The sixteen official documents, constitutions, decrees, and declarations, of the Second Vatican Council are now available from Liturgical Press in the most popular and widely used inclusive-language edition translated by Irish Dominican Austin Flannery. As the worldwide Church continues to celebrate the fiftieth anniversary of the Council (1962-65), there is a great need in college classrooms and parish faith formation groups (as well as for individuals) to again have access to these documents in contemporary English. As Flannery wrote in his introduction to the 1996 edition, 'The translation of the texts of the Vatican documents in the present volume differs from that in the previous publication in two respects. It has been very considerably revised and, in place, corrected. It is also, to a very large extent, in inclusive language. I say 'to a very large extent,' because we have used inclusive language in passages about men and women but not, however, in passages about God, except where the use of the masculine pronoun was easily avoidable.'
Perfectae Caritatis, the Decree on the Adaptation and Renewal of Religious Life, is the document issued by the Second Vatican Council which deals specifically with institutes of consecrated life in the Roman Catholic Church. It is one of the shorter documents of the Council. As is customary for Church documents, the title is taken from the first words (incipit) of the decree: 'of Perfect Charity' in Latin.
