Saints and Sinners: A History of the Popes; Fourth Edition (62 page)

On every front, then, the Council redrew the boundaries of what had seemed till 1959 a fixed and immutable system. For some Catholics, these changes were the long-awaited harvest of the New Theology, the reward of years of patient endurance during the winter of Pius XII. For others, they were apostasy, the capitulation of the Church to the corrupt and
worldly values of the Enlightenment and the Revolution, which the popes from Pius IX to Pius XII had rightly denounced. For others, perhaps the majority, they were a bewildering stream of directives from above, to be obeyed as best they could. Many of the older clergy of the Catholic Church found themselves sleep-walking through the Conciliar and post-Conciliar years, loyal to an authority which called them to embrace attitudes which the same authority had once denounced as heresy. Pope John’s successor would have to deal with all this.

With a sort of inevitability, Giovanni Battista Montini, middle-class son of a
Partito Popolare
politician from Brescia, was elected to succeed John on 21 June 1963, taking the name Paul VI (1963 —78). Everyone knew how crucial Montini’s insight and determination was to the shaping of the Council and the forcing through of its reforms. John had often felt outflanked by the Vatican bureaucracy, his peasant shrewdness no match for the complexities of curial filibuster and red tape. Montini, by contrast, who had worked in the secretariat of State from 1922 to 1954, knew every inch of the Vatican and its ways, and could fight fire with fire. While still a young man he had toyed with the idea that the pope of the future should break away from St Peter’s and the claustrophobia of the Vatican City, and go to live among his seminarians at the Cathedral Church of Rome, the Lateran, to take the papacy once more to the people. He never in fact had the daring to put this vision into practice, but it says much about his understanding of the tasks and challenges that confronted the pope and the Council that he entertained it at all.

Yet he was emphatically no radical, and could hold the confidence of all but the most die-hard reactionaries. It was up to him to steer the Council to the successful completion of its work, to oversee the implementation of its reforms, and to hold together conservatives and reformers while he did so. In the turbulent sixties and early seventies, when religious reform and social and moral revolution flowed together, the task was almost impossible. No pope since the time of Gregory the Great has had so daunting a task. The societies of the West were passing through a period of general questioning of structures and authority, a crisis of confidence in old certainties and old institutions which was far wider than the Church. The reforms of Vatican II flowed into this general flux and challenging of values, and were often difficult to distinguish from it.

A century and a half of rigidity had left the Church ill-equipped for radical change. An institution which had wedded itself to what Manning had called ‘the beauty of inflexibility’ was now called upon to bend. The
transformations of Catholicism which flowed from the Council were drastic and to many inexplicable. A liturgy once seen as timeless, beautiful and sacrosanct, its universality guaranteed by the exotic vestments and whispered or chanted Latin in which it was celebrated, was now reclothed in graceless modern vernaculars to the sound of guitars and clarinets. Before the Council Catholics had been forbidden even to recite the Lord’s Prayer in common with other Christians: they were now encouraged to hold joint services, prayer-groups, study-sessions.

The reform was experienced by many as the joyful clearing away of outmoded lumber, by others as the vandalizing of a beautiful and precious inheritance. In addition to the signs of renewal and enthusiasm, there were signs of collapsing confidence. Thousands of priests left the priesthood to marry, nuns abandoned the religious habit, vocations to the religious life plummeted. In the exhilaration – or the horror – of seeing ancient taboos broken, prudence, a sense of proportion, and the simple ability to tell baby from bathwater were rare commodities. Both the enthusiasts and the opponents of reform looked to the papacy for leadership and support. To hold this strife of voices in some sort of balance was a daunting task. Montini, who took the name Paul to signify a commitment to mission and reform, rose to the challenge, signalling both continuity and reform from the very moment of his election. He allowed himself to be crowned according to custom, but then sold the papal tiara which had been used for the ceremony, and gave the money to the poor.

Not everyone liked Paul’s methods. Determined that the Conciliar reforms should not be thrown off course, he was also determined that no one should feel steam-rollered. There was to be, he declared, no one who felt conquered, only everyone convinced. To achieve this, he tried to neutralize conservative unease by matching every reform gesture with a conservative one. In a series of deeply unpopular interventions, he watered down conciliar documents which had already been through most of the stages of conciliar debate and approval, notably the decrees on the Church and on Ecumenism, to accommodate conservative worries (which he himself evidently shared). He gave to Mary the title Mother of the Church which the Council had withheld because it seemed to separate her unhelpfully the rest of redeemed humanity. He delayed the promulgation of the decree on Religious Liberty.

This balancing act was not confined to his interventions at the Council. In 1967 he published his radical encyclical on social justice,
Populorum Progressio
, which advanced beyond the generalities of
Gaudium et Spes
and denounced unrestrained economic liberalism as a ‘woeful system’, and called for the placing of the ‘superfluous wealth’ of the rich countries of the world for the benefit of the poor nations. This encyclical delighted the theologians and pastors of the Third World, and established Paul’s credentials as a ‘progressive’ on the side of the poor. In the same year, however, he reiterated the traditional teaching on priestly celibacy, alienating many of the same people who had acclaimed the encyclical. These contradictory gestures earned him, unjustly, the title ‘amletico’ – a waverer like Hamlet.

