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The Second Ecumenical Council of the Vatican, commonly known as the Second Vatican Council or Vatican II, was the 21st and most recent ecumenical council of the Catholic Church. The council met each autumn from 1962 to 1965 in St. Peter's Basilica in Vatican City for sessions of 8 and 12 weeks.

Pope John XXIII convened the council because he felt the Church needed "updating" (in Italian: aggiornamento). He believed that to better connect with people in an increasingly secularized world, some of the Church's practices needed to be improved and presented in a more understandable and relevant way.

Support for aggiornamento won out over resistance to change, and as a result 16 magisterial documents were produced by the council, including four "constitutions":

• Dei verbum, the Dogmatic Constitution on Divine Revelation emphasized the study of scripture as "the soul of theology".
• Gaudium et spes, the Pastoral Constitution on the Church in the Modern World, concerned the promotion of peace, the gift of self, and the Church's mission to non-Catholics.
• Lumen gentium, the Dogmatic Constitution on the Church on "the universal call to holiness"
• Sacrosanctum concilium, the Constitution on the Sacred Liturgy to restore "the full and active participation by all the people".

Other decrees and declarations included:

• Apostolicam actuositatem, a decree on The Apostolate of the Laity
• Dignitatis humanae, a declaration on religious freedom
• Nostra aetate, a declaration about non-Christian religions
• Orientalium Ecclesiarum, a decree On Eastern Catholic Churches
• Unitatis redintegratio, a decree on Christian ecumenism

The documents proposed a wide variety of changes to doctrine and practice that would change the life of the Church. Some of the most notable were in performance of the Mass, including that vernacular languages could be authorized as well as Latin.