In 1978, Pope Saint John Paul II came onto the loggia of St Peter’s Square. The third Pope of the year, it is difficult to overstate how consequential and providential his papacy would become.
Thirteen years on from the close of the Second Vatican Council, the Church was still finding its direction in the Council’s ripples. The Novus Ordo Missae, the Mass of Paul VI, had been in parish churches for less than a decade, having been introduced on the First Sunday of Advent in 1969, and a progressive theological mood had taken hold in the Church. Hans Küng rejected papal infallibility in that same year, and just a few years earlier Edward Schillebeeckx OP had, in Jesus: An Experiment in Christology (1974), attempted to explain away Christ’s bodily resurrection.
