This review by a Jesuit teacher at St. Mary of the Lake seminary in Mundelein (IL) identifies another Jesuit, author of a history of the 2^nd Vatican Council, as a proponent of a watershed view of the council:

“John O’Malley, a Jesuit professor at Georgetown University, is a prominent exponent of the view that Vatican II represents discontinuity,” says Rev. Edward T. Oakes, SJ, reviewing O’Malley’s What Happened at Vatican II.

At issue is whether a brand-new or mostly new agenda was presented in the 1962–65 meetings of bishops from around the world.  Oakes concedes:

At least superficially, Father O’Malley has a point: The Mass is now celebrated in the language of the people instead of in Latin; liturgical translations avoid Renaissance cadences in favor of staccato syntax; thundering condemnations of the modern world (and of Protestants) have been replaced with openness and dialogue — and vocations to the priesthood and convent life have plummeted. [Italics added]

Ouch for that last item, which Oakes hastens to deposit in the “unintended category” dustbin that goes with any major historical event.  This does not keep him from faulting the council, “at least to some extent . . . for the sin of imprudence if not of untruth.”

O’Malley does not see it that way, instead holding for the position that from the council came “unalloyed good, precisely because it marked a break with the past.”  This would be the position that matters were so bad, a revolution was called for.

He employs “the standard ploy of Whig and liberal historiography” when he contrasts “two different visions of Catholicism,” the old in new, clearly giving the nod to the new, what the council approved.  O’Malley here:

from commands to invitations, from laws to ideals, from definition to mystery, from threats to persuasion, from coercion to conscience,

etc.  “The narrative might be Whig, but the history is fair — and rivetingly told,” says Oakes, giving credit where it’s due.  O’Malley gives in to the yen to editorialize, but his account undercuts his thesis:

He openly admits that, without the advances made in church teaching during Pius XII’s pontificate (1939-58), Vatican II would have been inconceivable. Not only did Pius call on Catholic biblical scholars in 1943 to study the Bible as a set of variable documents conditioned by their respective cultural settings (thereby undercutting a budding Catholic quasi-fundamentalism), he also urged Catholics to promote democracy.

Again, etc.

It’s always good to see Jesuits going at each other, if only for the normally, as here, high level of discussion.  But it’s especially good to see an opposing view to what has become conventional Catholic wisdom on a major church issue.