intuition that Blessed John XXIII summarized in that word was and remains exact. Christianity must not be considered as 'something of the past', nor must it be lived with our gaze ever turned back. [...] Christianity is always new. We must never look at it as though it were a tree, fully developed from the mustard seed of the Gospel, that grew, gave its fruit, and one fine day grows old as the sun sets on its life force. Christianity is a tree that is, so to speak, ever “timely”, ever young. And this trend, this aggiornamento does not mean a break with tradition, but expresses its ongoing vitality; it does not mean reducing the faith, debasing it to the fashion of the times, measured by what pleases us, by what pleases public opinion. [...] The Council was a time of grace in which the Holy Spirit taught us that the Church, in her journey through history, must always speak to the people of today. Christopher Butler on Aggiornamento In an essay on aggiornamento, Bishop Christopher Butler, a participant in the Second Vatican Council as a Benedictine abbot, described the condition of the Church before the Council and explained the need for aggiornamento. Butler said that the new "pastoral aim, the instinct of a charity that goes beyond all boundaries, the sense of mission not so much to human nature or the abstract human species, but to human persons and the actually existing human family, demanded that our aggiornamento should be conceived of in depth." The bishops at the Council, Butler explained, recognized that great changes in the human environment and world required serious adaptation of the church to respond to this new environment. Otherwise, the church was moving toward "monumental irrelevance". Proclamation of the gospel is the first task of the church, and so it must make this gospel intelligible and relevant to the people of each age, and now to the whole world of diverse peoples represented by their bishops at the Council. For this the Council, in a spirit of aggiornamento, reached back "behind St Thomas himself and the Fathers, to the biblical theology which governs the first two chapters of the ''Constitution on the Church''." See also Spirit of Vatican II References 1959 in Christianity 1959 in religion Second Vatican Council