ABSTRACT
Since the time of their publication, the texts promulgated by the Second Vatican Council have been understood by commentators in very diverse, often contradicting, ways. The conciliar texts are used for both supporting and rejecting various changes which occurred in the Roman Catholic Church in the decades that followed the Council. This diversity of interpretations is often attributed to the presence of obscurities, ambiguities and compromise formulas in the conciliar texts which allegedly were placed there in order to win the Council’s fathers’ consensus needed for passing the documents. The language of the conciliar texts is often open-ended, ambiguous and susceptible to diverse interpretations, and more than fifty years after the conclusion of the Council, consensus about the correct way of understanding it is far from being achieved.
