Was Vatican II “Pre-Conciliar”?
| Dr. James Hitchcock | IgnatiusInsight.com http://www.ignatiusinsight.com/features2008/jhitchcock_vatican2_feb08.asp In many ways the promise of the Second Vatican Council has not been fulfilled, and most of this failure is traceable to fundamental misunderstandings of its intentions, to the very meaning of the process called “renewal.” Some of this misunderstanding is sincere, but some has also been deliberate, on the part of people who know that the Council did not authorize the changes they wanted but who pretend that it did. Often unnoticed is the fact that there were two different ways of understanding the Council’s reforming efforts, approaches which are not contradictory but which do move in different directions. A common term for post-conciliar reform was “aggiornamento,” an Italian word meaning “updating,” which conveyed the need for the Church to adjust itself to historical change, to make evangelization more effective by relating to the needs of the modern world. Less commo
