A privileged moment: 'dialogue' in the language of the Second Vatican Council 1962-65

Abstract

The style of language at Vatican II made a break with the then-current scholastic language of Catholic theology. Less concerned to define, in scholastic mode, the language of Vatican II was more concerned to persuade, in a rhetorical mode that was identified as 'pastoral' at the time. This book takes the central word 'dialogue' as the important interface between these two modes of language, because 'dialogue' had a history in scholastic theology as the finding-the-end-result dialectic of Thomism, yet 'dialogue' in twentieth-century philosophical thought had acquired the Buberian sense of an ongoing relationship that did not lend itself to once-and-for-all definitions. Some of the difficulties that have arisen in implementing the teaching of Vatican II are shown to result from these two different understandings of dialogue, compounded for English-speaking readers by the fact that two different Latin words in the original documents were commonly translated as 'dialogue' in the five major English translations.