How Should We Remember Vatican II?

What happened at Vatican II and the significance of its decisions is strongly contested in the Church today. There is a struggle over the memory of the Council. It is suggested that two hermeneutics are in use, continuity versus discontinuity. On the one hand, it is said that privileging the ‘event’...

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Bibliographic Details
Main Author: Sweeney, James (Author)
Format: Electronic Article
Language:English
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Published: Cambridge University Press 2009
In: New blackfriars
Year: 2009, Volume: 90, Issue: 1026, Pages: 251-260
Further subjects:B Discontinuity
B Memory
B Vatican II
B Continuity
B Hermeneutics
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Summary:What happened at Vatican II and the significance of its decisions is strongly contested in the Church today. There is a struggle over the memory of the Council. It is suggested that two hermeneutics are in use, continuity versus discontinuity. On the one hand, it is said that privileging the ‘event’ of the Council as the interpretative key for reading its documents leads to an ideological distortion and introduces discontinuity with tradition. On the other hand, it is held that the continuity thesis plays down the real changes the Council introduced and, while unexceptional as a theological principle, it is being deployed as a polemical ideology, restricting necessary change. This article distinguishes between theological principle and experience in relation to continuity/discontinuity. It argues that the event of the Council is to be found as much in its effects in the Church at large as what took place in Rome. It analyses the phenomenology of change at both levels and concludes that the tensions between the need for continuity and the impulses of discontinuity need to be recognised and worked with rather than repressed.
ISSN:1741-2005
Contains:Enthalten in: New blackfriars
Persistent identifiers:DOI: 10.1111/j.1741-2005.2008.01271.x