This article records tradition as it has been passed down and reported. Its sources are not yet part of the atlas's verified catalogue.
Pope John the Twenty-Third convened the Second Vatican Council, which met in four ten-week sessions each autumn from 1962 to 1965 under John and, after his death partway through, his successor Pope Paul the Sixth. Bishops from across the worldwide church gathered in Rome each session to debate and vote on the church's own renewal.
The council authorised the vernacular liturgy in place of Latin, opened formal dialogue with other Christian communions and other world religions, and affirmed religious freedom as a principle, reshaping how the Roman Catholic Church related to the many cultures it had already spread into. A separate page for the council itself, distinct in kind from this spread event, already exists elsewhere in this catalog.
What this changed for Christianity's spread was an acceleration of the church's own inculturation across the Global South in the decades that followed, the same shift this atlas records separately as the Global South Shift in Christianity's center of gravity. A council convened to renew the church's inner life ended up reshaping how it related, going forward, to the many cultures its earlier centuries of missionary spread had already carried it into.