book question: What Happened at Vatican II
  • marajoymarajoy
    Posts: 783
    has anyone read the book "What Happened at Vatican II" by John O'Malley?
    is it worth reading?
  • Randolph Nichols
    Posts: 398
    O'Malley's book is on my summer reading list. Before his death, Richard Neuhaus wrote a lengthy review for First Things. It's available on-line and very much worth reading. Harvard University Press, publisher of the book, gives this cryptic description: "Remarkably enough, this is the first book, solidly based on official documentation, to give a brief, readable account of the council from the moment Pope John XXIII announced it on January 25, 1959, until its conclusion on December 8, 1965."
  • chonakchonak
    Posts: 9,234
    Here is a link to Fr. Neuhaus' review.
  • Jeffrey TuckerJeffrey Tucker
    Posts: 3,624
    This looks outstanding. What really intrigues me, and what has not been well documented at all, are the years 1965-1970. This is period of chaos, confusion, betrayal, catastrophe, etc. The right book would make chilling reading.
  • rich_enough
    Posts: 1,051
    Neuhaus summarizes O'Malley's book thus:

    "What Happened at Vatican II is a 372-page brief for the party of novelty and discontinuity. Its author comes very close to saying explicitly what is frequently implied: that the innovationists practiced subterfuge, and they got away with it."

    I'd be afraid that the book has a very large ax to grind. This must be the same Fr. John O'Malley who wrote the classic case for the hermeneutic of rupture in the early 1970s for Theological Studies where he argues that seeing the Council in any other way is the result of an outmoded historical consciousness.

    Sam Schmitt
  • Daniel Bennett PageDaniel Bennett Page
    Posts: 837
    Yes, one and the same. The basic attitude is, "I'm a very smart Jesuit and understand things far better than you do. Leave your silly little dated interpretations out of this and let the true intellectuals tell you what it all means." It's intellectual vanguardism of a particularly narrow and prideful sort. Indeed, loyalty to one's own intellectual attainment and, even, enlightenment comes to replace loyalty to the Magisterium and, even, the things it holds holy. It's an example of what's gone terribly wrong on much of (putatively) Catholic academia.
  • eft94530eft94530
    Posts: 1,577
    I have done only a little bit of during-the-council reading.
    Liturgically, it is less what happened at Vatican II,
    and more of what happened after Vatican II.

    JT: not been well documented at all, are the years 1965-1970.

    I have several times suggested the following
    which gives a four-or-more-pages monthly unfolding of the USA history.

    Thirty-Five Years of the BCL Newsletter 1965-2000
    by USCCB
    http://www.usccbpublishing.org/productdetails.cfm?PC=294
  • Elizabeth Poel
    Posts: 44
    Have you not heard of The Rhine Flows into the Tiber: A History of Vatican II, by Fr. Ralph M. Wiltgen, SVD- - historian, journalist, author, and eyewitness to Vat. II? A very good book, published in 1967.
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