Attempts to bridge the divide in the Catholic Church between traditionalists and the mainstream Church.

The year 2015 marked the fiftieth anniversary of the end of the Second Vatican Council, which aimed to align the Church with the modern world. Over the last five decades, women religious have engaged with the council’s reforms with unprecedented enthusiasm, far exceeding the expectations of the Church. Addressing how Canadian women religious envisioned and lived out the changes in religious life brought on by a pluralistic and secularizing world, Vatican II and Beyond analyzes the national organization of female and male congregations, the Canadian Religious Conference, and the lives of two individual sisters: visionary congregational leader Alice Trudeau and social justice activist Mary Alban. This book focuses on the new transnational networks, feminist concepts, professionalization of religious life, and complex political landscapes that emerged during this period of drastic transition as women religious sought to reconstruct identities, redefine roles, and signify vision and mission at both the personal and collective levels. Following women religious as they encountered new meanings of faith in their congregations, the Church, and society at large, Vatican II and Beyond demonstrates that the search for a renewed vision was not just a response to secularization, but a way to be reborn as Catholic women.

From 1962 to 1965, in perhaps the most important religious event of the twentieth century, the Second Vatican Council met to plot a course for the future of the Roman Catholic Church. After thousands of speeches, resolutions, and votes, the Council issued sixteen official documents on topics ranging from divine revelation to relations with non-Christians. In many ways, though, the real challenges began after the council was over and Catholics began to argue over the interpretation of the documents. Many analysts perceived the Council's far-reaching changes as breaks with Church tradition, and soon this became the dominant bias in the American and other media, which lacked the theological background to approach the documents on their own terms. In Vatican II: Renewal Within Tradition, an international team of theologians offers a different reading of the documents from Vatican II. The Council was indeed putting forth a vision for the future of the Church, but that vision was grounded in two millennia of tradition. Taken together, these essays demonstrate that Vatican II's documents are a development from an established antecedent in the Roman Catholic Church. Each chapter contextualizes Vatican II teachings within that rich tradition. The resulting book is an indispensable and accessible companion to the Council's developments, one that focuses on theology and transcends the mass-media storyline of "liberal" versus "conservative."

Winner of a first-place award for a first time author and second-place in popular presentation of the faith from the Catholic Media Association. During the past five decades, the Second Vatican Council has been alternately celebrated or maligned for its supposed break with tradition and embrace of the modern world. But what if we’ve gotten it all wrong? Have Catholics—both those who embrace the spirit of Vatican II and those who regard it with suspicion—misunderstood what the council was really about? Fr. Blake Britton discovered the truth and beauty of the council while he was in seminary and he has witnessed firsthand the power of its teachings in the life of his own parish. In Reclaiming Vatican II—a partnership between Ave Maria Press and Word on Fire Catholic Ministries—Britton presses beyond the political narrative foisted upon the post-conciliar Church and contends that Vatican II was neither conservative nor liberal, but something much more beautiful and challenging. Britton clears up misconceptions about the council and reveals how—when properly understood and applied—it fosters a richer experience of being in the Church. Britton says Vatican II promotes a radical return to the Church Fathers and the Scriptures, holding both a commitment to tradition and the need for constant renewal in life-giving balance, recenters the Church on sacred liturgy and encourages both active participation and genuine encounter with transcendence, and charts a clear path for the Church’s renewal and empowers it for evangelism and transformative engagement with the world. Britton invites all Catholics to step beyond the polarization and embrace Vatican II as one of our greatest resources for being in the Church in a way that is faithful, engaged, and effective if we answer its radical call to worship and renewal.

On an otherwise ordinary Sunday morning in 1964, millions of Roman Catholics around the world experienced history. For the first time in centuries, they attended masses that were conducted mostly in their native tongues. This occasion marked only the first of many profound changes to emanate from the Second Vatican Council (1962-1965). Known popularly as Vatican II, it would soon give rise to the most far-reaching religious transformation since the Reformation. In this groundbreaking work of cultural and historical sociology, Melissa Wilde offers a new explanation for this revolutionary transformation of the Church. Drawing on newly available sources--including a collection of interviews with the Council's key bishops and cardinals, and primary documents from the Vatican Secret Archive that have never before been seen by researchers--Wilde demonstrates that the pronouncements of the Council were not merely reflections of papal will, but the product of a dramatic confrontation between progressives and conservatives that began during the first days of the Council. The outcome of this confrontation was determined by a number of factors: the Church's decline in Latin America; its competition and dialogue with other faiths, particularly Protestantism, in northern Europe and North America; and progressive clerics' deep belief in the holiness of compromise and their penchant for consensus building. Wilde's account will fascinate not only those interested in Vatican II but anyone who wants to understand the social underpinnings of religious change.

Gerald O'Collins explores the full scope of the positive teaching by the Second Vatican Council (1962-65) on other living faiths, illustrating how the Council made a startling advance in official Catholic teaching and how this teaching was borne out in the work of Pope John Paul II and Jacques Dupuis.