I WAS INTERESTED to read the interview with Archbishop Denis

Hurley (22 August). But as so often with interviews, the one question I was hoping he would be asked wasn't put...If he maintains, as he does, that the reforms envisaged by the Council Fathers have mostly been implemented, how does he explain the drastic fall in church membership throughout Western Europe, North America, Australasia, etc?
Professor Hitchcock, although as enthusiastic about the Council as Archbishop Hurley, maintains it was "Hijacked" by the Commissions when the Bishops returned to their dioceses. This certainly explains the failure of religious education since the Council, the drop in Mass attendance, etc. Failures no-one can deny as they are borne out by statistical evidence.
Just to pick priestly ordinations in a couple of areas: in North America a drop of over 11,000 in 25 years where before there had been a steady increase; in Europe, a drop of 55,600 from 1970 to 1995, instead of an increase. these figures are from L'Osservatore Romano, 13/20 August 1997. These "fruits" of the Second Vatican Council need some explaining.
Daphne McLeod Great Bookham, Surrey
ARCHBISHOP HURLEY (22 August) courageously states what so few are prepared to admit — that Vatican II represented something innovative in the life of the Church. More importantly, it represents an orientation which is not static, but something which is constantly evolving. Although he did not say it as such, the Archbishop would probably regard the notion of a rigid and perhaps "fossilized" application of Vatican II as contrary to the entire spirit of the Council. Conservative Catholics are unable to adjust to this mentality and they try to understand Vatican II with a spirit which is foreign to it.
Perhaps more than any other figure in the Church, Archbishop Hurley represents the extraordinary change which has come over Catholicism in the twentieth century. Southern African Catholics like myself were intrigued a few years ago when a Catholic newspaper did a retrospective on Archbishop Hurley's 45 or so years as Bishop and Archbishop of Durban. The metamorphosis of the young and stiff-looking cleric into the ecumenical figure who symbolised unswerving opposition to Apartheid is an example of the journey of the Church over the last half century.
Yet there remain a few of us who are not comfortable with the new roads along which the Church is travelling. Brought up as a Vatican II Catholic, I withdrew from the mainstream Church in 1991 and "converted" to the "traditional" or "integralist" Catholicism maintained by the Society of Pius X and related traditional orders. The turning point for me was when I finally realised that "the spirit of the Council" is an ongoing process which leads to unending change within the Church. A metamorphosis means more than change it means a process which generates something new and fundamentally different from what existed before. No clearer example of this process at work can be seen other than in the life of Archbishop Hurley himself...
Donald Leyshon Aberdeen