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The cultural challenges facing the Church and the Second Vatican Council in the early 1960s did not come as a surprise.[1] They were the culmination of the long evolution of modern Western culture, the origins of which go back to the Enlightenment. These challenges had emerged with the French Revolution and the Industrial Revolution and were then brought into focus in the 19th century by the great modern philosophical currents (German Idealism, Positivism, Marxism, Nietzschean vitalism, evolutionism), by the birth of the new human sciences (psychology, sociology, psychoanalysis…), and by the advent of constitutional, republican and democratic political regimes and the various economic systems born out of  mass ideologies and technical-scientific discoveries.