INTRODUCTION 3Based on responses to questionnaires circulated to dioceses
and Catholic organizations all over the world in 1959 and 1960, pre-
paratory commissions assembled working documents. Although
the four sessions that followed the Council’s launching in Octo-
ber 1962 began with these schemata, the Council fathers quickly
broadened their agenda. Dissent emerged within the bishops’
ranks, and opposing factions called on the expertise of periti—re-
nowned theologians and philosophers invited to participate in
the Council.
Over the course of four years, two-month stretches of de-
bate were separated by nine-month “intersessions,” during which
ideas percolated, factions negotiated, and debates played out
among Catholics at the parish, diocesan, and national levels. Spe-
cially appointed commissions and subcommissions of Council
fathers drafted working conciliar schemata, revised as the Coun-
cil unfolded. Bishops deliberated and ultimately produced a final
corpus of documents for which the phrase “Vatican II” has be-
come a metonym.
The Council’s prolific textual output alone makes it unprece-
dented in the history of Christianity. Vatican II is responsible for
thirty-five volumes of acta in addition to the nineteen volumes
produced by its preparatory commissions, compared to just sev-
enteen altogether produced by the Council of Trent four hundred
years earlier. Vatican II yielded sixteen final documents, whose
total pagination is almost double the length of the final editions
left by Trent.7 As John W. O’Malley has put it, “Vatican II thus
- As John W. O’Malley describes the mood at the First Session, “just as the
Council of Trent and Vatican I had mandated revision and emendation of liturgi-
cal texts, experts were now unanimously convinced that, while holding fast to the
liturgical tradition of the church, similar changes in texts and rites were needed ‘to
accommodate them to the ethos and needs of our day.’ The aggiornamento theme
was clear”; O’Malley, What Happened at Vatican II (Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press
of Harvard University Press, 2008), 130. - O’Malley, “Vatican II: Did Anything Happen?” in Vatican II: Did Anything Hap-
pen? ed. David G. Schultenover (New York: Continuum, 2007), 60.