The liturgical document Sacrosanctum Concilium, promulgated in 1963 by the Second Vatican Council, was a natural extension of the motu proprio of 1903 and of subsequent documents issued by the Holy See. What it had to say about Gregorian chant, polyphony, and the pipe organ had already been said before. But at the same time, the council fathers authorized worship in vernacular languages set to indigenous music. Whether it was by a stroke of genius that the church's bishops sanctioned the coexistence of these two, or merely reticence, is not for us to debate here. But in France, as elsewhere, they did not coexist very well.

In April 1969 the Holy See promulgated its Novus Ordo Missae, the New Order of Mass, fulfilling the demands of the council for a reformed liturgy. The complete missal of Paul VI appeared, in Latin, in 1970, and translations into the vernacular appeared soon thereafter.

While the more centrist French bishops sought at first to toe the conciliar line, maintaining the tradition while exploring new vernacular possibilities, the lower ranks of the clergy, inspired by a radical new secularism, had little investment in the Latin Gregorian tradition, which, in the event, was unable to withstand the emergence of vernacular translations and musical idioms that were widely regarded with suspicion by professional musicians.

One could argue that, in France, the council brought the church's music full circle. As popular forms of music had prevailed in the French church during the nineteenth century, so would they prevail again in the second half of the twentieth. Duruflé flourished between these two periods of musical secularism. The triumph of plainsong, of polyphony, and of truly liturgical organ playing, in the first half century of his life, represented for Duruflé the victory of a transcendent, hieratic worldview over the secular and popular aberrations ushered in by the nineteenth century. Their demise in the 1960s meant more than the loss of a well-regarded musical tradition; it was also an assault on the worldview that gave his life meaning.