Hello and welcome to the History Hour podcast from the BBC World Service with me Max Pearson,

the past brought to life by those who were there.

This week, a moment from the 1970s that changed the world of publishing.

It's the birth of the feminist Virago press.

I always wanted to change the world. I didn't think the world was good enough. I mean in that way I'm intensely

childish and I didn't think the way a woman lived was good enough.

Also from the 1950s, the birth of that great British cultural export, The Carry On Films, and the man who set up the first coal center in India.

When we went to the Telecom Authority of course they laughed us and said are you

kidding we're going to let you put phone lines so that you can dial people all over the

world. That's coming up later in the podcast but we begin with a moment which was

pivotal for the world's 1.2 billion Catholics in January 1959

Pope John the 23rd called a special council of the Roman Catholic Church,

which would modernize Catholicism.

The decisions taken by that council have had a profound effect, perhaps most notably in Latin America, but the Roman Catholic

Church has significant followings in Europe, Africa and Asia as well.

Rebecca Kespi has been speaking to Monsignia John Strinkowski, who was a student priest in Rome at the time of what became known as Vatican II.

Rome where this week there opens the Vatican Council the largest and perhaps the most

important of any of the conferences in the whole 2,000 years of the history of the

Roman Catholic Church. Vatican too is probably the most important religious event of the 20th century.

It was absolutely revolutionary, no question about that.

Monsignor John Strinkowski was a student of theology in Brooklyn, New York when Pope John the 23rd made the somewhat

surprise announcement just a couple of months after he was elected.

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