Sandro Magister is a journalist associated with the Italian weekly newsmagazine lespresso. His long obsession with the History of Vatican II continues. Two weeks ago he used his weekly web-column to reproduce yet another speech by Archbishop Agostino Marchetto repeating criticisms uttered many times in recent years and faithfully reported by Magister.This week, he devotes the column to the most recent issue of the scholarly journal published by the Institute for Religious Studies in Bologna, Cristianesimo nella Storia. Four of the essays in this number concern the hermeneutics of the Second Vatican Council. I wrote one of these essays, and my essay is one of the objects of Magisters criticism. Magister has echoed Marchetto in accusing something called the "Bologna School," said to be responsible for the five-volume "History of Vatican II," of accentuating the elements of discontinuity in the Council, of setting the two popes of the Council, John XXIII and Paul VI, in opposition to one another, of underestimating the texts of the Council in favor of its "spirit" and of its "event"-character.As for Magisters comments on my piece, I will say only that my essay was written originally for the use of my students in a course on Vatican II; when this came to the attention of the editor of Cristianesimo nella Storia, he asked me to submit it for publication in this issue. I wrote it independently of all the other pieces, and without knowing what the other essays say. Some weeks back I excerpted some paragraphs from this essay here on the Commonweal blog and was astonished to find that Magister read them as an official response of the "Bologna school"! On the particular point of the Popes criticism of those who would compare the Council to a "constituent assembly" or "constitutional congress," I did not know that Peter Hnermann had used that comparison in connection with a set of commentaries on the conciliar documents published recently in German. This project was quite independent of the History of Vatican II (in fact, some of the contributors to the History were very disappointed that the Germans refused the kind of international collaboration that had marked the Historybut that is another story), and this particular view of Hnermann was found quite puzzling to several of us. Papal criticism of that view cannot, then, be considered criticism of the so-called "Bologna school" and its History. Magister gives a very rapid and very incomplete summary of my contribution, which was a close analysis of Pope Benedicts remarks on the interpretation of the Council. From Magisters account one could guess that most of that speech was devoted to criticizing the alleged "hermeneutics of rupture". In fact, 85% of the talk was devoted to explaining the Popes favored "hermeneutics of reform" and the elements of novelty (the word "new" recurs often in the speech) at the Council as illustrated by the Councils endorsement of religious freedom. My close analysis argues that the Pope himself thought that in the area of Church-world relations the Council represented a needed shift of historic importance.Since I havent yet read the other essays in this number of the journal, I cant comment on Magisters summary of them, but if his treatment of me is typical of his commitment to completeness and accuracy in reporting, I would advise people not to place much trust in them.