Abstract
When, after the death of Pius XII, on October 28, 1958, Pope Angelo Giuseppe Roncalli was elected, who assumed the name of John XXIII, a short term was expected for him and indeed his pontificate would have ended only five years later. Faced with the economic and social transformations that characterized Italy in the Fifties, Roncalli considered it necessary for the Church to update and confront the new demands placed on the consciences of Christians; this intuition was translated into the convocation of the Second Vatican Council (1962-1965), which immediately revealed a clash within the meetings between a majority faithful to the traditional Catholic doctrine and a minority available to openness; a clash that will be echoed in the magazines and which will result in different interpretations of the conciliar documents. A different political reception of the basic transformation Council which involved the mass organizations of Catholics, Catholic Action, Acli, Christian Democracy and which, thanks to the meeting with youth movements, has become an open dispute within the Church , and whose goal was not that of a destruction of the institution, but a faithful and rigorous recovery of the Church of Christ, increasingly hidden and replaced by an organization of power that plotted economic and political relations and that made itself an accomplice of capitalism in perpetrating injustices in near and far lands. An other Church that did not want to become another Church. The first two chapters will be devoted to the development of Vatican II and to the work of peace promoted by Pope Roncalli, especially to the encyclical Pacem in Terris, promulgated in April 1963.