Expunged and forgotten texts and messages of Vatican II

After the conclusion of the council in 1965, many scholars, publishers, ecclesiastical opinion leaders, and bishops wrote their own commentaries on Vatican II. This literary genre was inclined to ignore what happened at the council and to concentrate on the decisions. In this way, many acts of the council were minimized or were simply ignored—even acts like the messages to the world at the beginning and end of Vatican II and the withdrawal of excommunications between Rome and Constantinople. Other crucial moves of the council were neglected or considered beyond the formal corpus of the documents of Vatican II. The most important of these is Gaudet Mater Ecclesia, the opening address of the council where John XXIII offered his hermeneutical views and expectations. But other steps—the first announcement of Vatican II, the signature of Paul VI—are also important keys to Vatican II: not as a machine producing decisions, but as an event creating an epochal turn in the history of the Roman Catholic Church.