Robert Barron - What Was the Actual Purpose of Vatican II?
Well, let me say a word about the Council because you brought it up first. Another great grace of my life was a relationship with Cardinal George of Chicago and the privilege of living with him at least part time for about five years and of course he had tremendous reverence for John Paul II, so we talked a lot about him. Cardinal George used to say "what people miss is that Vatican II was a missionary council". He said, unlike, for example, Nicea, Chalcedon, Trent, even Vatican I, it wasn't there to settle major doctrinal issues.
There was indeed doctrinal development in Vatican II, under the aegis of Newman's notion of development. That certainly happened, but as John XXIII saw, and Francis George reiterated this, what they wanted to achieve was the act now of bringing the richness and treasures from the Church into the world. So like Lumen Gentium, bring the Lumen of Christ to the Gentes (the nations), that was the purpose of Vatican II and so some of these adjustments in language and style and strategy that Rocco was talking about, that's all subordinate to the missionary purpose of Vatican II.
Rocco cited Balthasar, the great book that he wrote in the 50's called Schleifung der Bastionen, "the knocking down of the bastions". What he meant was the Church, he felt, was crouching too much behind its medieval walls and it was keeping its treasure, if you want, to itself. The ideal was to knock down the walls, not so much to let the modern world in, but to let the Church out, let the beauty and treasure of the Church out so as to transform the world.