Published December 4, 2025
The Second Vatican Council, which concluded 60 years ago Dec. 8, was made to order for the lavish photojournalism of Life magazine. It dedicated some 11 large pages of its Dec. 17, 1965, issue to what the cover, a fish-eye view of St. Peter’s from inside its majestic dome, trumpeted as “Catholicism’s Epic Venture.”
The story ran thousands of words, alongside photos of bishops hashing out conciliar documents, bishops at a Roman restaurant, bishops in conversation over coffee and grappa, and bishops streaming into the Piazza San Pietro when their years of work were over. Yet for all the attention to the most important event in the Catholic Church in 400 years—an ecumenical council reshaping the lives of the world’s largest religious community—the pull quote on the article’s last page was a clunker: “To guide man toward a better secular future.”
In the six decades since, various parties in the Catholic Church have adopted that interpretation: Vatican II was a full embrace of the late-20th-century zeitgeist, a “paradigm shift” at which the church blessed social, cultural and political modernity and promised to be in “dialogue” with the humanistic spirit of the age. The evidence across the 21st century is that this has led to forms of Catholic Lite that have in turn created Catholic Zero: moribund local churches marked by a lack of evangelical energy, dismal levels of religious practice, and dissent from settled Catholic teaching on the moral life and the path to human flourishing and social solidarity.
This isn’t what Pope John XXIII had in mind when he stunned the Catholic world by announcing on Jan. 25, 1959, his intention to summon the 21st ecumenical, or churchwide, council in two millennia. Why did a church with an infallible papal teacher need councils? What was the church-dividing crisis that, as in the past, necessitated one? Angelo Giuseppe Roncalli, elected pope in October 1958 as an elderly placeholder, had answers.
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George Weigel is a Distinguished Senior Fellow the Ethics and Public Policy Center’s Catholic Studies Program. A Catholic theologian and New York Times bestselling author, he is widely recognized as one of the world’s leading authorities on the Catholic Church and one of America’s leading public intellectuals. He served as president of EPPC from 1989-1996.
