Angelo Roncalli believed in the Church’s potential, from Christ and the Holy Spirit, to become ever again rejuvenated. This came from his prolonged work editing the records of Metropolitan Archbishop Charles Borromeo’s 1575 visitation of his own diocese of Bergamo. The visitation applied Trent’s reform decrees and renewed a large diocese by imposing new standards

This article relates the itinerary of Vatican II’s exhortation to Catholics to practice prayerful Scripture reading. In 1961 the Preparatory Theological Commission treated Bible reading in a cautionary and admonitory mode that highlighted guidance by the Magisterium. But the Secretariat for Promoting Christian Unity insisted that pastoral ministers should introduce the faithful to devout reading

The article presents interventions by certain expert-consultants (periti) just before and during Vatican II’s opening weeks in 1962. Discovering mediocrity in passages of the prepared schemas on God’s revelation, Joseph Ratzinger, Pieter Smulders, Karl Rahner, and Jean Daniélou formulated criticisms and framed alternatives that this article reviews. In time, several key conceptions of their alternative