The most respected translation of the Vatican II documents is available on CD-ROM. This edition contains the 16 original constitutions and decrees and 49 documents issued after the close of the Council.

Vatican I and Vatican II represent two of the three ecumenical councils in modern times, yet relatively few studies have sought to understand their relation to one another. In fact, the councils are often positioned as mutually exclusive so that one must choose either Vatican I’s or Vatican II’s presentations of church and ecclesial authority. Failing to understand the relationship between these councils inhibits the church’s self-understanding and risks misinterpreting key aspects of its own tradition; further, it limits the church’s ability to teach effectively on topics of concern to modern women and men, such as authority, freedom, and ecclesiology. Vatican I and Vatican II: Councils in the Living Tradition uses the questions of what, why,and how the councils taught to frame and demonstrate significant points of continuity, complementarity, and difference between them. It argues that only by seeing both Vatican I and Vatican II as communicating vital dimensions of the Christian faith can the church’s living tradition be fully appreciated and speak meaningfully to modern Christian women and men.?

This third volume of the History of Vatican II describes the period during which the Second Vatican Council began to assume its mature and distinct character. With the succession of Pope Paul VI to Pope John XXIII the Council had a new head. With the revisions of texts accomplished during the first intersession the council had a new agenda more in line with the desires of the majority that had emerged during the first period. With the appointment of four Moderators the Council had a new leadership. The ecumenical commitment of the Council became visible, not only in the discussion of a decree on ecumenism, but in the visit of Paul VI to the Holy Land. During the second intersession the work of the Council continued, the most important features of which were the beginnings of the liturgical reform, the revision of the major texts still to be considered or voted on, and a plan to reduce many other texts to simple sets of propositions that was designed to make it possible for the Council to end with the third period.

The Second Vatican Council is the single most influential event in the 20th century history of the Catholic Church. The book analyzes the relationship between the Council and the "Ostpolitik" of the Vatican through the history of the Hungarian presence at Vatican II. Pope John XXIII, elected in 1958, was a catalyst. The pope thought that his most urgent task was to renew contacts with the Church behind the iron curtain. Hungarian participation at the Council was also made possible by the new, pragmatic model in Hungarian church politics. After the crushing of the 1956 Revolution, churches in Hungary thought that the regime would last and were willing to compromise. Vatican II – in the perspective of Hungary – was not primarily an ecclesial event, but it remained closely joined to the negotiations between the Holy See and the Kádár regime: during the Council Hungary became the experimental laboratory of the Vatican's new eastern policy. Was it a Vatican decision or a Soviet instruction? Fejérdy suggests that it was a decision of the Holy See.