Using Lumen gentium as a focus, what can we say about the unfinished business of renewal? How does it work, and how must we read Lumen gentium in order to grasp “what remains to be done”? We consider four issues, each of them in dialogue with one of four theologians who reached their 60th birthday in 1964, the year Lumen gentium was completed. Bernard Lonergan helps us come to terms with the historically conditioned nature of Lumen gentium itself. Karl Rahner points the way towards a better grasp of Lumen gentium's discussion of the place of other religions in the economy of salvation. John Courtney Murray's influence on the Council fathers is a case study in the importance of the local church. And Yves Congar's willingness to rethink his own positions testifies to the importance of not making Lumen gentium into unchanging truth. Overall, the unfinished business of the document on the Church is to learn to treat it, in Lonergan's words, as “not premisses but data.”

This article reviews the church and culture relationship developed in Gaudium et Spes and Lumen Gentium and proposes a Catholic account of modernity as a way in which the contemporary mission of the church in today's culture can be creatively and faithfully carried forward. After an initial outlining of the definitions of church and culture proposed by the Vatican documents, I then go on to position my proposal of a Catholic modernity in relation to some important current accounts of the church and culture relationship that tend towards a rejection of secular culture. I argue that Protestant accounts of modernity have dominated in philosophical and sociological theories and draw on my previous work on Max Weber to illustrate the significance of this for developing a Catholic account of modernity. I conclude by sketching some of the important issues which would need to be addressed in formulating a systematic account of a Catholic modernity.

Pius XII condemned atheism's “most ignoble corruptions” in his 1956 encyclical Haurietis Aquas, along with its “lethal tenets” in 1958's Meminisse Iuvat. Only six years later, however, in 1964, Vatican II's Lumen Gentium affirmed the possibility of salvation for “those who, without any fault of theirs, have not yet arrived at an explicit knowledge of God” (article 16). Furthermore, the following year's Gaudium et Spes 19–21, drafted by Paul VI's newly-founded Secretariat for Non-believers, offers, among much else, a sympathetic overview of contemporary atheisms, and invites their contemporary adherents to “a dialogue that is sincere and prudent”. These paragraphs, according to Ratzinger, “may be counted among the most important pronouncements of Vatican II”.

Evidently, comparing Pius XII's “lethal tenets” to Vatican II's salvific optimism, profound developments are manifest in the Catholic engagement with atheism. Primarily responsible for this are, I argue, two episodes in French Catholic history in the decades preceding Vatican II: a) the unprecedented dialogue of Catholic intellectuals with modern atheism, following the French Communist Party's main tendue (“outstretched hand”) during the period of the Popular Front (1934–38); and b) the ‘priest-worker’ experiment, initiated by Henri Godin and Yvan Daniel's 1943 publication of La France – Pays de Mission?

For reasons of academic fashion and ecclesial politics, Rahner is often dismissed as a liberal. Though elements of his thought on the church/world relationship do not date well, and others have been so thoroughly absorbed into the mainstream as to lose their interest, there is a dimension of his thought which remains important and which in fact undercuts typical divisions between liberals and their opponents.

Karl Rahner's theology is essentially spiritual and pastoral. His theology arose from his experience as a Jesuit, living at the heart of the traumas of twentieth-century Europe and, at the same time, interpreting the new academic insights in Church history and the early Fathers, scholasticism and modern philosophy, within the framework of the Church's traditional teaching.

Arguably one of the most well received of the documents of Vatican II, this article considers the gestation of Dei Verbum and whether it remains key to Catholic thinking on revelation, exegesis, hermeneutics and the use of the Bible in the Church.

Insofar as Dei Verbum enabled Catholicism to rediscover its own sacramental paradigm of revelation, it can be said to have effected a decisive move away from a propositional view which risks reducing the drama of salvation to a combination of bullet points and performance indicators. Moreover, Catholic biblical theology has enjoyed a welcome renaissance in these subsequent decades and scripture now plays a more obvious part in liturgy and piety.

Though there are lacunae (e.g. anthropology, ecology), and though some of the exegetical tensions have been by-passed by postmodern hermeneutics, perhaps the more interesting questions that remain will centre not on the scriptures but on a renewed understanding of the nature of tradition and the creativity of its relationship with the magisterium.

In this paper I first survey several paradigms of liturgical renewal that respond to the mandate of the Second Vatican Council and I restate a suggestion made in 2007 for a new model of liturgical study, ‘Appreciating the Liturgy’. This new model encourages a deeper appreciation of the current liturgy and is offered that the Church may better discern the way forward in the renewal of the liturgy. Then, following a brief presentation of the liturgical hermeneutic taught at the Pontifical Institute of Liturgy and a practical example of analysing a prayer with this method, I conclude by showing how the ‘Appreciating the Liturgy’ model has helped to reveal a liturgical hermeneutic heretofore overlooked, that of Christian maturation by developmental steps.

The method which Daniel McCarthy and I have developed and used here can validly be applied to other liturgical sources, yet this paper's conclusions, based on the analysis of a newly-composed oration in one of the renewed texts (editiones typicae) resulting from the Second Vatican Council and the Constitution on the Liturgy, suggest that Christian maturation was a real concern of those taking part in the Council.

This paper seeks to explore the impact that the Council had upon moral theology, and vice versa, along with some of the main debates and methodological questions that have preoccupied Catholic ethicists since. Seeking to chart both that, as well as how, moral theology was transformed, four key points arise. First, the emergence, even prior to the council of a more participatory approach to moral theology. Second, the retrieval of an understanding of the provisionality of much moral teaching. Third, an appreciation of the circular relationship between ethics and ecclesiology. Fourth, the ‘work to be done’ in relation to continuing disagreements over method and the ‘yearning for continuity’ that emerged in reaction to the transformations in moral theology and indeed the Council in general. We close with consideration of constructive proposals for the future concerning whether and how Catholics might live with difference and indeed with less certitude, reminding ourselves that morality is not a precise and exact science, as if any such thing exists.

What happened at Vatican II and the significance of its decisions is strongly contested in the Church today. There is a struggle over the memory of the Council. It is suggested that two hermeneutics are in use, continuity versus discontinuity. On the one hand, it is said that privileging the ‘event’ of the Council as the interpretative key for reading its documents leads to an ideological distortion and introduces discontinuity with tradition. On the other hand, it is held that the continuity thesis plays down the real changes the Council introduced and, while unexceptional as a theological principle, it is being deployed as a polemical ideology, restricting necessary change. This article distinguishes between theological principle and experience in relation to continuity/discontinuity. It argues that the event of the Council is to be found as much in its effects in the Church at large as what took place in Rome. It analyses the phenomenology of change at both levels and concludes that the tensions between the need for continuity and the impulses of discontinuity need to be recognised and worked with rather than repressed.