Fr Komonchak replies: “It is dangerous to oversimplify the Council. There are a far more nuanced ways of reading the Council. To say that all the Council did was to reassert the Church’s teaching, to repeat what was already being said, greatly oversimplifies things. Pope John XXIII, in his opening speech, said that there would have been no need to call a Council if that is all it would do. When Pope Benedict speaks of a ‘hermeneutic of reform’, he defines it as ‘a combination of continuity and discontinuity at different levels’.”
…
The real achievement of the Council, he says, was to rid the Church of the anti-Modernist reactions prevalent after the First Vatican Council and re-animate the fairly desiccated theology that was being taught in seminaries at the time. Much of the Council though, he says, was the fruit of the labour that had begun decades before it was called. Today he would like to see new commentary on Scripture using newer methods of interpretation, not just the historico-critical method but taking on a structuralist reading, for example, and a deeper discussion on the degree of change that the Council
effected in the Church.
