The council, which produced over a dozen documents and initiated sweeping reforms, is difficult to summarise.

It is not any easier to summarise the timeline of reactions since those documents were promulgated.

One reading goes like this:

Shortly after the council, there was a period of widespread enthusiasm (coupled surely with some Evelyn-Waugh-like grumbling).

But in the midst of interpretation and liturgical experimentation, the church in the West, which had great influence over the council, began to collapse. There was an exodus from the priesthood, vowed religious life and the pews.

Unsatisfied with the landscape, a "reform of the reform" movement took place, intending to tamp down the revolutionary character of the council.

This culminated with Pope Benedict XVI (who was a theological advisor to the council but don't let such details get in the way of a narrative) restoring the pre-Vatican II Mass for any Catholic who wished to celebrate or attend it.

Finally, Pope Francis, with Jesuit guile, arrives on the scene to breathe life back into the implementation of the council, leading to the re-suppression of the Latin Mass and the institution of a synodal church that is always listening.

This narrative, which you could surely quibble with at every turn, at the very least establishes a plot, a rise and fall, a thesis and antithesis about the role and reception of the council.

Ross Douthat, writing in The New York Times, describes our situation in these terms: "the Second Vatican Council cannot be simply reduced to a single settled interpretation, or have its work somehow deemed finished, the period of experimentation ended and synthesis restored."

Pope Paul VI makes his way past bishops during a session of the Second Vatican Council in 1964.

Pope Francis, in a homily at the Vatican to mark the 60th anniversary, described two "camps" reacting to the council as being tethered to a "‘progressivism' that lines up behind the world and the ‘traditionalism' that longs for a bygone world."

Indeed, the pope reminded us (with not a small amount of chastisement) that "a church in love with Jesus has no time for quarrels, gossip and disputes."

Perhaps those reacting strongly to Mr Douthat's column think they are channelling the Holy Father when they chastise him for even bringing up that there are real debates and questions about Vatican II, in The New York Times, of all places.

Pope Francis greets the Anglican Archbishop of Canterbury, Archbishop Justin Welby, during a private meeting at the Vatican in June.

Yet I want to push back on some of Mr Douthat's critics and reflect on the pope's own words a bit.

The problem is not with our arguing or disagreeing (or at the very least, acknowledging that the disagreements exist).

To act like there are no open questions about the council's relationship to the state of the church is an act of denialism and pearl-clutching. And questioning whether or not Vatican II has succeeded does not make someone a sedevacantist.

• Did the changes to the council cause the church's decline in the West, or did it make its growth in places like Asia and Africa possible with its emphasis on inculturation?
• Has the church truly recognized the role of the laity?
• If our liturgy was changed to reflect the vernacular, then why has it not continued to change along with our vernaculars?
• Has the growth in missionary discipleship been worth the loss of our institutions?
• Does the church need another ecumenical council to resolve new, urgent questions, or to revisit old ones?

A church that asks these questions openly, carefully and lovingly is a church that cares.

After all, you cannot read the Acts of the Apostles and find a church without disagreements. Continue reading

• Zac Davis is an associate editor and the senior director for digital strategy for America. He also co-hosts the podcast, Jesuitical.

In a flourish of juvenile, blind confidence, we three founding hosts of "Jesuitical" (our former cohost, Olga Segura, now an editor at The National Catholic Reporter, is someone to whom we remain deeply indebted for making the first three years of the show with us) assumed that we could just turn on the microphones during our normal, daily conversations, and other people would clamour to hear what we had to say.

Dear readers and listeners: We were wrong. Those first pilot episodes were unfocused, uninteresting and, frankly, painful to listen to. You might still think the show comes across that way, but we promise you, we used to be so much worse.

To mark our five-year anniversary, we are looking back on what we have learned from our guests to help us and our listeners navigate the modern world as people of faith.

Yet we had an inkling that something was missing from the Catholic podcasting space.

