It is commonly said, and with good reason, that the Second Vatican Council was the most important religious event of the 20th century. If media coverage is a measure, it was second only to the war in Vietnam during council sessions from 1962 to 1965. It is also said to have been the largest deliberative meeting in human history, with more than 2,000 participating bishops from around the world, along with hundreds of theological experts (periti) and ecumenical observers who did much more than observe.

Four decades later, the arguments are still hot and heavy concerning what the council said and did. The two books under review nicely represent the main lines of the argument. The very titles are instructive. John W. O’Malley’s “What Happened at Vatican II” (Harvard University Press, 372 pages, $29.95) accents that it was a multifaceted event with viewpoints, personalities, and interests in frequently tumultuous conflict, and it makes for a rollicking good story. The important thing, he believes, is to understand the “spirit” of the council. “Vatican II: Renewal Within Tradition” (Oxford University Press, 462 pages, $99), by way of sharpest contrast, consists of 22 essays on the documents approved by the council and was edited by Matthew Lamb and Matthew Levering. The emphasis here is on understanding what the council actually said. (Full disclosure: I contributed an essay to the second book.)

The main story line of the council was established from the beginning by Xavier Rynne (the pseudonym of Father Francis X. Murphy) in a series of “Letters from Vatican City” published in the New Yorker. The council, according to Rynne, was an epic battle between stuck-in-the-chancel conservatives and enlightened liberals who were striving mightily to bring a tradition-bound Catholicism into the light of the modern world. In this telling of the story, the key to understanding the council is aggiornamento — usually translated as “updating.” Among other achievements, the council strongly endorsed ecumenical engagement with other Christians; clarified the church’s relationship to world religions, especially Judaism; affirmed the “collegial” role of bishops in the church’s government; refined the relationship between the authority of the Bible and the church’s teaching tradition; and, in a development to which American bishops were crucial, placed Catholic teaching squarely on the side of the defense of freedom of religion and conscience.

There is no doubt that something very important happened at the council. The 19th-century theologian and cardinal, John Henry Newman, helped Catholics to understand “the development of doctrine,” and the development of doctrine was obviously at work in the council. It is quite another matter, however, to claim, as Rynne and the thousands of reporters who followed his lead did claim, that Vatican II was a great liberal triumph.

In “What Happened at Vatican II,” Father O’Malley calls Rynne’s account “gossipy but engrossing,” yet he wants to rise above its strident partisanship. And so, for instance, he eschews references to “conservatives” and “liberals,” preferring to speak of the minority and the majority (while not disguising that he is rooting for the liberal majority). From beginning to end, says Father O’Malley, the great question was whether the council would “confirm the status quo or move notably beyond it.” He says his purpose is “to provide a sense of before and after.”

“Before and after” — that gets to the heart of most of the disputes about the council. Up through the 1980s, self-identified liberals routinely spoke of the “pre-Vatican II Church” and the “post-Vatican II Church,” almost as though they were two churches, with the clear implication that a very large part of the preceding centuries had been consigned to the dustbin of history.

Many liberals made no secret of their belief that aggiornamento was a mandate for radical change, even revolution. In the two decades following the council, they hailed as renewal what others saw as destabilization and confusion. Some traditionalists, farther to the right of center and as disappointed by the impact of the council as liberals were heartened, blamed the council itself, employing the logic of post hoc ergo propter hoc — “after which therefore because of which.” Liberals, on the other hand, demanded an early convening of Vatican Council III in order to, as they put it, “complete the revolution.”

There is no denying that there was much confusion in the aftermath of the council, and although Father O’Malley says he wants to treat the “before and after” of the council, he in fact limits himself to the before and at the council. Slight attention is paid the consequences of the changes he celebrates. Theologians openly dissented from church teaching and did so with impunity, indeed often being rewarded by the guild of academic theology for their putative courage. Tens of thousands of priests abandoned their ministries, convents were emptied as nuns embraced the vaunted freedoms of the secular world, Gregorian chant was replaced by “Kumbaya,” the number of seminarians preparing for priesthood plummeted, and not a few of the priests who remained decided on their own that celibacy was optional. Not incidentally, a majority of Catholics stopped going to Mass every week and decided, or were given to understand by progressive priests, that moral truths taught from the church’s beginning were, at most, advisory in nature.

