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R e v i e w
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This Rock
Volume 15, Number 10
 December 2004 
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Only Some of the Voices from the Council
More than forty years after the beginning of the Second Vatican Council (1962–5), a number of works of reminiscence and revision are beginning to appear. But there is still no good general history of the Council written from the perspective of the post-conciliar years, which turned out to be so very different from what the Council fathers had envisaged. Such a general history is badly needed to replace the "quicky" histories written during or in the immediate aftermath of the Council by journalists such as Henri Fesquet, Fr. Ralph M. Wiltgen, S.V.D., or the pseudonymous "Xavier Rynne" (Fr. Francis X. Murphy, C.SS.R.). The reader today who would like to know about the Council still has to depend upon these and similar histories written too close to the event to allow for proper perspective.
Thus, the appearance of a book such as Voices from the Council is welcome in that it provides a wealth of interesting material about the Council based on the memories of some of those who were there. The book consists of interviews of a number of the Council fathers themselves and some of their periti ("experts") and theologians, as well as a representative selection of media people who covered the Council and "separated brethren" invited as observers. The editors are meticulous in providing dates, biographical information, and the like. The interview format makes for smooth and easy reading. At the same time the book contains many interesting personal remembrances and comments that help bring the Council to life.
But the book cannot be unreservedly recommended, especially for the reader who does not already know a fair amount about the Council. Taken by itself, the book gives a somewhat misleading picture of the Council as a whole. For one thing, the editors (like the publisher) are primarily interested in the liturgy, and hence both the selections of those interviewed as well as those conducting the interviews are weighted heavily toward liturgists and liturgical musicians. Even many of the bishops covered have been associated primarily with liturgical questions in the course of their careers. This perhaps enhances the value of the book in the eyes of those primarily interested in Vatican II’s thorough-going liturgical reform.
But the fact remains that Vatican II represents far more than just liturgical reform alone. The editors and interviewers even tend to recognize this, for instance, in the recurring question of what Vatican II’s most important document was. It is significant how many times the Council’s great dogmatic constitution on the Church, Lumen Gentium, is mentioned in this connection. Still, there is no getting around the emphasis placed on the liturgy in this book, sometimes to the detriment of some of the Council’s other great themes. Thus, the book adequately represents only some of the voices from the Council.
Another deficiency lies in the book’s general obliviousness to the degree to which the post-conciliar era diverged from the true aims of the Council as set forth in its official documents. Blessed Pope John XXIII is praised repeatedly for his strictures against "prophets of doom" and his preference for the "medicine of mercy" as opposed to the "medicine of severity," as if the post-conciliar era, contrary to the hopes of John XXIII, had not turned out to be an era of widespread dissent from Church teachings and disobedience to Church rulings. A dissenter, the former priest Gregory Baum, is interviewed as if his own disagreement with important Council decisions somehow qualifies him to give a valid interpretation of the Council. Hans Küng is blandly identified as a "Swiss Roman Catholic theologian and author," as if the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith had not, in 1979, officially declared that he could no longer be considered a Catholic theologian.
In brief, this book is worth reading for some of the interesting material it contains, but it should be approached with caution, particularly as regards some of its theological judgments.
—Kenneth D. Whitehead
Voices from the Council
Edited by Michael R. Prendergast and M. D. Ridge
Oregon Catholic Press
328 pages
$29.95
ISBN: 1579921191
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