Cardinal Kasper reflects on Vatican II and its legacy
December 23, 2025
» Continue to this story on L'Osservatore Romano (Italian)
CWN Editor's Note: Cardinal Walter Kasper, the 92-year-old president emeritus of the Pontifical Council for Promoting Christian Unity, has commemorated the 60th anniversary of the closing of the Second Vatican Council with a lengthy essay in the Vatican newspaper.
“Conservative and progressive [interpretations of Vatican II] are not opposites, since, correctly understood, they are part of the same whole,” he wrote. “The hope is that the new Pope, Leo XIV, has recognized the absurdity of this dispute and will say that we must disarm our language: we should not polarize and speak against each other, but dialogue in a conciliatory way. One can only hope that Pope Leo will succeed in this reconciliation.”
“The Second Vatican Council showed that the Church is not a rigid and immobile entity,” he concluded. “The Council set many things in motion. This dynamism is also needed in the new century. The streams of pilgrims who came to Rome in the last months of the Holy Year—more than 30 million people and so many young people from all over the world—showed that the Church, despite all the controversies after the Second Vatican Council and despite the increase in persecution against Christians in the world, has remained alive and young.”
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