The story of Vatican II begins in the middle of the century with a man commonly known as Il Papa Buono. On Jan. 25, Pope John XXIII calls for an ecumenical council.

DENVER — New-media evangelist Father Robert Barron says the dream of Vatican II is still unrealized: that Catholics in every walk of life embrace the missionary call to proclaim Jesus Christ to ...

After more than three years of preparation, the Second Vatican Council began in October of 1962, with ambitious goals for fostering a renewal in the Church’s mission in the modern world.

This week marks the 50th anniversary of the Second Vatican Council, or Vatican II, which opened the Catholic Church's window onto the modern world. Among other things, it gave a larger role to lay ...

VATICAN CITY (RNS) Gianni Crea has 2,797 of them. And he and his team of official 'key keepers' use them to open 300 doors around the Vatican, and lock them again each night. Now if only he could ...

Unlike his two predecessors, St. John Paul II and retired Pope Benedict XVI, Pope Francis was not present in Rome for any of the sessions of the council, which met from 1962 to 1965.

"To me, the key to Benedict is Vatican II," Bishop Robert Barron of Word on Fire Ministries told Fox News Digital. "He's a man of the council. He was at the council.

In a way, maybe we are living all together as baptized Christians in the synodal process in the same way that the council fathers at Vatican II experienced collegiality in their role as bishops.

In the second of Michael Sean Winters' two-part review of The Oxford Handbook of Vatican II, he praises the book's treatment of the council itself and its reception.

Before dawn at the Vatican Museums, the key keeper and his team have to open up more than 2,700 doors. ... In 1508, Pope Julius II commissioned Michelangelo to dress up the ceiling with frescoes.

The image above is of the cathedral of Köln after World War II bombing devastated most of that German city. It's why the Second Vatican Council was necessary -- and why it might have been doomed ...