Index

Abstract

It is easy to agree with Y. Congar who says that a council which has not successfully passed through the process of reception in the life of Church remains a dead letter. After all, historical experience abundantly testifies to it. Councils and synods have made real progress in self-understanding and in Church practice only if the Church community has assimilated them at a number of levels in a quite often lengthy and very complex process that has never been devoid of interpretational dilemmas and conflicts. For fifty years the same hermeneuticreception scenario has also accompanied the assimilation of Vatican Council II. The Second Vatican Council is undoubtedly the greatest religious event of the twentieth century. This is evidenced by enormous global attention given to the Council while it was being held, but also in the first years after it, by members of various churches, religions, media, historians, sociologists, politicians. Because of the until then in history unseen media resonance of Council events, the themes and documents of Vatican Council II have become the topic of interpretations and discussions of the entire people of God. So we can say that the church community, on the level of its inner life and its relations with other churches and religions, had already started with reception of the Council while it was going on...