Two thousand and eight marked the fortieth anniversary of a number of significant events—the Tet Offensive in Vietnam; the American massacre at My Lai; the assassinations of Martin Luther King, Jr., and Robert F. Kennedy; the student occupation of the University of Nanterre; and, of course, the opening of Hair on Broadway.

It was also the fortieth anniversary of Humanae Vitae, Pope Paul VI's encyclical “On the Regulation of Birth.” This document was hailed by conservative Catholics as reaffirming the Church's traditional teachings on marriage, the family, and contraception. It was also condemned by liberal Catholics like Karl Rahner, Leo Joseph Suenens, and Charles Curran, who believed the encyclical was a betrayal of the progressive promise of the Second Vatican Council, which had just concluded three years earlier.

It is fitting, therefore, that 2008 should have brought us an examination of Vatican II—and, specifically, the question of whether the sixteen documents released by that council represented a radically new path for the Catholic Church or a vision for the future that was grounded in nearly two millennia of tradition. Anyone looking for a discussion of the merits of both arguments will have to look beyond Vatican II: Renewal Within Tradition, though. It is the assertion of all of the historians and theologians contributing to this volume that an emphasis on the “newness” of Vatican II amounts to a “distortion” of the council's contribution to the history of the Church—one that can only be sustained so long as Catholics focus on the “style” of the council and ignore the substance of the documents released.

Levering and Lamb present their volume as a response to Pope Benedict XVI's call in 2005 for a “proper hermeneutic” on the Second Vatican Council. According to the pontiff, “the implementation of the council has been somewhat difficult” because a “hermeneutic of discontinuity and rupture” has dominated the popular understanding of what Vatican II did for the Catholic Church. This interpretation of the council's work “availed itself to the sympathies of the mass media” in the mid-1960s, creating and sustaining a mistaken idea that there is a “split between the preconciliar and postconciliar Church” (ix–x).

Pope Benedict calls for a more deeply developed “hermeneutic of reform” that will understand the Church's rapprochement with modernity, as represented by Vatican II, as a “renewal” that “reviewed or even corrected certain historical decisions, but in this apparent discontinuity … actually preserved and deepened [the Church's] inmost nature and true identity” (xiv). To that end, the contributors to this volume all concern themselves with showing how the ideas expressed within documents released by the council between 1962 and 1965 have their roots in documents issued earlier by the Church. It is noted, for instance, that Lumen Gentium's discussions of “perfect and imperfect realizations of the sacrament” resemble Pope Pius XII's discussions of the visible and invisible churches, as articulated in Mystici Corporis Christi (27). That encyclical was issued in 1943 and self-consciously drew on Paul's understanding of the Mystical Body of Christ when including laypeople as an important component of the Church's identity.

By that same token, discussions of human dignity and the “close connection between disorder in the soul and that in society” in Gaudium et Spes are found to resemble ideas expressed in 1891 by Pope Leo XIII in his Rerum Novarum, in 1524 by St. Ignatius of Loyola in his Spiritual Exercises, and in the thirteenth century by St. Thomas Aquinas (149–151).

When discussing the “hermeneutic of discontinuity and rupture” that has dominated the prevailing understanding of Vatican II, though, all of the contributors to this volume seem to ascribe an undue level of influence to the mass media. They are right to note the extensive nature of the media's coverage of Vatican II, which is rivaled today only by the coverage the Church received in the wake of the pedophilia crisis in 2002, and undoubtedly the media's endemic need to portray issues in a simplistic and dialectical manner—old vs. new, conservative vs. liberal—did much to cultivate misconceptions about Vatican II among non-Catholics worldwide. But if, as Pope Benedict and the contributors to this volume insist, it is wrong to see Vatican II as forging a radically new path for the Catholic Church in the world, why have so many Catholics—more than a few of them prominent members of the clergy—been eager to interpret the council in this way? After all, by the editors' own admission, “few [journalists] had any expertise in Catholic theology,” and much of the dialectical coverage came from “popularized accounts of the council's deliberations and debates offered by periti and theologians with journalistic skills” (3).

The closest we get to an answer to this question comes from Matthew Lamb when, near the end of the volume, he laments that “departments of theology at Catholic universities in North America have many or even a majority of faculty members who did not get their doctoral degrees in Catholic programs.” Lamb also insists that, “in Europe, some Catholic scholars internalized the liberal versus conservative framework of the media coverage of the council, which had a similar effect of promoting a hermeneutics of rupture rather than renewal and reform within tradition” (440).

This explanation paints an extremely passive picture of Catholic scholarship in Europe, though—and it grants an extraordinary amount of power and influence over religious debate to a profession whose members seem to understand less and less about the nature of faith with each passing year. Furthermore, it does not explain why people like Francis Xavier Murphy, the Redemptorist priest who covered Vatican II for the New Yorker, were so willing to embrace and perpetuate the hermeneutic of discontinuity in the 1960s, or why, until his death in 2007 at the age of 82, the famous Catholic historian Guiseppe Alberigo was still emphasizing the struggle against the Roman Curia in his accounts of Vatican II.