We journey in the wake of the Second Vatican Council, and the journey itself draws us deeper into the life of the Church. Thomas O’Loughlin takes stock of the Council’s legacy, 60 years on.

On 11 October 1962, the Second Vatican Council opened. It was expected by most of the bishops that it would ratify a series of documents prepared by the curia covering a raft of issues – but in essence this was seen as an exercise in tidying up a few loose ends that had been debated since 1870 – and the whole affair would be over by Christmas. The expectation of many bishops as they arrived in Rome in early October was that the Council would involve just that single trip. Some suspected that the feast of the Immaculate Conception on 8 December would be a most appropriate day on which such an event could end, and so the bishops (allowing some time to visit Gammarelli’s, the papal tailors, for some new kit) would be home well before Christmas.

Those bishops expecting a short, rather technical council were right about one thing: it did end on the feast of the Immaculate Conception – except that they got the year wrong. It ended on 8 December 1965 – three years and four ‘sessions’ later – making it the second longest council in the history of the western Church. Moreover, what we would now call its ‘outputs’ – formal documents ranging from binding constitutions to messages of goodwill – dwarf in volume, range, and complexity the productions of any previous council. Is there a reader of the Pastoral Review who does not have The Documents of Vatican II somewhere near to hand? And it is a hefty paperback!