Catholics before Vatican II lived in a world emotionally and even geographically apart from non-Catholics and non-believers. The church was identified as a European institution embedded in the cultures of the traditionally Catholic countries of Southern and Eastern Europe brought to North America and Australia by immigration. Highly authoritarian and hierarchically organized, the Catholic Church provided a universe largely at odds not only with Protestants but also with “modern” developments in government, sciences, and philosophy.

Vatican II laid theological foundations for understanding the church as the Christian faithful through its emphases on baptism and the work of the Holy Spirit. These foundations include ecclesial metaphors that speak to both unity and diversity among the faithful; the faithful’s participation in the mystery of the incarnation and the paschal mystery; and God’s calling of the faithful to the immanent and eschatological work of building the kingdom.

The Second Vatican Council’s vision for the liturgy was rooted in a deep appreciation for the intimate relationship between a people’s culture and that people’s fruitful participation in the liturgical life of the Church. By examining the conciliar documents’ treatment of the liturgy and tracing the history of post-conciliar liturgical reform, this chapter argues that cultural diversity in the liturgy is necessary for the liturgy to serve the life of the church.

This essay proposes that the ecclesiology of the Second Vatican Council is best characterized as a “communion-in-mission.” A first section shows that the council was a “missionary council” from start to finish. A second section argues that the council worked from a renewed understanding of mission that was rooted in the Mission of God and inclusive of inculturation, justice, and dialogue. The final section suggests that there is a growing reception of the council’s missionary ecclesiology, expressed succinctly in Pope Francis’s description of the church as a “community of missionary disciples.”

The Second Vatican saw a radical shift in the Catholic Church’s attitude toward other religions. This chapter examines the preconciliar attitudes and events that led to interreligious dialogue featuring as a major pastoral teaching of the post-Vatican II church. The reception of the council’s teachings is examined by the witness of the popes since the 1960s and the transformation in how Catholics of the postconciliar church relate with their neighbors of other faiths.

Vatican II was the catalyst for a significant realignment of ministerial life in the Catholic Church. Although the council did not undertake a thoroughgoing revision of episcopal or presbyteral ministry, the repercussions of its stress on the primacy of baptism and on the ecclesial dimension of all ordained ministries have altered the landscape of ministry.

The Second Vatican Council officially launched the Catholic Church into the ecumenical movement. A reexamination of these texts more than fifty years later suggests areas of critique as well as further possible developments that were underexplored at the time, even though the seeds for these developments were planted at the council.

Before the Council, the renewal of moral theology plays itself out very differently on either side of the Atlantic. In the aftermath of World War II, European moral theologians develop a moral theology based on the responsibility of the personal conscience. In the United States, moral theologians rebuff these initiatives and seek to maintain the authority of a magisterial tradition. The promulgation of Humanae vitae occasions a crisis that leads many of the latter moral theologians to reconsider the contributions of their European counterparts.

This chapter first outlines the preconciliar, largely Christocentric perspective that formed the foundation for the ecclesiology of the Second Vatican Council. As the Council proceeded it complemented this Christological understanding of the church with increasing awareness of the ecclesial role of the Holy Spirit. The eschatological framework of the final documents and the analogy made between ecclesial and Trinitarian koinonia are two notable effects of this rebalancing of Word and Spirit.

The council recovered a more eschatological understanding of the church as a pilgrim people. This emphasis on the “pilgrim” character of the church would prove among the major factors in bringing about the transformation of the self-understanding of the church, thereby providing a theological opening for the council’s program of aggiornamento. Combined with the emergence of an equally dynamic and open-ended pneumatological emphasis in conciliar ecclesiological thinking, this “eschatological turn” helped create conditions for the possibility of major ecclesial renewal and reform. This chapter will consider the emergence and development of such ecclesiological elements in the council’s vision, considering the key particular texts that specifically gave expression to this open-ended sense of the church’s life, mission, and relationship to the wider world.