WASHINGTON, DC (Catholic Online) - If you have read the documents of 2nd Vatican Council, you will have noticed there is nothing in any of them that even closely resembles the "Spirit of Vatican II" so often evoked by dissenters.  All those documents have one goal in mind: To make the Catholic worship and teaching more communicative to the people of God, or, as it is usually put, more pastoral.

As we said at the outset of this series, the old hands in the media and at Catholic outlets such as America and Commonweal still recall the brilliant, and subversive, series of Vatican II reports published in the New Yorker under the pseudonym of Xavier Rynne, who was actually a Redemptorist priest, Rev. Francis X. Murphy, who attended the Council as a journalist.