even in some ways a fully honest
account.

It was he, above all, who established in the public's mind the idea
that this was a titanic battle between "liberals" and "conservatives".
The liberals were those who wanted more fresh air in the Church, who
wanted the Church to change. They were the Modernists, though he didn't
use the term. They wanted the Church to update itself; they saw the
secular culture as being the yardstick by which we should measure
ourselves. The conservatives were the stuffy old reactionaries who were
holding back progress. Cardinal Alfredo Ottaviani, whom we mentioned in
the first lecture, the man officially in charge of preserving orthodoxy
in the Church, kept warning, warning, warning that there were dangers
inherent in some of these things. He was cast by Xavier Rynne as the
great villain, almost an evilXavier Rynne a.k.a.
Francis X. Murphy.

Time magazine, which was a much more influential journal
then, than it is now, was represented at the Council by a reporter
whose name was Robert Blair Kaiser. He had been at one time a Jesuit.
He was not a priest but he had been a Jesuit, had studied for the
priesthood, and was therefore somebody who knew something. He wasn't an
ignorant man who had to learn it all from scratch; he was fairly
sophisticated in religious matters. But Robert Blair Kaiser's reporting
was very much along the same lines as that of Xavier Rynne, the
good-guy liberals versus the bad-guy conservatives. Every day there
was a shootout at the O.K. Corral over some issue or other. Fortunately
most of the time the good-guy liberals managed to disarm the bad-guy
conservatives. They shot the