text: The whole nature of Vatican II WAS to be different.  Did you read what Pope St. John XXIII state at the Opening Mass in October 1962?   The whole thrust was to be about the medicine of MERCY.   The purpose of ecumenical councils is to deal with important issues that the church is facing---not to utter anathemas.  
  
  What happened with the anathemas in the past?  Catholics and Protestants fighting with each other, religious persecution on all sides, a backward-looking Catholic hierarchy, the splintering of Protestant sects proclaiming scores of competing doctrines.  All in told, Christianity, in the past, has not always put its best foot forward.  Based on the example Christians have set in the past, we shouldn't wonder why so many people today reject Christianity altogether.
  
  Some people think that the Church should go backward into the Middle Ages or to become fundamentalist.  But John XXIII, who was a trained Church historian, believed that it was time to enter a time of Hope.