Modern Roman Catholicism yielded and then stiffened, yielded at the Council and then stiffened after. A kind of failure of nerve maybe? After the windows were opened, they could never be fully shut, so there is still movement. The previous movement had been against Modernism, a part of enlightenment rationalism, and the Council opened to it. The reaction afterwards set some limits, and some limits were probably needed.
The question that needs to be asked now is how to speak to a new generation when the ethos, the mores, the very mythos, of the enlightenment are being challenged. I wish I could have paid more attention to that class at Harvard, “Magic, Science, Religion, and the Question of Rationality,” or at least had saved the notes and syllabus.