MUCH of the recent debate on the anniversary of the Second Vatican Council has centred on whether it constituted a break or a continuation in the tradition of the Roman Catholic Church. Conservatives have spoken of a "hermeneutic of continuity". Those who reject that view have been characterised as advocates of a "hermeneutic of rupture". But neither of these is very helpful.

It is easy to see how this polarisation has arisen. The bishops who assembled in Rome in 1962 tossed aside papers that Curia bureaucrats had prepared. In three years of meetings, they produced more than a dozen seminal documents, which hurled the Church into the 20th century. A bold manifesto for modernisation and renewal called for a new engagement between the Church and other faiths, between it and the secular world, and between Pope and bishops, clergy and laity, men and women, rich and poor.

Those, such as Professor Hans Küng, who feel that those pledges have been comprehensively broken, have called for the 50th anniversary of the Council to be marked by an act of penance, or even a funeral. Those of an ultra-traditionalist mindset - who feel that the world has been allowed to infect the Church with a silent apostasy - rejoice at the turning of the tide, which is installing a new generation of conservative bishops, priests concerned with outward piety, and the suppression of parish councils by clerics reverting to dictatorial mode.

Tides go in and out in church affairs. But, although many in the pews feel that they have, like followers of the Grand Old Duke of York, been marched pointlessly up and down the hill, the Church has been moved in a trajectory that is probably irreversible.

Consider the following: religious freedom, which was described by a previous pontiff as an "absurd and erroneous proposition", has been endorsed. The ban on Roman Catholics' participating in the funerals and weddings of other denominations has gone. So have centuries of Christian teaching that branded the Jews as an accursed race and laid the ground for the Holocaust.

The Church has turned to address all men and women of good will, whether believers or not. Protestant baptism has been recognised. The laity have been given new status, as eucharistic ministers administer communion in the hand under both species. And they have been appointed parish co-ordinators, financial managers, tribunal judges, assessors, and more.

For all the anachronistic fiddling with the text of the mass, it remains in the language of ordinary people: the handful of priests reverting to Latin with their backs to the congregation are seen as quaint eccentrics. Vatican II has brought the Bible to the centre of Roman teaching in a way of which Luther would have approved. It has redefined the Church as the people of God, a mystery rather than an institution, inseparably bound to other Christian Churches. It has replaced a vocabulary of anathema, denunciation, alienation, and disdain with one of brotherhood, partnership, dialogue, conscience, and collegiality.

The genie is out of the bottle, and, in this world of instant global communication between ordinary people, there is no way back from this underlying shift in values. Institutionally, the Church may have embarked on a plan to roll back the concept of collegiality, retreating into a form of hierarchical authoritarian clericalism. But the scandal of sex-abuse by priests, and its lamentable cover-up by the institutional Church, has shown up the inherent flaws in the old system.

The psychology of the faithful has shifted. Infantilism and submission have gone. Large majorities of Catholic lay people have found a way to live with the cognitive dissonance of dissent, loyalty, and love. What has developed is a hermeneutic of reform.

Paul Vallely is associate editor of The Independent.