How Should We Remember Vatican II?

Abstract

What happened at Vatican II and the significance of its decisions is strongly contested in the Church today. There is a struggle over the memory of the Council. It is suggested that two hermeneutics are in use, continuity versus discontinuity. On the one hand, it is said that privileging the ‘event’ of the Council as the interpretative key for reading its documents leads to an ideological distortion and introduces discontinuity with tradition. On the other hand, it is held that the continuity thesis plays down the real changes the Council introduced and, while unexceptional as a theological principle, it is being deployed as a polemical ideology, restricting necessary change. This article distinguishes between theological principle and experience in relation to continuity/discontinuity. It argues that the event of the Council is to be found as much in its effects in the Church at large as what took place in Rome. It analyses the phenomenology of change at both levels and concludes that the tensions between the need for continuity and the impulses of discontinuity need to be recognised and worked with rather than repressed.

Cracks in the Edifice: Recent Challenges to the Received History of Vatican II

“…Marchetto's analysis is far from dismissive of the work of Alberigo and his collaborators but he cites so many examples, in History of Vatican ll, of how methodologically and factually suspect accounts are put consistently to serve a particular theological agenda, that his criticisms cannot be dismissed as 'pure polemics'. 36 Marchetto makes a strong case for his accusation of a systematic bias in this history (a history that certainly can claim to be the received reading) and it is a case that deserves detailed consideration. The suggestion that the received reading represents the only credible one, and that its critics are motivated by a 'polemic' which is 'ideological'," and by a desire for 'reassertion of control by Rome'," no longer seems an adequate response.…”