To Sanctify the World: The Vital Legacy of Vatican II
By George Weigel
Basic Books 2022

October of 2022 marks the 60th anniversary of the opening of the Second Ecumenical Council of the Vatican, which Pope John XXIII opened in 1962, and as George Weigel repeatedly observes in his impressive new book To Sanctify the World: The Vital Legacy of Vatican II, sixty years has traditionally been observed to be just about the minimum amount of time necessary in order to sort out the historical significance of such an event. Chronologically and conceptually, Vatican II’s time has come round again. 

There nevertheless have been so very creditable earlier assays. Robert de Mattei’s 2013 book The Second Vatican Council: An Untold Story is solid work though necessarily incomplete; Ralph Wiltgen’s 2014 book The Inside Story of Vatican II masks genuine critical acumen under an almost gossipy exterior; and most of all, John O’Malley’s 2008 book What Happened at Vatican II seems to have been well-thumbed by Weigel in the course of composing his own book (“seems to” because this is what can be gleaned from the copious notes; in a scandal that’s become far too common, the publishers haven’t included a Bibliography). 

These and other books have been valuable, but none has had the sweep, the underspoken compassion, or — to the point — the historical perspective of Weigel’s book. To Sanctify the World is the first truly outstanding popular account of Vatican II, and it loses none of its power, in fact gains power, from the fact that it’s an intensely Catholic history of this most vital of Catholic events. 

Hence the thoughtful, feeling thumbnail sketches of great Catholic writers and thinkers like Mattias Scheeben, Bishop Wilhelm von Ketteler, John Henry Newman, Antonio Rosmini-Serbati, and Johann Möhler. Hence the inclusion of figures like Romano Guardini, who leads in turn to the mention of a wide sweep of literary figures, since he “believe that novelists and poets were fit conversation partners for theology.” These mentions of “the renewal of the Catholic mind in the mid-twentieth century,” invoking writers like CK Chesterton, Ronald Knox, Graham Greene, Evelyn Waugh, JRR Tolkien, Flanders O’Connor, and Walker Percy, speaks to the reach of Weigel’s reading and will help non-Catholics to feel like participants in the great doctrinal matter he’s describing.

It was Guardini who lamented, Weigel writes, that “Catholic propositions could not meet the challenge of modernity’s radical self-absorption.” He argued that what the Church must offer was “a personal encounter with Jesus Christ, the incarnate Son of God, who reveals to us the full truth of our humanity.” It was to stress just such an encounter that an aging (and secretly ailing) Pope John XXIII convened Vatican II, and in these pages Weigel very effectively presents both the importance and the intimacy of the event and its long prologue in Church thinking. 

One of the most consistently thrilling methods he uses to accomplish this is to look closely at the core Vatican II documents themselves. Skeptical readers will be amazed at how much sheer life Weigel reveals in Church pronouncements like Dei Verbum, which was “Vatican II’s Dogmatic Constitution on Divine Revelation”:

In Dei Verbum, the Catholic Church affirmed that humanity does not live in a claustrophobic world: a world of self-creating, self-contained, autonomous human beings, caught in a narcissistic trap of reflection; a world of self-absorption, silence, and darkness. Rather, the bishops of Vatican II taught, we live in a world open to transcendence, to that which is greater than ourselves.

Popes stride through Weigel’s pages like Shakespearean characters, from Pius XI, who was temperamentally against anything resembling Vatican II (and whose 1928 encyclical, Mortalium Animos, reads like a blueprint for a Church that will never face the real world at all, even a little), to John Paul II (then Bishop Karol Wojtyla) and Benedict XVI (then Joseph Ratzinger), who, Weigel insightfully writes, considered that “those who did not grasp the truth of Vatican II — whether progressives or radical traditionalists, both them mired in the hermeneutic of rupture — understood neither the Church nor the Council.” And of course there’s the curiously retiring star of the show, Pope John XXIII, whose “determination that the pursuit of Christian unity be among the primary tasks of the Second Vatican Council markedly accelerated the Catholic Church’s engagement with the modern ecumenical movement.” 

Weigel brings his superb narrative to a conclusion that necessarily looks to the future, as Vatican II itself did, with an eloquent mixture of defiance and hope:

To bring the Second Vatican Council to fruition, the Catholic Church of the twenty-first century and beyond must recover its nerve, which is less a psychological than a spiritual matter: a matter of deeper conversion to Christ. Over two millennia of history, Catholicism has been confronted by “the world” in some of the world’s most aggressive, demonic, and lethal forms. But it has endured, and it has continued to bring men and women to Christ, particularly whenever it has remembered the assurance the Lord Jesus gave his friends at the Last Supper: “In the world you have tribulation; but be of good cheer, I have overcome the world.” 

Steve Donoghue is a founding editor of Open Letters Monthly. His book criticism has appeared in The Washington Post, The American Conservative, The Spectator, The Wall Street Journal, The National, and the Daily Star. He writes regularly for The Boston Globe, the Vineyard Gazette, and the Christian Science Monitor.