The Second Ecumenical Council of the Vatican, commonly called the Second Vatican Council or Vatican II, was the twenty-first and most recent ecumenical council of the Catholic Church. It met in four annual sessions in St. Peter's Basilica in Vatican City between 11 October 1962 and 8 December 1965, spanning the pontificates of Pope John XXIII, who convoked it, and Pope Paul VI, who presided over its final three sessions and promulgated all sixteen of its documents.
John XXIII, elected in 1958 at the age of seventy-six and widely expected to preside over a brief, uneventful pontificate, announced the council less than three months into his papacy and described its purpose with the Italian word aggiornamento, "bringing up to date." Roughly 2,900 bishops and the heads of male religious orders were entitled to attend; nearly 2,500 did so at some point, along with theological advisers, non-Catholic observers, and, from the second session onward, a small number of lay auditors. Over four sessions the bishops debated and revised dozens of draft texts, eventually approving four constitutions, nine decrees, and three declarations covering the liturgy, the nature of the Catholic Church, divine revelation, the Catholic Church's relationship to the modern world, ecumenism, religious freedom, and the Catholic Church's stance toward non-Christian religions.
The council's decisions reshaped the Roman Rite, permitting the vernacular languages into a liturgy that had been celebrated almost entirely in Latin for centuries, and set in motion changes to the church's relations with other Christian communities, with Judaism, and with the modern secular state that were still being debated sixty years later. Later Catholic scholarship has disagreed sharply over how to characterise this change: some historians treat the council chiefly as a body of texts to be read against continuous Catholic tradition, while others, following an interpretive current associated with Fr. Joseph Komonchak, argue that Vatican II is better understood as a historical "event" whose meaning was not settled by the documents alone but continued to be worked out, contested, and applied in the decades that followed.
Background
Two currents in earlier twentieth-century Catholic thought fed directly into the council's work. The first was a renewal of biblical scholarship. Pope Pius XII's 1943 encyclical Divino afflante Spiritu had encouraged Catholic exegetes to use the original Hebrew and Greek texts of scripture and the methods of modern critical scholarship, rather than working exclusively from the Latin Vulgate, and gave ecclesiastical sanction to a generation of biblical scholarship that would inform the council's later teaching on revelation in Dei verbum.
The second was a theological movement, associated above all with French and Belgian Dominicans and Jesuits, that called for a return to the Bible, the early Church Fathers, and the liturgical sources of the tradition rather than the manual-based scholasticism that dominated seminary teaching. Historians commonly call this movement ressourcement; its leading figures included Henri de Lubac, Yves Congar, Jean Daniélou, Marie-Dominique Chenu, and Hans Urs von Balthasar. This movement provoked real institutional conflict. Pius XII's 1950 encyclical Humani generis criticised theological tendencies the pope considered dangerous, without naming individual authors, and in its aftermath several of these theologians were removed from teaching posts or barred from publishing. This was strikingly reversed by John XXIII as he appointed both de Lubac and Congar as council experts, and other theologians who had been under a cloud in the 1950s, they became architects of the documents on revelation, the church, and ecumenism.
Vatican II also inherited unfinished business from its predecessor. The First Vatican Council opened in December 1869 but was suspended in September 1870 after the Italian army captured Rome during Italian unification, before it had addressed the theology of the episcopate or the place of the laity in the church; it had completed only its teaching on papal primacy and on the relationship of faith and reason. Bokenkotter treats the theology of collegiality and the laity as among the questions Vatican I left open for its successor to take up. Paul VI made the same connection explicit in his 1964 encyclical Ecclesiam Suam, describing Vatican II as continuing work Vatican I had been unable to finish.
Convocation and preparation
John XXIII announced his intention to call an ecumenical council on 25 January 1959, addressing a small group of cardinals at the Basilica of Saint Paul Outside the Walls; the announcement, delivered less than three months after his election, appears to have taken even senior churchmen by surprise. He framed the council's purpose around three related aims: renewing the internal life of the church, advancing the cause of Christian unity, and enabling the church to speak more effectively to contemporary social and political problems.
Formal preparation took nearly three years. An antepreparatory commission, appointed in May 1959, surveyed bishops, universities, and Curial departments for topics the council might address; in June 1960 this gave way to ten preparatory commissions, most of them attached to a department of the Roman Curia and chaired by its head, which drafted the texts, or schemas, that would form the basis of debate. The council was formally convoked by the apostolic constitution Humanae Salutis on 25 December 1961. The draft texts that emerged from this process varied considerably in character: those produced by the liturgical commission and by the Secretariat for Promoting Christian Unity leaned toward substantial renewal, while several others largely restated existing manualist theology and drew sharp criticism once debate opened on the council floor.
The council in session
John XXIII opened the council on 11 October 1962 with the address Gaudet Mater Ecclesia, delivered to an assembly beginning with a procession of some 2,400 bishops across St Peter's Square on a morning after heavy rain, watched by observers from other Christian communities and representatives of eighty-six governments. In the speech John XXIII distanced himself from what he called "prophets of doom" who saw only decline in the modern world, and urged the bishops to favour "the medicine of mercy" over condemnation in the documents they would produce.
