A Spirit of Affirmation

Reading the book, I remembered meeting O'Malley in 1963 at one of the U.S. bishops' daily press conferences after the council's morning events. A young scholar, he was working on a book on the Augustinian reformer Giles of Viterbo (1469-1532) under a prestigious fellowship at the American Academy in Rome. I was covering the council as a freelance journalist and later published a book on the Second Session (1963) under the title The Open Church.

I report this only to make two points: Based on my experience of the same events, O'Malley does a truly superior job of reporting the crucial details and capturing the moods and passions of that time. Secondly, he has the advantage of many testimonies not known to us back then. These, too, he handles deftly.

But to my thinking, O'Malley's approach is a little too lacking in irony, a little too blind to the council's negative effects and much too blind to errors committed by progressives in pursuit of noble goals: Translations of council documents (and important texts of the Scriptures) were so ideologically cast that they distorted the meaning. The abruptness of changes in the sacred liturgy unloosed a sense of instability and make-it-up-yourself theology. In some places, there followed a "me decade" of "cafeteria Catholics" who felt they could pick and choose from church doctrines.

O'Malley mentions that Joseph Ratzinger, then in his 30s, was among the leading progressive theologians at the council. Meanwhile, he overlooks a long memo from Krakow's young Bishop Karol Wojtyla urging the council to focus on two questions-- What do we mean by "the human person"? And what is the nature of human "community"? -- which is exactly what the council did.

O'Malley's study would have benefited from a section on Wojtyla and Ratzinger, who became the intellectually powerful Popes John Paul II and Benedict XVI. Both were champions of the progressive cause during the council, while in later years also unmasking the deficiencies in the progressive view. Since they became the council's chief interpreters for the next four decades, a chapter on their critiques would have given What Happened At Vatican II a sharper focus. Nonetheless, O'Malley's book is a splendid introduction to a story of longed-for change, its good consequences and its sometimes depressing, unintended ones. ·

Michael Novak holds the Jewett Chair in Religion, Philosophy and Public Policy at the American Enterprise Institute. His newest book is "No One Sees God."