2 PIOTR H. KOSICKI
aggiornamento, or updating, of the Roman Catholic Church, what
became known as the Second Vatican Council soon took on an
almost mythical stature—inside and outside the Catholic faith.
Opening on October 11, 1962, and closing on December 8, 1965,
the Council included four sessions that hosted a total of close to
3,000 bishops.
Entire bookshelves’ worth of memoirs, theological commen-
taries, and historical studies have recapitulated the major achieve-
ments of Vatican II, from introducing the vernacular liturgy to
engineering the Catholic Church’s embrace of modernity, Juda-
ism, ecumenism, and the laity. Called as an “ecumenical” council,
Vatican II was, by definition, concerned with the “unity of the
Church.” Among the many tasks this implied for Council fathers
was redress of the eleventh-century Great Schism between Latin
Christianity and Eastern Orthodoxy.3 This alone would require a
Herculean effort, yet it would be only one of many transformative
projects to grace the Council’s agenda.
Neither Catholic nor secular commentators have been bashful
about expressing their admiration for Vatican II’s achievements.
José Casanova has credited it with “the transformation of the Cath-
olic church from a state-centered to a society-centered institution.”
Meanwhile, Brian Porter-Szűcs has described the Council as the
site “where the word modernity itself was officially rehabilitated.”
- By Melissa J. Wilde’s count, “approximately 2,200 bishops voted on any one
vote, but over the four years of the Council almost 3,000 bishops participated because
of illness, death, and replacement”; Wilde, “How Culture Mattered at Vatican II: Colle-
giality Trumps Authority in the Council’s Social Movement Organizations,” American
Sociological Review 69, no. 4 (2004): 577. - For example, Augustin Bea, “The Council and Christian Unity,” Furrow 13,
no. 6 (1962): 311–26. “[W]e wish to study together what the Council can do, in the
present situation, to promote the unity of all those who, by baptism, are joined to
Christ”; ibid., 311. - José Casanova, Public Religions in the Modern World (Chicago: University of
Chicago Press, 1994), 71. - Brian Porter-Szűcs, Faith and Fatherland: Catholicism, Modernity, and Poland
(New York: Oxford University Press, 2011), 109.