“It usually takes half a century for a council to begin to sink in,” says Cardinal Timothy Dolan of New York. “Now we have a pope who says, ‘Look, we just had five decades of internal debates and controversy about the meaning of Vatican II, and now it’s time to do it.’ And that’s what he’s doing.”

Pope Francis, the first pontiff to have received holy orders after Vatican II, is very much a son of the council. It took place during his years of study in the Jesuit order in Argentina—he was ordained just four years after it ended—and he enthusiastically followed the proceedings in Rome. On the eve of the 2013 conclave that elected him pope, then-Cardinal Bergoglio identified the main threat to the church: not the encroachment of secular culture but a tendency among Catholics themselves, especially within church institutions, to retreat into ghettos of their own making. The risk, he said, was of “theological narcissism.”

“This pope is very much a man of [Vatican II],” says Archbishop Blaise J. Cupich of Chicago. “He has an understanding of how the church ought to be positioned at the service of the world, in which we don’t impose but we propose.”

“Excessive centralization,” he has written, “rather than proving helpful, complicates the Church’s life and her missionary outreach.”

At the synod’s first session, the pope told the nearly 200 members to speak “without fear” and “to say what one feels duty-bound in the Lord to say.” The ensuing debate, inside and outside the synod hall, was the fiercest the Vatican had seen since Vatican II itself, with sotto voce accusations of heresy and racism and even warnings of schism.

American Cardinal Raymond Leo Burke went further, telling the Spanish magazine Vida Nueva that the church felt like a “ship without a rudder.” He called on Pope Francis to end debate with an unambiguous restatement of traditional moral teachings, but the pope did not oblige.

“If your starting point is ‘We already have the answers,’ this process becomes difficult to deal with,” says Cardinal Wuerl. But the pope “is saying, ‘We have the revelation, but we don’t have the application for all times; don’t presume that we know everything and that we have every answer.’ ”