When Pope John XXIII announced the creation of the Second Vatican Council (also known as Vatican II) in January 1959, it shocked the world. There hadn't been an ecumenical council — an assembly of ...

Pope Emeritus Benedict XVI, who died on Saturday, left behind an extensive body of work examining and diagnosing ills in the Catholic Church. A theological and spiritual giant to many, Benedict's ...

EDITORIAL: Distortions of its teachings threaten to obscure the impact of the Second Vatican Council; a recommitment to receiving conciliar teachings in fidelity to the Gospel is the only way forward.

"Vatican II did not drop out of the sky," writes Michael Sean Winters. "There were three essential precursors to St. John XXIII's decision in 1959 to announce he was calling an ecumenical council." ...

With the passage of 60 years since the opening of the Second Vatican Council, there are few people alive who remember the event, even fewer who participated. The council, comprising all the Catholic ...

Editor's Note: This article is part of the Register’s symposium on Vatican II at 60. In the world of academia one can still find scholars working on the Wirkungsgeschichte (history of how texts have ...

VATICAN CITY — Pope Francis is the first pope to have been ordained to the priesthood after the Second Vatican Council. Unlike his two predecessors, St. John Paul II and retired Pope Benedict XVI, ...

(RNS) — Conservatives, reading Vatican II's documents like biblical fundamentalists, miss what it meant to participants. (RNS) — With the passage of 60 years since the opening of the Second Vatican ...

The Vatican daily L'Osservatore Roman (LOR) published an article this week on a meeting of the international theological and cultural review "Communio," which was founded 38 years ago by Hans Urs von ...

Six decades have passed since Pope Saint John XXIII announced his intention to “open the windows” of the Roman Catholic Church by convening a gathering of bishops known as the Second Vatican Council.

The Second Vatican Council, the great revolution in the life of the modern Catholic Church, opened 60 years ago this week in Rome. So much of that 1960s-era world has passed away, but the council is ...

The image above is of the cathedral of Köln after World War II bombing devastated most of that German city. It's why the Second Vatican Council was necessary -- and why it might have been doomed to ...