29th May 2020
ST. POPE PAUL VI
As I give a commentary of the life of this great Saint Pope Paul VI, I stand humbled to have served the Mass and witnessed to his Canonization. What a joy and privileged from God.
Born near Brescia in northern Italy, Giovanni Battista Montini was the second of three sons. His father, Giorgio, was a lawyer, editor, and eventually a member of the Italian Chamber of Deputies. His mother, Giuditta, was very involved in Catholic Action.
After ordination in 1920, Giovanni did graduate studies in literature, philosophy, and canon law in Rome before he joined the Vatican Secretariat of State in 1924, where he worked for 30 years. He was also chaplain to the Federation of Italian Catholic University Students, where he met and became a very good friend of Aldo Moro, who eventually became prime minister. Moro was kidnapped by the Red Brigade in March 1978, and murdered two months later. A devastated Pope Paul VI presided at his funeral.
In 1954, Fr. Montini was named archbishop of Milan, where he sought to win disaffected workers back to the Catholic Church. He called himself the “archbishop of the workers” and visited factories regularly while overseeing the rebuilding of a local Church tremendously disrupted by World War II.
In 1958, Montini was the first of 23 cardinals named by Pope John XXIII, two months after the latter’s election as pope. Cardinal Montini helped in preparing Vatican II and participated enthusiastically in its first sessions. When he was elected pope in June 1963, he immediately decided to continue that Council, which had another three sessions before its conclusion on December 8, 1965. The day before Vatican II concluded, Paul VI and Patriarch Athenagoras revoked the excommunications that their predecessors had made in 1054. The pope worked very hard to ensure that bishops would approve the Council’s 16 documents by overwhelming majorities.
Paul VI had stunned the world by visiting the Holy Land in January 1964, and meeting Athenagoras, the Ecumenical Patriarch of Constantinople in person. The pope made eight more international trips, including one in 1965, to visit New York City and speak on behalf of peace before the United Nations General Assembly. He also visited India, Columbia, Uganda, and seven Asian countries during a 10-day tour in 1970.
Also in 1965, he instituted the World Synod of Bishops, and the next year decreed that bishops must offer their resignations on reaching age 75. In 1970, he decided that cardinals over 80 would no longer vote in papal conclaves or head the Holy See’s major offices. He had increased the number of cardinals significantly, giving many countries their first cardinal. Eventually establishing diplomatic relations between the Holy See and 40 countries, he also instituted a permanent observer mission at the United Nations in 1964. Paul VI wrote seven encyclicals; his last one in 1968 on human life—Humanae Vitae—prohibited artificial birth control.
Pope Paul VI died at Castel Gandolfo on August 6, 1978, and was buried in St. Peter’s Basilica. He was beatified on October 19, 2014 and canonized on October 14, 2018.
Saint Pope Paul’s greatest accomplishment was the completion and implementation of Vatican II. Its decisions about liturgy were the first ones noticed by most Catholics, but its other documents—especially the ones about ecumenism, interfaith relations, divine revelation, religious liberty, the Church’s self-understanding and the Church’s work with the entire human family—have become the Catholic Church’s road map since 1965.
4 BIG LEGACIES
- Paul VI, the refomer
Chief among them was Paul’s call for a more missionary church that would be open to the world and one that would dialogue with other Christians and other believers, and with nonbelievers, too.
In addition, Paul was a vocal champion of the church’s social justice teachings, and he sought to embed those concepts as foundation stones of Catholic doctrine. He also implemented a system of regular meetings of bishops, called synods, to promote a more collaborative, horizontal church.
- Paul VI, an ‘evangelical’ pope
The key to Paul’s pontificate was his 1975 exhortation on evangelization, Evangelii Nuntiandi (“On Proclaiming the Gospel”), “the greatest pastoral document written to date.”
In that landmark document — largely overshadowed by the contraception encyclical — Paul said that the church itself “has a constant need of being evangelized,” and he wrote that people today listen “more willingly to witnesses than to teachers,” so Catholic leaders above all must practice what they preach.
“The world calls for, and expects from us, simplicity of life, the spirit of prayer, charity towards all, especially towards the lowly and the poor, obedience and humility, detachment and self-sacrifice. Without this mark of holiness, our word will have difficulty in touching the heart of modern man. It risks being vain and sterile,” Paul wrote
- Paul VI, the pilgrim pope
Elected in 1963 on the death of St. John XXIII, amid intense debates among bishops at the Second Vatican Council, the former Cardinal Giovanni Montini inherited the difficult task of seeing the council through to its conclusion in 1965. In the following years, he pushed through the council’s changes, including updating the liturgy from Latin to the vernacular and completing a major reorganization of the Roman Curia.
He also discarded the papal triple tiara and other trappings of the monarchical papacy, sending a message “that the pope was not a king, but a bishop, a pastor, a servant,” And Paul — not his globe-trotting successor, John Paul II — was the original “pilgrim pope,” the first pontiff to travel outside Italy in the modern era.
On his first trip, Paul met the Eastern Orthodox patriarch in Jerusalem in 1964, and during Paul’s eight other foreign journeys he visited Asia — a knife-wielding artist in the Philippines tried to stab him — Africa and Latin America
- Paul VI, the bridge builder
Paul is also returning as a hero for many in the newer generation. Cardinal Luis Antonio Tagle Prefect of the Propaganda Fide, has praised Paul for his efforts to unify the church, citing Paul’s motto: “No one defeated; everyone convinced.”
Indeed, critiqued by the left over birth control and by the right for reforms to the liturgy, Paul in his last years was depicted as a Hamlet-like figure of equivocation. His end did seem tragic, as he aged rapidly under the burdens of the office, governing the church at a time of massive social upheavals abroad and close to home.
In the spring of 1978, a longtime friend of Paul’s and a prominent Italian political leader, Aldo Moro, was kidnapped and executed by left-wing terrorists in Italy despite an impassioned appeal by the anguished pope. Paul died three months later, “one of the holiest and most loving of Popes”
St. Pope Paul VI, Pray for us.
Fr. Bassols Imo Donald 