic philosophy, no rediscovery of the importance of history for theology, no Pius XII—no Vatican II.

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