It has been fashionable to present the Church’s leaders in the 1960s and ’70s as victims of that period’s tremendous cultural change, especially insofar as it prevented the realization of the Council’s putative promise. The standard conservative account is that Vatican II itself was fine but then the Church got blindsided by the spirit of 1968 and that threw off everything. I believe we have every reason to call this narrative into question; indeed, to hold that the opposite is true. It was Vatican II that precipitated 1968, in the sense that the one institution in the Western world that had unequivocally represented timeless order, stability, tradition—even if people hated it—suddenly seemed to be reexamining everything from the ground up. That was sufficient to make the dam burst.
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