Second Vatican Council

The event

Pope John XXIII, elected in 1958 at age 76 and widely expected to preside over a brief, uneventful "caretaker" pontificate, surprised the Catholic world by announcing in January 1959 his intention to convene an ecumenical council — the church's first since the First Vatican Council nearly a century earlier — aimed at bringing about what he called aggiornamento, an "updating" or renewal of the church's engagement with the modern world.

The Second Vatican Council opened in October 1962 with more than 2,000 bishops from around the world in attendance, along with, notably, official observers from numerous other Christian traditions including Eastern Orthodox and various Protestant denominations, reflecting the council's markedly more ecumenical orientation than earlier Catholic councils.

Across four working sessions (John XXIII died in June 1963, midway through the first session, and the council continued under his successor, Pope Paul VI), the council produced sixteen major documents addressing a sweeping range of subjects: the introduction of vernacular languages alongside Latin in the Mass and other liturgical rites; a renewed emphasis on scripture and lay participation in church life; a redefined theological understanding of the church itself as "the People of God"; formal statements affirming religious liberty as a fundamental human right; and significant new declarations on relations with other Christian denominations (Unitatis Redintegratio) and non-Christian religions, including a historically significant repudiation of the notion of collective Jewish responsibility for the death of Christ (Nostra Aetate).

The council's reforms produced profound and, in some respects, still-contested changes within Catholic religious life over the following decades — welcomed by many as a necessary and overdue renewal, while some more traditionalist Catholics viewed certain changes, particularly to the liturgy, as excessive or destabilizing — but Vatican II is nonetheless widely regarded by historians across the theological spectrum as the single most significant event in Catholic Christianity since the Council of Trent four centuries earlier.

Other witnesses

• Documents of the Second Vatican Council (full texts, Vatican archives)
• Nostra Aetate (1965)

Further reading

• Christian History Magazine 157: Vatican II — free full issue
• The Documents of the Second Vatican Council — primary sources, official texts