“A HISTORY of indebtedness would take up too much space. But thanks to all those from Cracow to Chicago who have stayed up late to talk it over and shared the hope for the Church which makes faith possible.”

This comes from Peter Hebblethwaite’s exhilarating and upbeat prologue to his own equally animated response to Vatican II, The Runaway Church (1975). This remarkable new Handbook takes the reader on an action-packed journey, beginning with the extraordinary atmosphere of the 1960s, elements of which reappear at different points throughout.

All the way from the contextual background of Vatican I and the Modernist crisis through to Mathijs Lamberigts’s penultimate chapter on the reception of Vatican II in Europe, the reader cannot escape the revolutionary impact of the Council; Lamberigts cites John Robinson, Harvey Cox, and Peter Berger serially, as witnesses to the energy and challenge that the 1960s brought to conventional theological assumptions. The Council emerges as both initiator of revolution and also child of a revolutionary decade.

The handbook falls into five substantial sections: Context and Resources, The Council Documents, Catholic Reception of the Council, Reception by Other Christians and Non-Christians, and, finally, Global Reception. This final section takes one from continent to continent, and takes into account, too, the transformation of the Holy See’s diplomatic service after Vatican II. Ultimately, 300 pages are then devoted to the reception of the Council within the Roman Catholic Church, and include negative reaction from traditionalists within Roman Catholicism, to which we shall return later.

After an introduction, beginning with Trent, Vatican I, and Modernism, the second chapter, from Massimo Faggioli, one of the two main editors, offers a masterly description of the Council’s context. The political scene opens with the Cuban crisis, the Cold War, and Pope John XXIII’s encyclical Pacem in Terris. We are reminded of the sheer unexpectedness of Pope John’s initiative: an elderly pontiff from a modest Italian background, seen by all as a classic caretaker figure, “opens the Vatican windows”, calling for aggiornamento, an “updating” of the Church in every sense. For those who did not live through that decade, the sense of “turning the world upside down” may not be appreciated.

John XXIII, however, is not the only hero of Vatican II; for, despite the tragedy of Humanae Vitae (which has often hung like a cloud over Pope Paul VI’s pontificate), Andrea Riccardi’s chapter “The Papacy and Vatican II” indicates how Paul VI’s intellect, sensitivity, and experience of the Curia never allowed the conservative minority led by Cardinal Ottaviani and others to reduce the momentum. Riccardi was the founder of the Community of Sant’Egidio, dedicated to social service, a community that was effectively born out of the Council.

Throughout, of course, the primary significance of the key documents shines through. Sacrosanctum Concilium, the first constitution to be approved, changed the liturgy almost overnight through the move to the vernacular, and the reordering of the ecclesial family around the altar, then later through the liturgy’s relationship with the catechetical movement. The work of Guardini, Casel, Beauduin, and others formed the basis of liturgical reform; here, John Baldovin, an outstanding scholar of the Council’s liturgical constitution, is our courier.

AlamyA papal procession through the vast gathering of prelates in St Peter’s Basilica, Rome, at the Second Vatican Council

The scholarship throughout, however, could not be bettered. Richard Gaillardetz pilots us through Lumen Gentium, anchoring it in the sacramental model of the Church in Sacrosanctum Concilium. Hans-Joachim Sander leads us through Gaudium et Spes, offering a very different take from pre-conciliar teaching on the relationship of Church and world.

Next comes a vintage chapter from Gerald O’ Collins, showing how the constitution on divine revelation, Dei Verbum, breathed new life into every aspect of Vatican II’s teaching. It is there, of course, in the liturgy, but also in ecclesiology and very clearly indeed in the changing scene within moral theology. Although no individual constitution was promulged on morals, the impact of the Council was sufficient to unseat old patterns of casuistry and the manuals of moral theology, deferring to the scripturally fashioned work of Bernard Häring and a host of others.

This would lead to what a later chapter describes as the return of the “Inquisition” during John Paul II’s pontificate and the long reign of his enforcer, Joseph Ratzinger, at the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith; Richard McCormick and Charles Curran were two Americans who suffered under that hammer, as did the Irish scholar Enda McDonagh.

Mark Chapman writes engagingly on Anglican reception, as Bill Rusch does on Lutherans. The Handbook is an enormously useful tool and guidebook at many different levels. Francis’s pontificate and the hermeneutical shift that it has brought have been determined by his being formed by the Council and so effectively its first papal son.

In the light of this, one critical observation might be to ask whether our commentators and couriers who guide us through the Handbook are responsive enough to the present hostility of a significant minority. A brief glance at some recent responses within Roman Catholicism demonstrates a sometimes shrill and unrestrained hostility among Francis’s critics. More generally, however, the writers here leave us in no doubt of the impact of the Council not just on Roman Catholicism, but on the whole Church and, indeed, the modern world.

The Rt Revd Stephen Platten is a former Bishop of Wakefield.

The Oxford Handbook of Vatican II
Catherine E. Clifford and Massimo Faggioli, editors
OUP £135
(978-0-19-881390-3)
Church Times Bookshop £121.50