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Its purpose was to renew the Church, to evangelise, and to engage with the world rather than to excoriate it. There were shortcomings and unintended consequences, but 60 years on, Vatican II’s achievements can be seen ever more clearly. There is a story that sometime in the 1950s, Archbishop Angelo Roncalli, the future Pope John XXIII, picked up Yves Congar’s True and False Reform in the Church. Roncalli appreciated the boldness and vision of this French scholar-priest, but had to ask himself: “A reform of the Church: is such a thing really possible?”