Pope Paul VI presides over a 1963 session of Vatican II. Credit: CNS photo/Catholic Press Photo.

As we approach the 60th anniversary of the close of the Second Vatican Council on Dec. 8, it is a chance to look back at that council’s most influential and important documents, many of which appeared in a flurry in the waning months of 1965 (coming up on Dec. 7: “Gaudium et Spes” and “Dignitatis Humanae”). But last Friday was the 61st anniversary of another of the biggies: The “Dogmatic Constitution on the Church,” better known by its Latin title, “Lumen Gentium.” And it is not possible to understand the provenance of 1965’s blockbuster promulgations without recognizing the importance of “Lumen Gentium” for the council and the church.

The constitution, wrote America associate editor Donald R. Campion, S.J., shortly after its publication, “ranks as the master work of this 21st ecumenical assembly. It must be recognized, moreover, as a landmark in two thousand years of Christian history.” While Father Campion realized that other council documents were awaited with greater anticipation, the dogmatic constitution “stands as an invitation to development in Christian faith and order that will challenge generations to come.” 

Looking back on “Lumen Gentium” five decades later, the theologian Gavin D’Costa wrote in America that the document “movingly emphasizes the central goal of the Catholic life, the call to holiness and charity—but mediated through the sacramental life of the church.”

Like most of the council documents, “Lumen Gentium” passed by an overwhelming majority in 1964, with a final tally of 2,151 for and five against. 

Some of the most resonant and memorable phrases of Vatican II come from “Lumen Gentium,” including the description of the church as a mystery and as the people of God and the assertion of a universal call to holiness. The constitution also affirmed “the common priesthood of the faithful” that all the baptized share. Linking the church as it exists today to the history of salvation and God’s original covenant with Israel in the Old Testament, “Lumen Gentium” simultaneously emphasized the church’s nature as a divine institution and as a pilgrim people on a journey.

I had a church history professor years ago who said: “Vatican I was the council of the papacy. Vatican II was the council of the bishops.” While Vatican II also issued a document specifically about the duties of bishops, “Christus Dominus,” it is in “Lumen Gentium” that their role as successors to the apostles and as a sacred college is most clearly defined—and in terms that were markedly different from Vatican I’s assertion of papal authority, up to and including infallibility.

In an article by Ladislas M. Orsy, S.J., that appeared in America in May 1965 (not making that up, he wrote for the magazine from 1963 to 2012), the Vatican II peritus and professor of canon law described “Lumen Gentium” as the bishops’ attempt to harmonize claims of papal primacy with episcopal prerogative. The bishops have a greater authority as a body (or college, or permanent community) than the sum of their parts; at the same time, however, “the college cannot exist without its head” in the person of the pope. “Hence any form of conciliarism that would put the bishops above the Pope is proscribed,” Orsy wrote. 

Indeed, the final document included a special note at the request of Pope Paul VI stating, among other matters, that “As Supreme Pastor of the Church, the Supreme Pontiff can always exercise his power at will, as his very office demands.” Just in case anyone got any ideas.

Another major concern of “Lumen Gentium” was the church’s role in the economy of salvation. Was there still “no salvation outside the church,” or could the dawning ecumenical age teach the Catholic Church something about a diversity of pathways to God? At various parts, “Lumen Gentium” sounds like it is offering a resounding “no.” For example:

This Sacred Council wishes to turn its attention firstly to the Catholic faithful. Basing itself upon Sacred Scripture and Tradition, it teaches that the Church, now sojourning on earth as an exile, is necessary for salvation. Christ, present to us in His Body, which is the Church, is the one Mediator and the unique way of salvation.

Not even Leonard Feeney could object to that formulation. So why is “Lumen Gentium” considered by so many to be one of the documents that opened up the possibility that the Roman Catholic Church doesn’t have a monopoly on salvation? Because earlier, the document states:

This is the one Church of Christ which in the Creed is professed as one, holy, catholic and apostolic, which our Saviour, after His Resurrection, commissioned Peter to shepherd, and him and the other apostles to extend and direct with authority, which He erected for all ages as “the pillar and mainstay of the truth”. This Church constituted and organized in the world as a society, subsists in the Catholic Church, which is governed by the successor of Peter and by the Bishops in communion with him, although many elements of sanctification and of truth are found outside of its visible structure. 

That’s right: “subsists in,” not “is.” The text did not use the Latin “est” but instead “subsistit in.” Is there a difference, or were the council fathers just playing thesaurus games? Or was this a Clintonesque case of “well, that depends on what the meaning of the word ‘is’ is”? For some in the church then and now, this wasn’t a question of semantics but one of the church forsaking its divinely ordained status as the unique way to salvation. If the existing Catholic Church is not equivalent to the one church of Christ, what about our notions of a societas perfecta, an institution that contains the fullness of truth?

You know that Catholic who has an allergic reaction every time synodality is mentioned? Well, he really, really hates “subsistit in.” Much ink has been spilled in the decades since on this topic—including in one rather controversial Vatican declaration in 2000.

In 2007, responding to an article in America by the theologian Richard R. Gaillardetz, Cardinal Avery Dulles, S.J., argued that the council fathers had originally written that the one church of Christ “is present” (“adest”) in the Catholic Church but chose “subsists” because they “wanted to safeguard the doctrine that Christ’s church is completely present in the Catholic Church and nowhere else…members of the doctrinal Commission were well aware that the verb subsist in classical metaphysics meant full and substantial existence.”

In 1989, however, writing in Theological Studies, Cardinal Dulles stated that whereas “Pius XII had said that the Mystical Body and the Roman Catholic Church were one and the same thing, Vatican II contented itself with saying that the Church of Christ ‘subsists in’ the Roman Catholic Church—an expression deliberately chosen to allow for the ecclesial reality of other Christian communities.”

Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger (later Pope Benedict XVI) stated in 2000 that “the Council Fathers meant to say that the being of the Church as such is a broader entity than the Roman Catholic Church, but within the latter it acquires, in an incomparable way, the character of a true and proper subject.” 

Theological kerfuffles aside, “Lumen Gentium” also stands out among church writings of any era for its evocative language and literary style. That is another reason it is so often quoted and referenced: its appeal to the better angels of our nature.

During the early days of the church’s sexual abuse scandals in 2002, the theologian Christopher J. Ruddy penned a piece for America on what Vatican II might offer a church in crisis. Noting that “Lumen Gentium” described the church as always in need of being purified and following “the path of penance and renewal,” Ruddy also remembered the words of Karl Rahner, S.J., that “the darkness of the night makes the stars shine all the more brightly.” Ruddy cited from “Lumen Gentium” some words that he felt might give a broken church new hope:

But by the power of the risen Lord [the church] is given the strength to overcome, in patience and in love, its sorrows and its difficulties, both those that are from within and those that are from without, so that it may reveal in the world, faithfully, although with shadows, the mystery of its Lord until, in the end, it shall be manifested in full light.

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Our poetry selection for this week is “Digital Vespers,” by Bianca Blanche. Readers can view all of America’s published poems here.

In other news, we still have a few spots left for our pilgrimage to Ireland in April 2026. Led by myself and America editor in chief Sam Sawyer, S.J., the trip, “The Land of Saints & Scholars: A Journey into the Heart & Soul of Ireland,” will be from April 19 to 28, 2026. We promise a lot of spiritual insights and a lot of absolute blarney.