Vatican II Class: Against Forgetting: Memory and Vatican II

In the present discussion over the meaning of Vatican II, considered from the historical vantage point of 50 years, the council needs to be resituated as an event of the mid-20th century. Its break with the past, embodied in ruptures and reversals of long-standing Catholic mentalités, must be seen as a response to two world wars, the Holocaust, the Atomic Age, atheist Communism, postwar existentialism, and the Cold War. Current debates about whether "anything happened" at Vatican II should consider that the new age inaugurated by the council was not merely possible --- it was morally necessary.

Stephen Schloesser, a Jesuit priest, earned his doctorate in History and Humanities at Stanford in 1999. He is currently Associate Professor in History at Loyola University of Chicago. Prior to Loyola, he was on the faculty at Boston College. He is the author of Jazz-Age Catholicism: Mystic Modernism in Postwar Paris, 1919-1933 (Toronto, 2005) and of the forthcoming Visions of Amen: The Early Life and Work of Olivier Messiaen (Eerdmans). His research focuses on the development of Catholicism within French culture in the early 20th century, at the height of modernism.

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