Il Concilio Vaticano II e i suoi protagonisti alla luce degli archivi ed. by Philippe Chenaux and Kiril Plamen Kartaloff (review)

Reviewed by: Il Concilio Vaticano II e i suoi protagonisti alla luce degli archivi ed. by Philippe Chenaux and Kiril Plamen Kartaloff Jared Wicks S.J. Il Concilio Vaticano II e i suoi protagonisti alla luce degli archivi. Edited by Philippe Chenaux and Kiril Plamen Kartaloff. [Ponticifio Comitato di Scienze Storiche, Atti e Documenti, Vol. 46] (Vatican City: Libreria Editrice Vaticana, 2017. Pp. 583. € 48. ISBN 978-8-826-60005-5.) The Pontifical Committee for Historical Sciences collaborated with the Pontifical Lateran University's Center for Research and Study of Vatican Council II to hold two international scholarly congresses observing the fiftieth anniversary of the Second Vatican Council. The first congress, in 2012, featured twenty-five papers reporting from different locales on the archives of the Council Fathers' papers, telling of their extent, their inventories, and their accessibility to scholars. Lateran University Press brought out these papers in 2015, edited by Philippe Chenaux, Director of the Lateran's research center, under the title, Il Concilio Vaticano II alla luce degli archivi dei padri conciliari. The second congress took place in 2015, with its thirty-four papers being published in 2017 in the volume presented here, under the editorship of Chenaux and Kiril Plamen Kartaloff, Bulgarian member of the Pontifical Committee, who suggest in their title a broader topic, the "protagonists" of Vatican II. A volume collecting thirty-four congress papers obliges the reviewer to do a good deal of cataloging of contents, often with only brief hints of themes of particular value. Along the way, however, arguments of broader import do emerge, which deserve note. Statements on the hermeneutics of the Council, for instance, come at the beginning and the end of the 2017 volume. The brief opening Preface by the two editors states that their scholarly congress views Vatican II, along with Pope [End Page 816] Benedict XVI, as framed by "a proper and fruitful hermeneutic of reform and continuity" in the Church. Thus, their volume stands in contrast with an erroneous "hermeneutic of discontinuity and rupture." The latter approach, treating Vatican II as an "event" which brings about an "epoch-making transition" in the Church, disseminates confusion, which they see sown by the five-volume History of Vatican Council II, published from 1995 to 2006, directed by Giuseppe Alberigo (1926–2007) and edited in English by Joseph A. Komonchak. The 2015 congress practiced fairness by giving place to a paper now in the resulting volume by Alberigo's disciple, Alberto Melloni, which formulates a spirited apologia for the other approach, on which this review will report below. The hermeneutical theme was taken up early in our volume by John O'Malley, S.J. (1927–2022), who deconstructs the cliché by which Vatican II is qualified as a "pastoral" council standing in contrast with earlier predominantly "doctrinal" councils. O'Malley scores a major point by recalling how the Council of Trent is remembered by most as teaching crucial doctrines on the relation of grace and free choice in justification as well as on each of the seven sacraments—while many also completely forget Trent's dozen documents of reform decrees of decisive importance for the ways pastoral care was provided in the modern Catholic Church. Then, in a passage of elegant remembering, O'Malley recalls the doctrines formulated by Vatican II, to conclude in a reconstruction, by which Vatican II's central action was to issue documents in which doctrine and practice compenetrate each other, while illuminating truths of existential import for believers and communities called to holiness and seeking to live out their Christian vocations in our world. Moving on to the great block of the 2015 papers, we note that seventeen of the scholars reporting in 2012 on the extent and condition of archives in different nations returned to the 2015 congress to present findings from their sources in the papers of the 2017 volume, at times with dense and illuminating results. A striking example is Gilles Routhier's account based on the archived letters of several French Canadian bishops who tell of how they were gaining day by day at Vatican II a fresh awareness of the Church's catholicity, growing out of all their informal...

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