This book is an important one regarding the place of the Laity in the Catholic Church. After the second Vatican Council (1962-1965), commentators such as Avery Cardinal Dulles SJ, reported that the clergy-dominated era of the Church, an era that originated at least from the sixteenth century, was now over. Laity, they said were now central to the life of the Church., and no longer passive subjects of the clergy's ministrations and control. Pope Saint Pius X had written in 1906 that the only responsibility of Laity was to "obey their pastors in all docility". The Vatican II commentators declared this era as extinct. Guilmot, however, in this book, proposed the thesis that the ambiguity of the Vatican II documents was confusing and caused their statements to be too weak to cause such a powerful paradigm shift. For Guilmot, the post-Vatican II Church was still fundamentally a clerically dominated Church.