Bishop Christopher Butler mentions that prior to Vatican II the one area where Catholic theology was allowed to develop uncritically, apart from the total life of theology, was in devotion to Mary, so that "it began to seem that the Catholicism of the future would approximate more and more to the condition of an Italian tribal cult." This century-long drift was brought to an end by the Council on October 29, 1963, "a fixed point of the Marian paradigm shift," the date on which the Council decided, in a very close vote, to not give Mary a separate document but to situate her properly within the larger Church.