No More Nostalgia

Just about seven years after Pope John XXIII’s surprise announcement of a new Vatican council in January 1959, Vatican II came to a conclusion on December 8, 1965, with a ceremony led by Pope Paul VI, who brought the ship into port. Vatican II’s implementation had already begun concilio durante—for example, with liturgical reform, as well as with John XXIII’s last encyclical, Pacem in terris. But after December 1965, the bishops and their theological advisors went back to their dioceses. The pope and the Curia remained in Rome to oversee a process of ecclesial reform of unprecedented scale and depth, not to mention new dynamics between Rome and the local churches, the hierarchy and the laity, and the Church and the world.