The hope and dream of the creators of these study guides is that all the faithful of the Church--laity, religious, and clergy--become familiar with the Vatican II documents and better equipped to pass on the faith. That all the faithful become better informed ministers of the Church and help animate the world with the Christian Spirit. It is the dream of Pope John XXIII himself. May we recognize that, in the council's work.

Gaudium et Spes, Vatican II’s Pastoral Constitution on the Church in the Modern World, marked fundamental shifts in ethical methodology, in how we do ethics in the Catholic tradition, and in how we think about ethical and ecclesial issues in the Catholic Church in the modern world. On the document’s fiftieth anniversary, this book explores the historical origins of Gaudium et Spes, its impact on the Church’s ecclesial self-understanding, and its implications for doing Catholic theological ethics for the specific ethical issues of marriage, social justice, politics, and peacebuilding.The book engages in the ongoing communal discernment of the aggiornamento sought by the council’s convener, Pope John XXIII, seeking to bring the Church up to date in the twenty-first century.

The sixteen official documents—constitutions, decrees, and declarations—of the Second Vatican Council are now available from Liturgical Press in the most popular and widely used inclusive-language edition translated by Irish Dominican Austin Flannery (+October 21, 2008). As the worldwide Church continues to celebrate the fiftieth anniversary of the Council (1962–65), there is a great need in college classrooms and parish faith formation groups—as well as for individuals—to again have access to these documents in contemporary English. As Flannery wrote in his introduction to the 1996 edition, “The translation of the texts of the Vatican documents in the present volume differs from that in the previous publication in two respects. It has been very considerably revised and, in place, corrected. It is also, to a very large extent, in inclusive language. “I say ‘to a very large extent,’ because we have used inclusive language in passages about men and women but not, however, in passages about God, except where the use of the masculine pronoun was easily avoidable.”

The Council Fathers express a desire to engage in conversation with the entire human family so that the Church--whose role it is so scrutinize the signs of the times and interpret them in the light of the Gospel--can help solve contemporary problems. Acknowledging the positive and negative realities of this new age of human history, Church teachings about man's relationship to economics, poverty, social justice, culture, science and technology, and ecumenism are explored.

Gaudium Et Spes Gaudium et spes, the Pastoral Constitution on the Church in the Modern World, was one of the four constitutions resulting from the Second Vatican Council. The document is an overview of the Catholic Church's teachings about humanity's relationship to society, especially in reference to economics, poverty, social justice, culture, science, technology and ecumenism. Approved by a vote of 2,307 to 75 of the bishops assembled at the council, it was promulgated by Pope Paul VI on 7 December 1965, the day the council ended. The title is taken from its opening words in Latin "the joys and hopes".