The opening pages of The American Catholic Revolution find theologian Yves Congar, O.P. in 1962, standing dumbstruck in St. Peter's Basilica, while the Council Fathers voted to reform the liturgy. “Something irreversible has happened,” Congar is reported to have said. The book arrives as today's Catholics wait on a new change in the liturgy, which according to many prominent critics, promises to reverse those earlier reforms. The possibility of undoing what seemed to be “irreversible” poses the pregnant contradiction at the heart of this most engaging examination of the encounter between the Catholic tradition and “the historical consciousness.”

Mark S. Massa, S.J., Dean of the Boston College School of Theology and Ministry and Karl Rahner, Distinguished Professor of Theology at Fordham University, has written an excellent volume that suggests the Council should be understood as an expression of a historicism that traces its development back to the German Romantics of the eighteenth century. Massa asserts the usefulness of historicism — indeed, its necessity — through a sequence of vignettes drawn from the Catholic experience in the United States during and after the Council. The historicism that led to and resulted from the Council tells us that “life and reality [are] synonymous with history,” and, “all notions of truth [must] be examined and explained as realities forged within the historical process”(154). Any such perspective, with a pedigree that extends through Marx and Hegel, cannot sit comfortably with the staid Thomism of the Catholic tradition. Yet, this lens of historicism helpfully brings into focus the tension between resourcement and aggiornamento built into the Council's purpose.

Integrating resourcement (return to the tradition's original sources) with aggiornamento (modernizing, literally “bringing-up-to-date”) assures the status of the Council as a unique event in world history as much as church history, one that demands the attention of every curious mind. No polity on Earth fails to struggle between the insistent tug of the past and the countervailing pull of the present, and so the study of the Council always is useful as a case study for students of history or politics, as well as religion. Moreover, Massa emphasizes the dimensions of the interpretive conflict in a familiar American idiom that heightens the relationship of an esoteric theological argument about how to define a “Church in the Modern World” to the level larger cultural forces that have left no human life in the Western world untouched for the last fifty years. With such an ambitiously relevant purpose, Massa's book should appeal to anyone concerned with culture and ideas, far beyond just the questions of religion and politics.

Historicism, therefore, was the in-eliminable question of the Council. What can Catholic faith mean as both stable tradition and as lived, inevitably contingent experience? In a key chapter, Massa looks to an important and, in some ways, most ambiguous work of the late Avery Cardinal Dulles, S.J., Models of the Church. Dulles's work becomes important to Massa's project so far as Dulles “played an important part in nurturing a historical consciousness already let out of the bag” (145) by the Council. Dulles, who notably urged a conservative interpretation of the Council in the last decades of his life, concluded that each generation “in the Church has to face anew the problem of how to maintain its institutional strength and societal stability” (Models of the Church). Even with that sentence, Dulles hardly gives his full endorsement to a historicist reading of the Catholic tradition. But neither can we ignore the implications of admitting “anew” each generation's realization of the Church in history.

Once we acknowledge the role of the historical consciousness and recognize change as a permanent characteristic of tradition, we find also that change need not always necessarily imply a Hegelian, relentlessly forward progress. Change can be regressive, and the historical consciousness can defend backsliding as well as progress. The American Catholic Revolution succeeds by admitting these uncertain fruits of the Enlightenment and post-Enlightenment to our understanding of the Catholic tradition. Massa complicates greatly our comfortable conceits about how we think about who is liberal or conservative in the Catholic tradition. Viewing history in all its complexity, those distinctions become awkwardly blurred.

Historicism is no unmixed blessing. If anything, Catholics must feel today that they still live in the midst of that revolution unleashed during the 1960's; one whose final meaning must stretch out to the horizon as far as history will take us.

A brief coda is in order. If anything unforgivably mars Massa's thoughtful work, it is the spelling errors (“Woytila” instead of “Wojtyła” on page 27, or “tress” instead of “trees” on page 85) and factual errors (misidentifying the Archdiocese of Boston as a “diocese” on page 17, elevating Atlanta Archbishop Paul Hallinan to cardinal on page 91, and inaugurating former-Alabama Governor George Wallace as the governor of Georgia on page 111) that appear throughout. And, while Massa's name appears on the cover, those glaring blunders strike this reviewer as a failure of the Oxford University Press production staff to serve the author well. The errors are not so distracting as to diminish Massa's work. Still, they leave this eager reader feeling a puzzled disappointment.