20 PIOTR H. KOSICKI
the First Session, “So much that was decisive in the first ses-
sion of the Second Vatican Council did not happen in the aula.”57
This was as true of the Council taken as a whole as of any single
session.
One of the crucial misconceptions that this volume seeks to
correct regarding Vatican II is that historians can exhaust the
Council’s intellectual and theological achievements simply by ex-
amining the documents published during its final session in 1965,
from Nostra aetate’s embrace of Judaism and Apostolicam actuosi-
tatem’s insistence on lay involvement in the life of the Church to
Gaudium et spes’s celebrated embrace of the “modern world.”58 In
addition to the sixteen documents produced by the Council, two
encyclicals published in the years of the Second Vatican Council—
but not while the Council was in session—also play an important
role in this volume: Pacem in terris (issued on April 11, 1963) and
Ecclesiam suam (August 6, 1964).
In Pacem in terris, imagining the brink of destruction to which
the previous year’s Cuban Missile Crisis had brought the world,
John XXIII called on American and Soviet Cold War camps alike
to “co-operate in the effort to banish fear and the anxious expec-
tation of war from men’s minds. But this requires that the funda-
mental principles upon which peace is based in today’s world be
replaced by an altogether different one, namely, the realization
that true and lasting peace among nations cannot consist in the
possession of an equal supply of armaments but only in mutual
A Kaleidoscope History of a Disorderly Decade (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University
Press, 2008).
- Hans Küng, The Council in Action: Theological Reflections on the Second Vatican
Council, trans. Cecily Hastings (New York: Sheed and Ward, 1963), v. - On the origins of Nostra aetate, see John Connelly, From Enemy to Brother:
The Revolution in Catholic Teaching on the Jews, 1933–1965 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard
University Press, 2012). On the origins and broader context of Apostolicam actuosita-
tem, see Paul Lakeland, The Liberation of the Laity: In Search of an Accountable Church
(New York: Continuum, 2003). On Gaudium et spes, see Norman Tanner, The Church
and the World: Gaudium et Spes, Inter Mirifica (Mahwah, N.J.: Paulist Press, 2005).