Second Vatican Council
The Second Ecumenical Council of the Vatican, commonly known as the or , addressed relations between the Catholic Church and the modern world. The council, through the Holy See, was formally opened under the pontificate of Pope John XXIII on 11 October 1962 and was closed under Pope Paul VI on the Solemnity of the Immaculate Conception on 8 December 1965.
Roman Catholic (term)
But as the prominent theologian at the Council Karl Rahner pointed out, by the 1960s the Church had made its second major transition. The first had been from Jewish to Western-Gentile. And now this Western church had become a world church. With Vatican II's decision to allow the liturgy in the vernacular, not everything would be so "Roman" anymore. The word "Roman" would be used mainly to designate the liturgy in Latin with its Roman origins. And by fifty years after Vatican II, with only one third of the Catholic church's 1.2 billion members living in the Western world, the large contingent of the hierarchy from the non-Western world was making it truly a world church.