What liberals celebrated as liberation many others lamented as catastrophe. With the aging of the boomer generation, and after three decades of the pontificates of John Paul II and Benedict XVI, the liberal Catholic project has fallen on hard times. The dominant call today, also among the bishops who succeeded the bishops at the council, is for a restabilizing of the church’s teaching and life. Some are reluctant to call this conservatism, preferring to speak of a need to “reform the reform.”

Enter “Vatican II: Renewal Within Tradition.” The book shamelessly pulls rank on Father O’Malley by opening with a reflection by Pope Benedict XVI on the proper interpretation of the council. The question is one of hermeneutics, says the pope. There are, he suggests, two quite different ways of interpreting the council.

On the one hand, there is an interpretation that I would call “a hermeneutic of discontinuity and rupture”; it has frequently availed itself of the sympathies of the mass media, and also one trend of modern theology. On the other, there is the “hermeneutic of reform,” of renewal in the continuity of the one subject, the Church that the Lord has given us. She is a subject that increases in time and develops, yet always remaining the same, the one subject of the journeying People of God.

It is tempting but inadequate to depict the difference between a hermeneutic of reform and a hermeneutic of rupture as a conflict between conservatives and liberals. The teaching of the council as advanced by John Paul II and Benedict XVI is in many ways emphatically liberal — as, for instance, in its embrace of democracy and its call for a new way of engagement between faith and reason. A great difference between the Lamb/Levering hermeneutic and the O’Malley hermeneutics is that the former is primarily theological and attuned to what is believed to be divinely revealed truth as it has been handed on and its understanding faithfully developed over the centuries. The Fr. O’Malley interpretation, by contrast, is essentially sociological, psychological, and linguistic, and is aimed at bringing the Church into line with what he and many others understand to be the spirit of the times. For instance, Fr. O’Malley rightly notes the council’s vigorous condemnation of anti-Semitism but fails to connect that with the council’s theological treatment of the unique relationship in God’s universal plan of salvation between the Church and the people of Israel.

There are other differences of great consequence. Whether one focuses, with Father Lamb and Mr. Levering, on the texts of the council or, with Fr. O’Malley, on the spirit of the council, there are interesting parallels with America’s legal debates between proponents of “original meaning” and proponents of “the living Constitution.” Fr. O’Malley is strongly on the side of a “living council” whose “spirit” is marvelously malleable. Moreover, his interpretation tends to reflect a particular moment in the progressive thought of Europe and America, while Fr. Lamb and Mr. Levering have in view a universal community of more than 1.2 billion members located mainly in the Global South. Thus Fr. O’Malley’s account is preoccupied with somewhat parochial European and North American discontents concerning relationships of power within the Church, while Fr. Lamb and Mr. Levering have in view the universal mission of the Church through time.

All that having been said, however, Fr. O’Malley’s book is the much better read. As Xavier Rynne and the editors of the New Yorker understood, personalities, politics, factional fights, and dark conspiracies make for high drama. Especially when combatants are cast as good liberals versus bad conservatives. Yet more than 40 years later the hermeneutic of continuity and reform is prevailing, as a result of the leadership of John Paul II and Benedict XVI and in critical response to the excesses of those who viewed Vatican II as a call to revolution. Today there are more younger priests, along with growing communities of religious women and men, and they tend to be deeply committed to renewal within tradition, with the emphasis on both renewal and tradition. The generation of Rynne is past or rapidly passing. Kumbaya still lingers in the air but is slowly giving way to music and liturgy drawing more deeply on centuries of Catholic worship. A relentless diet of novelty proved unsatisfying. Whether in liturgy, doctrine, or morality, novelty has never been Catholicism’s strong suit. For all the merits of Fr. O’Malley’s account, readers who want to understand the significance of the Second Vatican Council will be better served by Fr. Lamb and Mr. Levering. Perhaps they should have titled their book “What Really Happened at Vatican II.”

Fr. Neuhaus is editor in chief of First Things, an ecumenical journal of religion, culture, and public life, and author, most recently, of “Catholic Matters: Confusion, Controversy, and the Splendor of Truth.”