George Weigel’s first encounter with the Second Vatican Council was in person: As a boy, he visited St. Peter’s Basilica between the council’s sessions, when the vast benches for the prelates sat vacant.
Providentially, it seems, his own life has overlapped with the unfolding of this historic event. Eventually he gained sufficient personal interest and professional expertise to undertake an often-tried task of making sense of this towering moment in modern Church history.
With the full authority of his intellectual influence, Weigel embarks upon a task as timely as it might be controversial in To Sanctify the World: The Vital Legacy of Vatican II. He treads an insightful and positive middle path while debates concerning the latest ecumenical council surface everywhere from doctoral theses to internet comment boxes to papal airplane interviews.
After setting up the historical and theological context of the council’s origins, he provides a bold apologetic for the necessity of change by appealing to some of the eminent personalities of that era. Then he slogs through the primary documents with reference to their later import in execution.
All noteworthy groundbreaking innovations in the texts are carefully cataloged and their attendant difficulties are not ignored. The footnotes often provide more frank (and extended) analysis.
Weigel then muses on the various interpretative guides useful for unpacking the content of the documents. He asserts that Pope St. John XXIII’s opening address must be the preeminent interpretive tool through which we might later understand the texts the bishops produced directly afterward.
He posits that the key for understanding the council can be found in the 1985 synod that spurred production of the Catechism as an expression of the teaching office of the Church when clarity in orthodox theology was needed. The role of the various pontiffs is treated fairly but with no disrespect to their sometimes-saintly persons.
Throughout his 368-page odyssey, Weigel painstakingly bolsters the thesis of the theology of continuity over rupture, eventually with pontifical backing. Ultimately, the force of that argument requires that the Church’s focus remains Christocentric; this strikes him as the cause, means and goal of the Second Vatican Council.
The narrative is compellingly written for ecclesial wonks but is unwieldy for casual or leisurely interest. For most readers, the technical intrigue of the intersecting historical personalities and internal drama will hardly thrill. There is no escaping Weigel’s historian’s heart, with all its exhaustive drive.
This fresh investigation will be welcome to similarly conciliatory personalities, from scholars to pastors. His final success lies in compiling otherwise disparate information and often contentious analysis. Weigel’s effort represents the most up-to-date grappling with Vatican II as it enters its fourth generation of implementation, with a Church thoroughly modernized yet much of the council’s promise unfulfilled.
Father Tyron Tomson is the pastor of Lancaster St. Bernadette and Bremen St. Mary churches.