Massimo Faggioli is an adherent of what can be called the Alberigo School of interpreting Vatican II. Giuseppe Alberigo and others, like Alberto Melloni and the Jesuit John O'Malley, are well known as exponents of the view that Vatican II needs to be interpreted as much as an earthshaking event as a series of documents in line with the church's tradition. That view permeates Faggioli's book.
Faggioli, who teaches at the University of St. Thomas in St. Paul, Minnesota, has previously written a general hermeneutics of the council, entitled Vatican II: The Battle for Meaning (Paulist Press, 2012). This book drills deeper into the question of relating the council's first document, The Constitution on the Sacred Liturgy, to the rest of the council's work. Thus this book is about the “intertextuality” of Vatican II, the fact that one cannot make sense of the entire council without attending to the importance of the liturgical reform, and that one cannot understand the significance of the liturgical reform without relating it to the rest of the council, especially its ecclesiology. Faggioli (following Giuseppe Dossetti) discerns a profoundly eucharistic ecclesiology in the liturgy constitution (Sacrosanctum Concilium, hereafter SC).
According to Faggioli, a problem with the vast majority of commentators on SC and the subsequent Catholic liturgical reform is that they got so caught up in the liturgical reform itself that they failed to understand the theological importance of SC as the first of the council's decrees. In my opinion, he is on target and provides a valuable deepening as well as a corrective to works on the reaction to the liturgical reform, including my own. Faggioli is certainly correct in observing (7) that the traditionalists have had a far better appreciation of the theological and ecclesiological implications of the liturgical reform than its proponents have had. SC thus becomes an important hermeneutical key for understanding how profoundly new (and old in the sense of ressourcement) is Vatican II's theology of the church.
Along the way Faggioli makes a number of important points. For example, he spells out the ecumenical implications of SC (31–36), and he analyzes core aspects of SC's ecclesiology: the human/divine (theandric) conjunction, the issue of change and tradition, a sacramental view of the church itself (which was to become important in Lumen Gentium, the Constitution on the Church, hereafter LG), and the centrality of baptism and Eucharist (65–68). He notes that in a significant way LG failed to follow through on the eucharistic ecclesiology of SC (71). Faggioli is at his best when spelling out the disastrous consequences of Pope Benedict's motu proprio, Summorum Pontificum (2007), which liberalized the use of the pre-Vatican II liturgy. Pace Pope Benedict, SC represents a new lex credendi (rule of believing) for the church, and support for the old liturgy is thus a rejection of the council tout court (91–92, 150). In my estimation Faggioli is correct in assessing the so-called reform of the reform and current attempts to undermine the liturgical reform as the “fruit of a fascination with a world that does not exist anymore” (164).
I cannot recommend this book strongly enough for anyone who is concerned with studying the theological implications of the liturgical reform of the past fifty years. It would probably not be very useful for undergraduates, but it certainly should be considered for graduate seminars on Vatican II. Anyone who teaches liturgy and/or sacraments should have this book on his or her shelf.