We imagined there must be thousands of young people out there who were involved in campus ministry or did Jesuit Volunteer Corps or always went to the same last-chance Sunday Mass with their college friends and who now found themselves in a new city with a perhaps lacklustre parish and hungry for the Catholic community and spiritual nourishment.

Taking a page from our Jesuit colleagues, we sought to meet these theoretical young people where they were: on their smartphones.

So, to mark our five-year anniversary, we are looking back on what we have learned from our guests—Catholics and non-Catholics vastly smarter and more interesting than we are—to help us and our listeners navigate the modern world as people of faith.

Lessons About Young Catholics

Young Catholics need formal and financial support from the institutional church.
Molly Burhans, the founder of GoodLands—an organization that helps the Catholic Church leverage its landholdings to further its mission—was recently profiled in The New Yorker for her heroic efforts to fight climate change.

Ms. Burhans is a devout Catholic whose ecology is rooted in her faith. And Pope Francis has clearly made caring for our common home a priority for the church with his encyclical "Laudato Si'."

And yet, most of the support Ms. Burhans has received in her ministry has been from the secular world.

After Ms. Burhans created the first global map of the Catholic Church's landholdings, Pope Francis approved a plan for her to move to Rome and establish and run a Vatican cartography institute on a trial basis.

There was just one problem: It came with no staff and a very modest budget.

So Molly declined the offer.

She has since submitted a new proposal.

All the while, Molly continues to receive awards and offers from some of the most prestigious environmental groups in the world.

Career paths for lay vocations are not obvious.

The default view tends to include only a) academia, b) youth and young adult ministry, or, c) uh, I don't know, here's the password to our social media account. Go crazy, kid.

Unless we figure out how to incorporate young, lay Catholics and their talents and passions more fully into the formal structures of the church, the church is going to experience "brain drain" of people like Molly Burhans and so many others.

"I would have no self-respect, honestly, if I had stayed working for the Catholic Church as long as I had with the amount of resources I've had."

Young people are leaving the church—but it is not for the reasons you think.
A bunch of people with gray hair sit in the parish hall listening to a speaker.

Inevitably, someone raises their hand during the Q. and A. session and bemoans the fact that young people just are not interested in church anymore, that their adult child has drifted away, and they do not know what to do about it.

Luckily, the Springtide Research Institute, whose executive director, Josh Packard, spoke with us, is looking for the answers.

The institute is devoted to studying young people's feelings toward religion.

They found that a young adult who had five adults who cared about them was far less likely to engage in high-risk behaviour.

The same principal could help to connect young people to the church.

"[Millennials are] not leaving the church.

They were not raised in it to begin with.

They don't have anything to leave, but instead, they're going to be building things. And they're going to be doing that with the bits and pieces and fragments of the institutional lives that have been left behind for them." - Josh Packard, Episode 172, March 12, 2021

Stop putting young adult Catholics at the "kids table."
In 2018, over 300 young people from all over the world went to the Vatican to help prepare the meeting of the Synod of Bishops on young people.

One of those delegates, Katie Prejean McGrady, had spent a lot of time working with young people in the church as a speaker, writer, youth minister and high school theology teacher. (Katie now hosts a daily radio show on Sirius XM).

We talked to Katie about what it was like to dialogue with bishops about youth and young adult ministry, and what changes she wanted to see in how the church welcomes young people.

"A lot of times young people are relegated to the cheap seats, when it comes to Catholicism.

"They're either the problem to be solved, they're the kids that made a mess in the parish hall or they're the ones that can clean up after the adult gathering….

"They're just kind of put into this separate category rather than [being recognized as] an active part of the life of the church.

"I hate the term ‘youth Mass.'

"It's Mass—and young people just happen to be engaged more in the work of the liturgy. But why can't that happen at the 9 a.m. Mass?" - Katie Prejean McGrady, Episode 75, Sept. 14, 2018 Continue reading

• Ashley McKinless and Zac Davis