Vatican II Resources

Dr. Jeff Mirus at catholiculture.org assembled an impressive set of summaries for all of the documents of Vatican II. The summaries most pertinent for our study are "Vatican II on the Liturgy," "Vatican II on the Church," "Vatican II on Divine Revelation," and "Vatican II on the Church and the World."

The Catholic Pillar has a no-frills primer that introduces you to the who, what, when, and where of the Second Ecumenical Council of the Vatican (its formal title).

Hermeneutics is a term that basically means, "What are the rules and principles we use to interpret something?" That "something" could be a speech, a book, or even a film. Interpretation, when it comes to the texts of the Second Vatican Council, has been ensnared in controversy since the council concluded in 1965. So much so that Pope St. John Paul II called forth an extraordinary assembly of the Synod of Bishops in 1985 in order to officially define a hermeneutic—a set of principles—for interpreting the council's documents. Dr. Eduardo Echeverria at Sacred Heart Seminary summarizes those principles in this brief blog post at The Catholic Thing.