‘The biggest meeting in the history of the world’

‘The biggest meeting in the history of the world’

Hilmar Pabel
This autumn marks the fiftieth anniversary of the Second Vatican Council and this week a major series of articles celebrating and analysing its impact on the Catholic Church begins in The Tablet with a leading Catholic historian’s reflections of the winds of change blowing through Rome when bishops from 116 countries, more than the then United Nations membership, gathered for the opening of the council on 11 October 1962