Cardinal Dulles says Vatican II a renewal, not rupture with past

Published: 2004-02-19

CHICAGO (CNS) -- The Second Vatican Council was no revolution in Catholic thought or doctrine, and theologians who do not read the council documents in light of earlier church teaching badly misinterpret them, Cardinal Avery Dulles said. Cardinal Dulles, a Jesuit and a professor at Fordham University in New York, presented his case at "The Theological Aftermath of Vatican II," a Feb. 7 symposium at the University of Chicago sponsored by the Lumen Christi Institute and the university's divinity school. "The council has elicited many healthy initiatives over the past 40 years, but its beneficent effect has been partly offset by the false interpretations based on a mentality that has its sources in an alien culture," the cardinal said. "The widespread misinterpretation of the council, in my judgment, is due to the cultural ambience in which this document has been read," he said. "The thinking and feeling of our age is dominated by subjectivism, individualism, relativism and historicism -- things that are as prevalent today as ever in the past."

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