With its pronouncements on the non-Christian religions and cultures the Second Vatican Council has placed the Catholic Church in an entirely new perspective. This bears consequences not only for the way in which the Catholic Church officially approaches the non-Christian religous but also for the way in which Catholics make a study of and publish on the Catholic Church in predominantly non Christian countries. Besides, the Second Vatican Council as well as the social encyclicals of Pope John XXIII and Pope Paul VI have oriented the Church to engagement on the integral development of man as a whole, in his society, national as well as international.