Fortress Press

"This is an immensely erudite and stringently argued study of the leading scholars of early modern theology and Enlightenment Catholicism. Thoroughly accessible and persuasive, Ulrich L. Lehner offers new and striking vistas on Catholicism's complex response to the european Enlightenment, and on how that response subsequently informed and crucially shaped what happened at Vatican II."   

"With this extraordinarily informative book, Ulrich L. Lehner establishes himself as the leading authority on the  Catholic Enlightenment. Eminently readable and greatly instructive, Lehner's On the Road to Vatican II sheds light upon the most under-researched era of Catholic history in Europe and uncovers a veritable seed-bed of productive, creative, and decisive impulses constitutive of modern Catholicism. A 'must read' for every student of Catholicism in the modern world. A remarkable scholarly achievement."

"Ulrich L. Lehner's meticulous and fascinating history of the Catholic Enlightenment continues a scholarly project of the first order. Not only does Lehner uncover a Catholic Enlightenment in Europe but also he revises what we can mean by 'Enlightenment' and thereby changes our very understanding of modernity."

"Arguing that the Catholic Enlightenment reflects not only the spirit of Vatican II but also the spirit of Trent, Ulrich L. Lehner brilliantly describes an extraordinary set of initiatives in ecumenism, liturgical renewal, appreciation for historical-critical exegesis, greater tolerance for the Jewish people, ecclesiastical reform, and so forth—alongside powerful polemics, vilification of opponents, persecution of new ways of thinking, strong contempt for scholastic theology and philosophy, denunciation and suppression of Jesuits, and much more.  This book should end once and for all the shameful theological neglect of the four hundred years between Trent and Vatican II.  There can no longer be any excuse: the full breadth of this period of Catholic theology simply must be retrieved post-haste."