council

Tonight in theology class the instructor talked about the radical change of direction in Catholic theology represented by Vatican II. Let me just state for the record, again, that I'm completely baffled by Vatican II. How exactly did 2,400 bishops, all of whom had signed the Oath Against Modernism multiple times in their careers, vote by large majorities to approve documents whose stated purpose was aggiornamento, bringing the Church up to date? How did the logistics of discussing the documents among all those bishops even work? Was there really any discussion, or were the documents more or less written by a few at the top? Did anyone actually think that the Church could be radically changed, in short order, from the top down? And, can answer to the Church's problems today really be found in these documents, if we only learn to read them the right way (which seems to be the message, or at least the hope, of these classes)?

I'm mostly overwhelmed by how little I know.

In my internet wanderings after class I learned about the Pact of the Catacombs (full text here), which is a clear counterpoint to the ambiguous language of the council documents (however radical they may have been). I don't have a lot of hope for the Church hierarchy reforming itself, but it is comforting to know that the man currently at the top comes out of this tradition.