INTRODUCTION 19The volume thus understands Vatican II not merely as time spent
by bishops, auditors, and periti in session in the autumn of 1962,
1963, 1964, and 1965, but rather as the sum-total of the Catholic
experience of aggiornamento in preparation for and surrounding
the Council as well as the living witness that has been its legacy.53
John XXIII, drawing on Matthew 16:3, wrote in his 1963 encycli-
cal Pacem in terris of the “signs of the times,” to which the Council
must serve as the Church’s response.54
It is therefore crucial to examine Vatican II in the fullness of
its historical context.55 The Council began at a moment of global
crisis framed by the construction of the Berlin Wall, the decolo-
nization of sub-Saharan Africa, the end of French military in-
volvement in Algeria, and the nonviolent resolution of the Cu-
ban Missile Crisis. In the middle of the Council’s Second Session,
U.S. president John F. Kennedy was assassinated. Two months
before the Fourth Session’s opening, the U.S. Congress adopted
the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution, authorizing American involve-
ment in what became the Vietnam War; one month into that
session, Nikita Khrushchev resigned as Soviet Communist Party
general secretary.56 As Council peritus Hans Küng wrote during
- Joseph A. Komonchak has described the Council as a historical “ ‘aggregate
of little facts’ called ‘Vatican II’ ”; Komonchak, “Vatican II as an ‘Event,’ ” in Vatican II,
ed. Schultenover, 36. - “You know how to judge the appearance of the sky, but you cannot judge
the signs of the times”; Mt 16:3, in The New American Bible, rev. ed. (2011), at http://
http://www.usccb.org/bible; accessed March 3, 2014. French Dominican theologian Marie-
Dominique Chenu—one of the leading periti at the Council—wrote in 1964 that
signs of the times represented “signs of the compatibility of the Gospels with hu-
man hope”; Chenu, “I segni dei tempi,” in La chiesa nel mondo contemporaneo, ed.
Enzo Giammancheri (Brescia: Queriniana, 1966), 97. - José Casanova described it thus: “It is no longer a question of the church
teaching the world eternal truths and upholding the objective moral order onto-
logically inscribed in natural law, but of the church accepting the task of having to
appropriate the meaning of the Gospel in and through historical interpretation”;
Casanova, Public Religions in the Modern World, 72–73. - On the context, see, for example, Gerard J. DeGroot, The Sixties Unplugged: