As a Protestant convert to Catholicism, I think Vatican II was a game changer. I was only a Sunday School kid at the time and I wouldn't have known a Church Council from a bar of soap. But had the Catholic Church still been a Vatican I church circa 1996, I doubt very much if I'd have become Catholic.
The fall of the Soviet Union meant the USA became the new singular world power. But the atheist empire had crumbled, and as a result the West became more secular as there was no longer an effective formal atheist counterpoint. There was little point in pretending to hold the "Christian" moral high ground when there was nobody to challenge it.
China might fill that role I suppose but we can always hope China becomes Christian.
The pedophile crisis in the Catholic Church (it included other churches to some extent and non-government agencies) meant the Church lost a lot of moral credibility which it still hasn't recovered, and has cost it a lot of money.
The other religious event has been the rise of Islam. If someone had said 50 years ago that Islam would challenge the West the way it is now, they would have been laughed at. There were a few prophetic figures who thought it might be on the cards eg. Hillaire Belloc,
BY THOMAS D. WILLIAMS, PH.D.31 Dec 2015160 The celebrated historian and British parliamentarian Hilaire Belloc was convinced in his day that Europe and America had forgotten about Islam to their […]
catholiccitizens.org
The celebrated historian and British parliamentarian Hilaire Belloc was convinced in his day that Europe and America had forgotten about Islam to their own peril, and were unaware that the Muslim religion could rise again and would pose perhaps the greatest threat of any enemy of the western world.
“It has always seemed to me possible, and even probable,” Belloc wrote in 1938, “that there would be a resurrection of Islam and that our sons or our grandsons would see the renewal of that tremendous struggle between the Christian culture and what has been for more than a thousand years its greatest opponent.”
The rise of super-industrialisation and a growing population has led to a climate issue (world population has tripled in my lifetime alone). This is another factor to be considered by Christians and the church.
The space race has taken earth out of its comfortable position as the only possible world in Scripture. I personally think God is going to drive us off the planet. If He does, what significance will the Vatican have to the crew of a space ship orbiting Alpha Centauri? I suppose it's part of what Dietrich Bonhoeffer foreshadowed with his (incomplete) thoughts of a "world come of age" and a "secular Christianity".
