His main point is that Vatican II differed in its way of thinking from every other doctrine-setting gathering in the church’s history, from the Council of Nicaea in 325 A.D. to the First Vatican Council in 1869. His preferred word for this is “style,” though sometimes he says “method,” “approach” or “language.” Vatican II was distinctive, he contends, in its attention to the liberty of the human person and to the connectedness of the human community. The new spirit was to affirm, not condemn; to be open, not closed; to focus on ideals to live by, not things forbidden.
“Vatican II was unprecedented,” he writes, “for the notice it took of changes in society at large and for its refusal to see them in globally negative terms as devolutions from an older and happier era.” He says the council underscored the authority of bishops while, at the same time, trying to make them “less authoritarian.” For bishops, priests and everybody in authority, it recommended the ideal of the servant-leader. It upheld the legitimacy of modern methods in the study of the Bible. It condemned anti-Semitism and discrimination “on the basis of race, color, condition in life, or religion.” It called on Catholics to cooperate with people of all faiths, or no faith, in projects aimed at the common good. And it supplied “the impetus,” O’Malley writes, “for later official dialogues of the Catholic Church with other churches….”
But to my thinking, O’Malley’s approach is a little too lacking in irony, a little too blind to the council’s negative effects and much too blind to errors committed by progressives in pursuit of noble goals: Translations of council documents (and important texts of the Scriptures) were so ideologically cast that they distorted the meaning. The abruptness of changes in the sacred liturgy unloosed a sense of instability and make-it-up-yourself theology. In some places, there followed a “me decade” of “cafeteria Catholics” who felt they could pick and choose from church doctrines.
It can be equally fascinating to look at how the Council deliberations played out once the bishops returned home to their dioceses, especially as cafeteria Catholicism proved to be no respecter of theology. The damage left in the wake of the “cultural revolution” is amply demonstrated in Michael Jones’ classic study of John Cardinal Krol and the Archdiocese of Philadelphia. Jones, incidentally, is not sparing of the Episcopal role in some of the events that he discusses. If you want something a little less polemical (even though I agree with much of what Jones writes), I would humbly recommend my own oeuvre on the fortunes of one small southwestern diocese that got into renewal in a big way.
[url=http://tinyurl.com/RoadtoRenewal]Academic Review[/url]
There is also this interesting take by a former Oklahoma resident who wrote the first in-depth study of Oklahoma Catholicism.
[url=http://catholicandreformed.blogspot.com/2008/09/thomas-elton-brown-reflcects-on-road-to.html]Personal Review[/url]