He put that influence relentlessly toward the great project of his life, which was to argue that Vatican II ushered in a radical new age in the life of the Church. His admirers argued plausibly that no one did more to shape how the North American media understood Vatican II. He was the great standard-bearer for liberal Catholicism, passionately advancing the idea that the Church should deal with the sexual revolution — the dominant cultural reality of our time — by accommodating her teaching to it. Few did more to make the “pelvic issues” central to the Church’s public profile in the 1980s and 1990s, for he never stopped writing about them.
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