Nonetheless, he identified further reasons why Vatican II was necessary and why its teaching was essential for the Church’s life going forward: In the years immediately after the Council, Joseph Ratzinger (the future Pope Benedict XVI), who was one of the three most influential theologians at Vatican II, knew that the Council’s reception was imperfect and its implementation even more imperfect. In 1952, he published a small book in German, Razing the Bastions: On the Church in This Age, in which he worried that the great Catholic tradition had become fossilized and had “slipped out of the living center of holiness.” The “great salvage operation” of the Counter-Reformation had been necessary, Balthasar argued, but it was over, and the Church had to get out of its defensive crouch and get on with offering humanity the truth of God in Christ. Then there was the Swiss polymath-theologian Hans Urs von Balthasar. Giovanni Battista Montini (the future Pope Paul VI) in these no-nonsense terms: “In this suffocating atmosphere of unctuous and arrogant imbecility, perhaps a scream - chaotic but Christian - would do some good.” In 1953, however, he found the atmosphere in the Holy Office, the Suprema among curial offices, insufferable. Giuseppe De Luca was a stalwart churchman who had drafted the Holy Office decree placing the books of 1947 Nobel Prize-winner André Gide on the Index of Forbidden Books. That, however, was not the view of some quite orthodox Catholic leaders in the decade before Vatican II. That question is often raised today by young Catholics who, unsettled by the excessive ecclesiastical air turbulence over the past decade and generally ill-informed about the pre-conciliar Church, imagine that everything in Catholicism was copacetic until John XXIII made the fatal mistake of summoning an ecumenical council. It also made me ponder why the Council was necessary. Writing my new book, To Sanctify the World: The Vital Legacy of Vatican II (Basic Books), afforded me the welcome opportunity to dig into the Council’s 16 texts and the many fine commentaries on them.
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