Often, as we have experienced in the performance of our daily apostolic service, we hear even offensive voices from some people who are religiously zealous but still lack objectivity and sound judgment in assessing facts. In the current state of human society, they are unable to see anything other than decline and devastation, claiming that our time, compared to past centuries, is getting worse. They go so far as to act as if they have nothing to learn from history, which is the teacher of life, as if everything had been effortlessly happy before previous councils, whether it concerns Christian doctrine, morality, or the just freedom of the Church. We definitely do not agree with such prophets of doom who only announce the worst, as if the end of the world was imminent.
(John XXIII., excerpt from the speech at the opening of the 2nd Vatican Council, December 11, 1962)
