Spirituality: One is what one does

Vatican II is the most complex council in the history of the church by reason of the international perspective it adopted, by reason of its awareness of the radical cultural changes that confronted it, and by reason of the number and difficulty of the issues it chose to address. Its adoption of a new genre to express itself adds to the complexity and to the difficulty in interpreting it in the full breadth of its significance. Taking account of the genre is, however, its first and most essential interpretive principle required to unlock that significance. When that principle is employed, it reveals that Vatican II is a council so unlike any other that it redefined what a council is because it redefined what a council does.