Chapter 8 studies the often painful changes to the Province in the aftermath of Vatican II as traditional ministries and ways of life were greatly altered, but also what and who enabled the Province to adapt to changed cirsumstances in ways that made possible a viable future for the friars in the twenty-first century.

In Chapter 3 we present the first main part of our case for Causal Mechanism, by discussing in detail apoptosis, a central biological mechanism. We examine how John Kerr and his co-workers first introduced apoptosis in 1972. We then present the most important stages in scientific research regarding apoptosis during the last decades that led to its identification as a central biological mechanism, explaining the shift from morphological descriptions to biochemical descriptions of the mechanism. We generalise the molecular definition of a pathway to arrive at a more general notion of a causal pathway. We also show that several distinctions used by biologists in order to differentiate between causal pathways and identify the genuine biological mechanisms (active vs passive, programmed vs non-programmed, physiological vs accidental) do not correspond to internal features of causal pathways, but concern an external feature, that is, the role those processes play within the organism.