Spirituality: Vocabulary

To dismiss the vocabulary as simply a pastoral ploy is to fail to understand that the vocabulary serves as the expression of dynamism of a quite specific literary form. Councils must express themselves with words. To change the words is to change the form. To change the form is to create something different from what prevailed before. To change to something different from what earlier prevailed is to change the nature of the object in question. It gives the object a new definition. That is what happened at Vatican II. The style change resulted in a council so different from all those that preceded it that it cannot be fully understood without applying to it different interpretive principles, the first of which is taking account of the literary genre the council employed.