• Council of Trent (1545-1563, discontinuously)
• First Vatican Council, Vatican I (1870-1): Clarification of the doctrine of papal infallibility; convened by Pope Pius IX
• Second Vatican Council, Vatican II (1962-1965): The bishops ordered a large-scale liberalization and modernization of practices in their church. Convened by Pope John XXIII and presided over by him and his successor Pope Paul VI
• Third Vatican Council, Vatican III (c. 1985): Utterly fictional at the time of Bellairs's creation.

The First Vatican Council, or Vatican I was the first to be held in over 300 years, since the Council of Trent, to proclaim the doctrine of Papal infallibility when speaking ex cathedra (formally, from the chair of St. Peter) on matters of faith and morals. Says Myers, "The work of this Council was never completed, as it was interrupted by the Franco-Prussian war and, I believe at the exact same time by Garibaldi's consolidation of Italy - in other words, good-bye to the Papal States, except for the tiny sliver of territory that the Vatican now occupies." Myers points out that Vatican I was the first to be held at that location - "though with improvements in modern travel and communications, plus centralization of authority in the Vatican we can probably assume that for the foreseeable future it will be the location for any further councils, unless Las Vegas comes up with a better offer."

Fast-forward to death of Pius XII in 1958, afterwhich an obscure 78-year old was elected pope who became John XXIII.

"Many of us - certainly all of us on the so-called 'liberal' wing - consider to be the greatest pope in history," explains Myers. "He surprised the world and maybe even himself by calling for a Second Vatican Council, which convened in 1962. As you suspect, many of us did and do regard this as a great liberating event. First, it reversed the church's siege mentality and called for an openness and outreach to all other Christians ('our separated brethren') and to other religions besides. It called for total elimination of anti-Semitism and promoted freedom of conscience. It encouraged greater participation by the laity in ecclesiastic affairs and for the first time encouraged laymen (and women) to pursue advanced degrees in theology. It swept aside the Index of Forbidden Books and it initiated a reform that nobody anticipated or even wanted - it eliminated the Latin mass in favor of saying it in the vernacular. This latter may seem a strange point to anyone who is not Catholic, but we mostly all liked the Latin mass and the assurance that it would be exactly the same all over the world. Not that we, the laity, could speak Latin; far from it! We used missals at mass, which contained Latin side by side with English translations, and it was a real art to maneuver through the missal between the parts of the mass that remained fixed and those parts that changed with the feast day."

The term for this bringing things up-to-date and ridding the church of outdated practices and attitudes was aggiornamento, an Italian word meaning roughly "bringing up to date," that Myers says will ever be associated with Pope John XXIII in the same manner that perestroika will always be with Gorbachev.

Myers feels many laity blame the reforms on the decline in religious vocations that set in soon thereafter. "Some said it narrowed the differences between priests and the laity and thus eliminated one of the chief attractions of following a religious vocation. Those of us who support Vatican II think that the decline is due to other causes, such as the increased prosperity and secularization of society. Vatican II caused some priests to expect that the celibacy requirement would soon be eliminated, but Pope Paul VI soon dashed those hopes. The chief reason however was Paul VI's disastrous encyclical Humanae Vitae, which reiterated the ban on artificial birth control by married couples and was counter to the recommendations of his theologians and bishops. Though Bellairs and I, and I think most Catholics, viewed the Council as a great, positive event, there are those who think it was a disaster and the source of all the Church's current troubles."

Bowen notes that Paul VI was more timid about making changes and "St. Fidgeta reflects a feeling of disillusionment that many of us had. Since the Popes that followed John XXIII have been cautious or conservative souls, no one has ever expected one of them to call a council. Councils have the potential for setting changes in motion, or at least raising expectations, in ways that conservative Popes would not like to see. It will probably take a miracle, or some sort of church calamity, to bring about another council. John sardonically imagines Vatican III as a right-wing reversal of Vatican II, but as I've said, church conservatives, who believe that absolute monarchy (within the Church) is a Good Thing, are happier when the Pope lets all the bishops stay home and communicates with them by Solemn Decree."