Excerpt of Faithful Fictions
September 28, 2022
The image of international Catholicism has itself undergone a change since the Second Vatican Council. The Church began to pay more attention to the individual conscience, to ecumenism, and to social justice, although there has also been fierce resistance to these trends in some quarters. Yet for a long period, Catholicism had seemed powerfully authoritarian and reactionary, and it was understandable that it should have been seen as set against all the social and political developments on which the genre of the novel was held to depend.