Second Vatican Council

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 Church, divine revelation, the Church's relationship to the modern world, ecumenism, religious freedom, and the 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...