Vatican II

Audience

The audience for Vatican II varied to some extent from document to document. Some concerned the activities of particular functional groups within the Church (bishops, priests and members of religious orders, and Eastern Rite Catholics); some were primarily addressed to groups outside the Catholic Church (non-Catholic Christians and non-Christians). The four foundational constitutions (those on the Sacred Liturgy, Revelation [Die Verbum], the Church [Luman Gentium], and the Church in the Modern World) were addressed both to Catholics and non-Catholics in that they sought to demonstrate how the Church should act and how it defined itself in serving as the link between God and Man. Perhaps the document with the most immediate impact on ordinary Catholics was the Constitution on the Sacred Liturgy, which, at a stroke, altered worship practices throughout the Catholic world.

One of the problems in defining the audience for Vatican II is that while lay activists frequently placed an expansive interpretation on the conciliar documents, arguing that they must be read in accordance with the “spirit of Vatican II,” many clerical leaders—including the late Pope John Paul II—rejected the notion that the council did away with the traditional understanding of hierarchical authority within the Catholic Church. In the former interpretation, Vatican II was a blueprint for transformation of the Church from the grassroots upward; under the latter view, it represented guidelines for the evolutionary transformation of the Church—in its own eyes and in the eyes of others—consistent with past tradition and in conformity with episcopal and papal authority.