by John Grondelski.

Expect the word "reform" to be thrown around frequently during the current interregnum in the Church. Looking backwards, there will be debates about what reforms were expected of Pope Francis, what he delivered or failed to deliver, and whether those acts or omissions were, in fact, reforms. Looking forward, the argument will be over what "reforms" to expect from the next pope.

Part of the "reform" debate will center around the Second Vatican Council and its ongoing implementation. One thing is for certain: whoever the next pope is - unless he is an octogenarian - for him, Vatican II will be an event of history, not unlike Trent or even Nicaea. And even Francis, who no doubt remembered the Council, took no part in it.

Which makes the revisionist history arising around the Francis pontificate so false.

There's a tendency to call Francis a "reformer" for "restarting" the "reception" of the Council, implicitly after the 35-year delay caused by John Paul II and Benedict XVI. Think about that: Bergoglio, a nonparticipant in the Council, supposedly better understood it than one pope who was a Council Father and another who was a distinguished peritus.

We are at a watershed moment.

This conclave will, in some sense, define how we "understand" Vatican II. Will it be a Council that fits into the long ages of Church history? Or will it be some break with that history? Will the Council be read according to what the Council Fathers actually wrote (allowing that there is ambiguity in some of the passages)? Or will "a specter be haunting the conclave," the ghost of Vatican II, that somehow, like so many emanations of penumbrae, finds scant anchorage in the Council's actual words?

This split has been plaguing the Church since the Council. It found its best recent expression in Pope Benedict's contrast between the "hermeneutic of continuity" and the "hermeneutic of rupture" - two very different ways of understanding the Council. During Benedict's lifetime, the advocates of rupture were somewhat held in check. Since his death, they've been unleashed.

Cardinal Gerhard Müller, the former prefect of the Congregation (now Dicastery) for the Doctrine of the Faith and bête-noire of the Francis papacy, captured this dilemma in the title of his 2023 book, True and False Reform: What It Means to Be Catholic. The crisis facing the Church is not, says Müeller, a choice between two equally valid and morally indifferent paths by which to go forward. The crisis she faces is one of true or false reform.

The crisis is: where do we start? Do we insist, as the Church always has, on the centrality and truth of Jesus Christ, the Word, whose teaching remains normative for the Church in all times and seasons, and which are the criteria by which those times and cultures are judged? Or, as some imagine Vatican II believed, do we start with the modern world and the concrete, existential human situation, tailoring the ecclesial response in ways that will "accompany" the world? As H. Richard Niebuhr rightly asked, does Christ measure the culture or the culture Christ?

When he delivered a Lenten retreat for Pope Paul VI, the future John Paul II prophetically remarked at one point that "we are in a lively battle for the dignity of man." In a very real sense, that too is the question the conclave will have to consider when it thinks about what kind of "Vatican II" the new pope should implement.

John Paul II put a huge focus on man because he was acutely aware of how human dignity and rights were under assault in the contemporary world. In that focus, John Paul was very much in line with the turn of modern thought towards the human subject.

But John Paul II never considered man apart from God. One text from Vatican II that he never tired of repeating was Gaudium et spes 22: "Jesus Christ fully reveals man to himself." We do not come to know who man is by examining him in his concrete - and broken - sinful reality, but as who he is supposed to be (and...