Pope John XXIII opened the Second Vatican Council
On this day · 11 October 1962
On October 11, 1962, an 80-year-old pope threw open the windows of the Catholic Church to the modern world.
On October 11, 1962, Pope John XXIII processed into St. Peter’s Basilica to open the Second Vatican Council, the twenty-first ecumenical council in the Church’s history. Roughly 2,500 cardinals, patriarchs, and bishops gathered from across the globe, joined by hundreds of theological experts.
The elderly pope had stunned everyone by calling the council at all. His watchword was aggiornamento, an Italian term for bringing the Church up to date. The morning after the opening, addressing diplomats, he recalled “the emotion We felt yesterday in St. Peter’s during the solemn opening of the Ecumenical Council.”
He urged the council fathers to meet the pastoral needs of the age rather than merely repeat old condemnations.
Meeting each autumn through 1965, the council produced sixteen documents that reshaped Catholic worship, including Mass in local languages instead of Latin. John XXIII did not live to see it finished, dying in 1963, but Vatican II remains his defining legacy.
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