Is the outline of a new Church emerging as the dust of the Council settles? Many who greeted the reforms instituted by the Council with expectant hopefulness are growing restless as time passes and little seems to change; others who were anxious at the very thought that renewal was necessary within the Church grow more alarmed as they see the inertia of the past giving way to what they regard as disastrous change? What is really happening in the Church at present? This question cannot be answered unless one is in possession of the basic facts about the work of the Council, about the state of the Church before the Council, and the challenges which the decrees of the Council were designed to meet. Desmond Fisher's general thesis is that the failure of the Church before 1958 was that it was preaching an idea of God and of religion which was at best incomplete, that it was no longer serving the modern world in a way that made sense to it. The Council's major task was to re-examine the whole nature, role and mission of the Church so as to enable it to fulfil its mission effectively. But the work of the Council to bring religion into the modern world will be completely frustrated unless the ordinary layman and priest understands what went on and realizes his own personal responsibility to make it effective. That is why this-book has been written: firstly, to examine what the Council actually did, and why; secondly, to present to each individual the challenge to fulfil in his own life that renewal and reform through greater understanding which is the only way that the gap between the closed world of the Church aid the contemporary life of us all can be bridged.