A Symposium in the Year of Faith

 This short paper has one objective to evaluate Pope John Paul II's claim, namely that the Documents of the Second Vatican Council are a sure compass for the Church, and therefore for the religious life. The aim here is to bring out the value of the Council. Above all, our presentation tries to reflect the Council's comprehensive framework and to accentuate central teachings in these two Documents . Such a plan comes up against a diversity of texts and contexts. As far as possible we have taken these factors into account, in the analysis of the major texts, yet such difficulties may seem formidable. Nevertheless, our plan can be justified by one undeniable fact: the unity of the subject that promulgates the two documents Lumen gentium and Perfectae caritatis, namely the Council itself.    Prior to Vatican II, religious life in the Catholic Church had under the pressure of canonical legalism succumbed to a certain amount of monastic uniformity. What occurred in Vatican II is in some contrast to the prevailing understanding in generations immediately prior to the Council (though not in the Church tradition as a whole). The Council challenged contemporary religious to a healthy pluralism and prescribed a twofold strategy for diversifying vowed living. First, the Council fathers summoned each order and congregation both to return to the Christian sources of vowed living and to rediscover its special identity as a community through renewed understanding of the vision of its founder. Second, Vatican II  2  called for the prudent adaptation of different religious institutes to the changed conditions of life in the modern world.1