of the world to turn away from a fortress-like defensive attitude to the modern world and set off in a new direction towards a renewed theology of the Church and of the laity, ecumenism and the reform of the liturgy. So, soon after the Pope's announcement, the stage was set for a confrontation between two programs: continuing the resistance to the modern world or taking seriously the Pope's call for renewal. The council was officially summoned by the apostolic constitution on 25 December 1961. Preparation Preparation for the Council took over three years, from the summer of 1959 to the autumn of 1962. The first year was known officially as the “antepreparatory period”. On 17 May 1959, Pope John appointed an Antepreparatory Commission to conduct a vast consultation of the Catholic world concerning topics to be examined at the council. Three groups of people were consulted: the bishops of the world, the Catholic universities and faculties of theology, and the departments of the Curia. By the following summer, 2,049 individuals and institutions had replied with 9,438 individual vota (“wishes”). Some were typical of past ways of doing things, asking for new dogmatic definitions or condemnations of errors. Others were in the spirit of aggiornamento, asking for reforms and new ways of doing things. The next two years (known officially as the “preparatory period”) were occupied with preparing the drafts, called schemas, that would be submitted to the bishops for discussion at the council. On 5 June 1960, ten Preparatory Commissions were created, to which a total of 871 bishops and experts were appointed. Each preparatory commission had the same area of responsibility as one of the main departments of the Curia and was chaired by the cardinal who headed that department. From the 9,438 proposals, a list of topics was created, and these topics were parcelled out to these commissions according to their area of competence. Some commissions prepared a separate schema for each topic they were asked to treat, others a single schema encompassing all the topics they were handed. These were the preparatory commissions and the number of schemas they prepared: Two secretariats – one the offshoot of an existing Vatican office, the other a new body – also had a part in drafting schemas: The total number of schemas was 70. As most of these preparatory bodies were predominantly conservative, the schemas they produced showed only modest