The first session, running to 8 December 1962, quickly exposed the fault line that would run through the whole council; as a majority of bishops wanted the preparatory schemas substantially rewritten, while a Curial minority, including Cardinal Alfredo Ottaviani of the Holy Office, preferred to keep closer to the prepared texts. Reform-minded bishops who took a leading role in the debates included Cardinal Augustin Bea of the Secretariat for Promoting Christian Unity, Cardinal Achille Liénart of Lille, Cardinal Josef Frings of Cologne, Cardinal Bernardus Alfrink of Utrecht, Cardinal Leo Jozef Suenens of Mechelen-Brussels, and the Melkite Greek Catholic patriarch Maximos IV Sayegh; more conservative positions were associated with Ottaviani, Cardinal Michael Browne, Cardinal Giuseppe Siri of Genoa, Cardinal Ernesto Ruffini of Palermo, and Archbishop Marcel Lefebvre. Theologians serving as periti--expert advisers to the bishops--included several figures who had faced restrictions a decade earlier, among them de Lubac and Congar, alongside Karl Rahner, the American Jesuit John Courtney Murray, Edward Schillebeeckx, and the young Joseph Ratzinger, later Pope Benedict XVI.
John XXIII died on 3 June 1963, between the first and second sessions and therefore the council was suspended in accordance with Canon Law until the next pope decided whether or not it would continue. John's successor, Paul VI, confirmed the day after his election that the council would continue, that it would be his "chief work", and that it would reconvene that September.
The second session (29 September – 4 December 1963) produced the council's first completed document, the Constitution on the Sacred Liturgy. The third session (14 September – 21 November 1964) approved the Constitution on the Church and the decree on ecumenism, among others, and saw the admission of the first women auditors. The fourth and final session (14 September – 8 December 1965) was the busiest by far, promulgating eleven of the sixteen documents, including the two most contested: the declaration on religious freedom and the pastoral constitution on the Catholic Church in the modern world. The council closed on 8 December 1965 with ceremonies in St Peter's Square.
Documents of the council
The council's teaching is contained in sixteen documents: four constitutions, nine decrees, and three declarations. Most passed by overwhelming majorities; several of the more contested texts nonetheless drew opposition in the hundreds.
The Constitution on the Sacred Liturgy
Sacrosanctum Concilium (SC), the Constitution on the Sacred Liturgy, was the first document the council completed, approved on 4 December 1963. It described the liturgy as the "summit toward which the activity of the Church is directed" and the "font from which all her power flows" (SC 10), and made "full, conscious, and active participation" of the laity in worship its central demand (SC 14). A close reading of the text published in the Irish journal The Furrow for the constitution's fiftieth anniversary counts twelve separate uses of the phrase "active participation" across the document and treats it as the central idea of the whole text rather than an incidental theme.
The constitution called for scripture to be read more extensively at Mass, for rites to be simplified, and for a wider, though not exclusive, use of the vernacular languages: it specified that Latin should be preserved in the Latin rites while allowing that the vernacular might be introduced, particularly for the readings and the people's parts, where local bishops judged it useful (SC 36). The constitution did not itself prescribe how the reform would be carried out, and much of what became associated with the "new Mass"--Vernacular hymns, the priest facing the congregation, standing to receive Communion--was introduced afterward by implementing legislation rather than being mandated by the constitution's own text.
The Dogmatic Constitution on the Church
Lumen gentium (LG), promulgated 21 November 1964, described the church in a deliberately layered way, as mystery, as sacrament, as the People of God, and as a hierarchical communion, rather than adopting a single controlling image. Its teaching on the universal call to holiness held that every Christian, regardless of state or rank, is called to the fullness of Christian life and to the perfection of charity (LG 40); Paul VI later called this "the most characteristic and ultimate purpose of the teachings of the Council."
The constitution's third chapter, on episcopal collegiality, was its most contested section. It affirmed that bishops, in union with the pope, share collective responsibility for the whole Church (LG 22), a claim a substantial minority of Council Fathers feared would revive the fifteenth-century heresy of Conciliarism, which had held a general council to be superior in authority to the pope. To reassure that minority, a "Preliminary Note of Explanation" was added to the text on 16 November 1964, reaffirming that the bishops' college exercises authority only together with, and never without, the pope's consent; opposition to the chapter fell from 322 votes to 46 the following day, and reduced to just five in the final vote only 1 week later.
The Dogmatic Constitution on Divine Revelation
Dei verbum (DV) was promulgated 18 November 1965 --after the longest gestation of any conciliar document. It taught that scripture and tradition together form a single sacred deposit of God's word, whose authentic interpretation belongs to the church's teaching office rather than to private judgment. It described the study of scripture as "the soul of sacred theology" (DV 24) and encouraged the faithful to read the Bible directly, a marked change from a pre-conciliar discipline in which lay Bible reading, while never prohibited outright, was not widely encouraged.
The Pastoral Constitution on the Church in the Modern World
Gaudium et spes (GS), promulgated on the council's final day, 7 December 1965, was the longest of the sixteen documents and the only one addressed explicitly beyond the Catholic Church, to "the whole of humanity." It treated human dignity, marriage and the family, culture, economic life, and the political order, and in its closing chapter condemned as a crime against God and humanity itself any act of war "directed to the indiscriminate destruction of whole cities or vast areas with their inhabitants" (GS 80), language widely read afterward as a condemnation of the use of nuclear and other weapons of mass destruction against civilian populations.
The other decrees and declarations
Several decrees adjusted Church governance and formation in the direction the constitutions on the church and the liturgy had set. Christus Dominus applied the teaching on collegiality to the pastoral office of diocesan bishops; Presbyterorum ordinis was about the ministry and life of priests, including their relationship to the bishop, preaching, and pastoral care; and Optatam totius called for seminary formation to be adapted to local circumstances under the joint authority of episcopal conferences and Rome. A further pair of decrees addressed particular states of life: Perfectae caritatis called religious orders to renew themselves by returning to the spirit of their founders while adapting to changed circumstances, and Apostolicam actuositatem described the mission of lay Catholics in family life, work, politics, and charitable activity as flowing directly from baptism rather than being merely delegated by the clergy.