This predates the recent warnings of the late Cardinal Martini on the Catholic church being 200 years out of date.......
From a letter to Pope John XXIII, August 1962, as quoted in Alberigo and Komonchak, The History of Vatican II, Volume I.
Several
schemata consider the Church too much as an institution under siege
which the Council must defend; they do not see in it enough the radiant
depositary of the salvation to be shared.
In them the Church has the
aspect of an institution more juridical than missionary.
They don’t show
the courage to turn frankly to the present world, toward its needs,
toward its new and legitimate demands.
They seem to believe, instead,
that it will be enough to repeat, with more insistence but without
deepening the doctrine, formulas which already the world no longer can
understand.
They seem to believe that the losses of faith, the
deterioration of morality, the failures of the apostolate have no other
causes than the inattention of men or the malice of the times;
they do
not ask if the obsolete character of certain forms of the Church’s
thought and action also play some role in it.
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