From: Commonweal | Date: March 11, 1994| Author: Imbelli, Robert P. | COPYRIGHT 1994 Commonweal Foundation. This material is published under license from the publisher through the Gale Group, Farmington Hills, Michigan.  All inquiries regarding rights should be directed to the Gale Group.Copyright information

In a path-breaking article, written to commemorate the fifteen hundreth anniversary of the Council of Chalcedon, Karl Rahner posed his famous question: "Chalcedon--End or Beginning?" His answer was, of course, both; though in the Roman Catholicism of the early 1950s the second term of the disjunction was scarcely self-evident.

One might pose the same question regarding the Second Vatican Council; clearly, for Roman Catholics and others as well, the defining ecclesial eve...