In the opening weeks of 2026, Pope Leo XIV made it unmistakably clear that the Second Vatican Council remains central to the church’s future.
Opening an extraordinary consistory of cardinals, he returned to Lumen Gentium’s vision of the Catholic Church as the light of Christ for the world, calling bishops to embrace the council’s mandate with renewed unity and charity. In subsequent General Audiences, he urged the faithful to return seriously to the council’s documents, beginning with Dei Verbum, and warned against allowing Vatican II to dissolve into slogans.
This is not a mere exercise in papal nostalgia. It reflects a sober recognition that the council’s impact is still unfolding. Vatican II has been endlessly cited, selectively invoked, and fiercely contested, yet its real achievement has too often been obscured by ecclesial politics that either canonise or caricature it. What we need now is a more mature engagement that recognises both what the council genuinely gave the church and where it left work still to be done.
Some regard Vatican II as a harmful rupture, blaming it for doctrinal confusion and subsequent ecclesial decline. Others elevate it as a revolution that rendered what came before obsolete. Still others minimise it altogether, insisting that little of substance really changed.
All three approaches distort the council’s reality. Vatican II did not abandon doctrine. It rearticulated enduring dimensions of the one unchanging faith, while renewing how that faith is understood and taught.
It reaffirmed the universal call to holiness, deepened the theology of episcopal collegiality, clarified the vocation of the laity, renewed the church’s missionary self-understanding, and retrieved a richer biblical and patristic vision of ecclesial life. These were substantive achievements that reshaped the church’s pastoral imagination and practice.
At the same time, to acclaim the council uncritically is to overlook the genuine tensions built into its texts. These tensions arose from its method of dialogue, the inevitable politics arising over four years of debate, and the practical demands of compromise.
As Pope John XXIII made clear from the outset, Vatican II was intentionally pastoral, choosing persuasion over condemnation. The faith itself remained intact, he insisted, but its presentation required renewal.
That choice enabled many of the council’s achievements, but it also meant that some questions were left open, some formulations were deliberately imprecise, and some theological syntheses remained unfinished.
The council therefore assumed ongoing theological work, careful interpretation, and responsible integration into the church’s life rather than mechanical repetition of its texts. It is for this reason that Pope Leo XIV renews the summons once heard by his great inspiration, St Augustine: tolle, lege, pick up and read.
In avoiding precise doctrinal or juridical determinations on contested questions, the council at times employed language that was intentionally open. In some cases, this openness proved fruitful. In others, it invited ambiguity that was later filled, at times irresponsibly, by theologians, pastors, and commentators.
One need only consider episcopal collegiality. Lumen Gentium powerfully retrieved the shared responsibility of bishops for the universal church, yet without fully specifying how this collegiality was to be exercised in relation to papal primacy. Subsequent clarification and development were therefore necessary, lest collegiality be overstated as a rival authority or reduced to symbolism.
In such cases, the council was sometimes asked to bear claims it never made. Its openness to growth and development was occasionally mistaken for doctrinal indeterminacy. The church’s task today is not to force answers where the council chose restraint, nor to judge that restraint as weakness but to continue, faithfully and thoughtfully, the work the council intentionally left us to discern.
This does not weaken Vatican II’s authority. It exercised the church’s ordinary magisterium and continues to make serious claims upon the conscience of believers. The council also was the product of sustained theological labour, shaped by decades, if not centuries, of engagement with Scripture, the Fathers, and the great currents of the tradition by French and German theologians in particular.
To read Dei Verbum, for example, without grasping the theological vision that generated it is to flatten its meaning, reducing the council either to rigid propositions or to an amorphous “spirit of Vatican II” detached from substance.
Did anything happen at Vatican II? Yes, though not everything that some later claimed. The council marked a genuine turning point, moving beyond a Counter-Reformation framework as the dominant lens for Catholic self-understanding. In doing so, it retrieved insights from earlier centuries of the tradition that had been partially eclipsed.
Here in Australia, the unfinished assimilation of Vatican II is not an abstract question. It is evident in our struggles with ecclesial identity, authority, participation, and mission in a post-Christian society. We have often inherited the council’s language more readily than its theological depth, and its aspirations more quickly than its discipline.
If Vatican II is to bear fruit here, it will demand more than appeals to its texts or invocations of its “spirit”. It will need theological seriousness, episcopal clarity, and renewed confidence that fidelity and reform are not opposites. Only then will the council be fully realised, not as myth or menace, but as a summons for us to think, discern, and act as a missionary church.
