Robert Blair Kaiser

As the 50th anniversary of the Catholic Church's historic Second Vatican Council approaches in 2012, author and journalist Robert Blair Kaiser—one of the last surviving eyewitness of Vatican II—offers an acute, informed account of this historic event, full of stories about the men and women who fought to update the Church.

Kaiser spent 18-hour days conducting interviews in an effort to illuminate what was going on inside and around the Council hall—which was closed to the press—and report it to the world. He shares delightful anecdotes about his experiences, including how he made friends among the Council's leaders, many of whom ended up in his home every week for Sunday supper, including more than 70 bishops from around the world, the Church's most prominent theologians, and a half dozen Protestant and Jewish observers. (Hans Kung of Germany, for example, was usually the last one there, drinking Rusty Nails and commenting on the Council's ups and downs; the Jesuit Archbishop T.D. Roberts, retired of Bombay, came to dinner one night and stayed as Kaiser's house guest for two years.)

With a unique perspective as both a reporter and a witness, Robert Blair Kaiser illuminates the work of the Council between October 1962 and December 1965, while putting those events into context with the major problems confronting the Church, and the world at large, today.

Kaiser believes that the Council helped us all be more real, more human, and more loving; that it helped us realize that the world was a good place. He recalls what kind of Church we lived in before Vatican II, and what the Council did to change that—irreversibly.

Now is the time to bring Kaiser before your congregation, community, or organization, so they may learn firsthand about Vatican II, hear these fascinating stories from one of the foremost journalist/ theologians of our time, and see that the Council is not a dead letter from the past but a challenging charter for change.