On the last morning of his five-day silent retreat with the Roman Curia, Pope Francis said he had been reflecting on the Second Vatican Council’s pastoral constitution, Gaudium et Spes, which provides the template for the Church’s engagement with the contemporary world.

Its opening words, “Joy and Hope”, and its call for the Church to scrutinise the signs of the times and interpret them “in light of the Gospel”, embody the spirit of the council. It arose out of the body of the bishops without pre-drafting from curial officials, and memorably declares that the joys, hopes, griefs, and anxieties of humanity, “especially those who are poor or in any way afflicted”, are also those of the followers of Christ.

But as the Pope remarked, Gaudium et Spes is “the document that has encountered most resistance, even today”. It doesn’t take much decoding to work out what he might be referring to. For some Catholic groups the world has become a frightening, decadent place, and when they read Gaudium et Spes, they conclude that the council fathers had drunk too much of the 1960s Kool-Aid of optimism. The Church today, they argue, needs to batten down the hatches, and tell the world where it is going wrong. Every reform step the 82-year-old Jesuit Pope has made – be it offering communion to remarried divorcees in certain circumstances or ending church support for the death penalty – has been vigorously opposed by those wedded to a pre-conciliar ideological version of Catholicism.