The ‘what happened’ of the title is to be understood not just in terms of events, but more fundamentally in terms of how far the council represented a turning point in the history of the Roman Catholic Church. O'Malley, although perhaps most widely known as a scholar of the Renaissance and Reformation, has been a major contributor to the discussion of this issue among Catholic academics in the USA. This debate has been from a particularly American perspective, bound up with the distinctive traditions of the US Catholic Church. However, it is linked to the painful ‘event-versus-continuity’ debate in Italy. This has primarily pitted the late Giuseppe Alberigo and other scholars associated with the Istituto per le Scienze Religiose of Bologna (established under the patronage of the progressive Cardinal Lercaro) against ‘concilio-sceptics’ close to the Vatican. The thesis of the council as ‘event’ or ‘epochal transition’ (Alberigo) sees it as a gathering in which the nature of the Church as the people of God, who are wayfarers in historical time, was made manifest and which, as a corollary, conducted itself in new ways. Those who brandish the superficially anodyne term ‘continuity’ seek to downplay such a position. With the pontificate of Benedict xvi, the dispute has become one about the future of the Catholic Church and it is also linked to the issue of ‘the Christian character of Europe’.

There is a vast bibliography on Vatican II. The standard work to date is probably the monumental History of Vatican II, the product of an international team of scholars with Giuseppe Alberigo as general editor under the auspices of the Bolognese institute (editions in seven languages, English-language edition edited by Joseph A. Komonchak, Maryknoll, NY 1995–2006). This contains a deeply-considered conclusion by Alberigo but is rather short on broad context for the benefit of non-specialists. In the study reviewed here, O'Malley brings a greater long-term historical depth to the subject. Areas examined include the development of church councils from the earliest times; the siege-mentality of the nineteenth-century Church; the elevation of Thomism under Leo xiii to the position of sine qua non in theological education; the rejection, through the condemnation of ‘Modernism’ at the turn of the twentieth century, of the new methods of biblical criticism that had been developed particularly in Germany; the discreet adoption of such methods by certain Catholic scholars in the twentieth century, combined with a move away from scholasticism towards an intensified study of biblical and patristic sources; and finally the liturgical movement. He examines the modest and wavering moves in Pius xii's teaching in the direction of these eventual openings. Broadly, O'Malley's overall conclusions are similar to Alberigo's. As ever, he subscribes to the interpretation of the council's major significance as an ‘event’. As an extension of this, he argues that its pronouncements were marked by a deeply significant stylistic shift: where the decrees of previous councils had been couched in terms of definitions, censures and anathemas, those of Vatican II employed a rhetoric of exhortation and admiration, a discourse based on patristic rather than scholastic or juristic models. Here he is pursuing the kind of analysis that he developed initially in Praise and blame in Renaissance Rome: rhetoric, doctrine and reform in the sacred orators of the papal court, ca. 1450–1521 (Durham, NC 1979) and more recently in the magisterial Four cultures of the west (Cambridge, Ma 2004). However, he is not riding a personal hobby-horse. This position, in some form, can be found in the work of other scholars, Alberigo included. O'Malley maintains that the ‘spirit’ of the Council lay not only in aggiornamento (developing the Church to meet the needs of the modern world) but also in ressourcement (a fresh look, informed by modern scholarship, at the sources of Christian tradition). Here again he is broadly in line with Alberigo but is particularly incisive in explaining the complementarity between the two: the exponents of these positions saw both scholasticism and papalist ultramontanism, for example, as historically relative, not as providing norms. In the light of this, O'Malley understandably avoids such terms as ‘progressive’ and ‘conservative’ in referring to the council Fathers. Much of the chronicle section of the book is taken up with the battles between the ‘majority’ and the ‘minority’. The former were the exponents of the ‘conciliar spirit’ and of ‘collegiality’ (basically a fuller role for bishops in the government of the universal Church). The latter were the defenders of positions on theology and church government which had become entrenched at the official level in the ‘long nineteenth century’. In part it was an opposition between pastor-bishops who felt undervalued and powerful curial cardinals together with their allies. Here, too, important factors were the perspectives brought by leaders of the oriental Churches in communion with Rome and by bishops from the Third World, pastors deeply critical of the eurocentricity and tendency to treat historic Latin Catholicism as the norm which had long animated official Church policy. O'Malley describes the manoeuverings and intrigues of the ‘minority’, while trying to be fair to both parties. This book superbly combines scholarly analysis with drama.