Yet steadily he pushed the essential changes onwards: the reform of the Mass and its translation into the language of everyday so as to involve ordinary people more deeply in worship; the establishment of the notion of episcopal collegiality along with the pope, and the creation of the Synod of Bishops, which was to meet regularly to embody it. To increase efficiency and to break the stranglehold of Pius XII’s cardinals and bishops over the reform process, he introduced a compulsory retirement age of seventy-five for bishops (but not the pope!) and decreed that cardinals after the age of eighty might not hold office in the Curia or take part in papal elections. This was a drastic measure. The average age of the heads of the Vatican dicasteries was 79: ten of the cardinals were over eighty, one was over ninety. Two of the leading curial conservatives, Cardinal Ottaviani and Cardinal Tisserant, made public their fury at their disenfranchisement.

To make the central administration of the Church more representative, he hugely increased the membership of the College of Cardinals, including many third world bishops, thereby decisively wiping out the Italian domination of papal elections. In the same spirit, he established a series of bodies to carry out the work of the Council. In particular he confirmed permanent Secretariats for Christian Unity, for Non-Christian Religions and for Non-Believers as permanent parts of the Vatican administration. He was deeply committed to Christian unity, going to Jerusalem to meet the Greek Orthodox leader Patriarch Athenagoras in 1964. In the following year they lifted the age-old mutual excommunication of the Eastern and Western churches. In 1966 he welcomed the Archbishop of Canterbury, Michael Ramsay, on a formal visit to Rome, to whom in a warmly personal but shrewdly dramatic gesture he gave his own episcopal ring. With calculated theological daring, he spoke of the Anglican and Roman Catholic churches as ‘sister churches’.

Paul began to travel, a new development for the modern papacy,
addressing the United Nations in 1963 in a dramatic speech which greatly enhanced his standing as a moral leader – ‘no more war, war never again’ – and visiting the World Council of Churches in Geneva in 1969, the first pope to set foot in Calvin’s city since the Reformation. In 1969 also he became the first pope to visit Africa, ordaining bishops and encouraging the development of an indigenous church. In 1970 he visited the Philippines (where there was an assassination attempt) and Australia (where the Anglican Archbishop of Sydney boycotted the visit).

The character of Paul VI’s pontificate is perhaps most clearly revealed in the emergence under him of a new Vatican
Ostpolitik
, to ease the condition of the churches behind the Iron Curtain. Despite his apprenticeship under Pope Pacelli, Paul believed that the Church’s confrontational attitude to Communism was sterile and counter-productive, and he went far beyond Pope John’s personal warmth, to a new policy of
realpolitik
and accommodation to Communist regimes. There were casualties. The symbol of the old confrontational attitude which had dominated the pontificate of Pius XII was the heroic and intransigent cold warrior Cardinal Josef Mindszenty, who had been living in the secular ‘sanctuary’ of the American embassy in Budapest since the failure of the Hungarian Revolution in 1956, refusing every offer of rescue, a permanent witness against and thorn in the side of the Hungarian Communist authorities. In 1971 the Americans told the pope that Mindszenty was an embarrassment to them, preventing
rapprochement
with the Hungarians. The pope ordered him to leave, and he settled in Vienna, writing his memoirs and denouncing the Hungarian regime. The Hungarian bishops told the pope the denunciations were making life harder for the Church in Hungary. In 1973 the pope asked Mindszenty to resign as bishop of Esztergom. He refused, on the grounds that the new Vatican arrangements with the Hungarian government would give Communists the final say in appointing his successor. Paul declared the see vacant, and in due course a replacement was appointed. The cardinal never forgave this ‘betrayal’, and denounced Paul in his
Memoirs.
Mindszenty, like Archbishop Marcel Lefebvre, was the ghost of the pontificate of Pius XII, haunting the Church of the Second Vatican Council.

In all this however, aspiration went further than achievement. Paul himself was often frightened by the runaway speed of change and was afraid of sacrificing essential papal prerogatives. However much he believed in the Church of the Second Vatican Council, however sincerely he fostered episcopal collegiality, he had been formed in the
Church of Vatican I, and he never abandoned the lofty and lonely vision of papal authority which underlay the earlier Council’s teaching. Six weeks after becoming pope, Paul jotted down a private note on his new responsibilities. ‘The post,’ he wrote,

This is a papacy conceived as service, not as power, but it is not a papacy conceived in terms of partnership with others. Given such a vision, and for all his good intentions, there were severe limits to the sharing Paul thought possible with his fellow bishops. Between him and them was the awesome gulf of that lonely vision, an absolute difference in responsibility and authority. The international synods of bishops would increasingly turn into talking shops, with little real power, where even the topics for discussion were carefully chosen by the Vatican. In 1968, within three years of the end of the Council, his pontificate was profoundly damaged by the furore provoked by his encyclical on artificial birth-control,
Humanae Vitae.

In the face of growing unhappiness with the Church’s total ban on all forms of artificial birth-control, even within marriage, Paul had taken the radical step of removing the question of contraception from the jurisdiction of the Council and remitting it to an advisory commission of theologians, scientists, doctors, and married couples. The commission prepared a report recommending modification of the traditional teaching to allow birth control in certain circumstances, and it was widely expected that the pope would accept this recommendation. In the event, he could not bring himself to do so, and the encyclical reaffirmed the traditional teaching, while setting it within a positive understanding of married sexuality. To his horror, instead of closing the question,
Humanae Vitae
provoked a storm of protest, and many priests resigned or were forced out of their posts for their opposition to the pope’s teaching.

Paul never doubted that he had done what had to be done, but his confidence was shattered. He never wrote another encyclical, and the last ten years of his pontificate were marked by deepening gloom, as he
agonized over the divisions within the Church and his own unpopularity, the mass exodus of priests and religious, and the growing violence of the secular world, signalled for him in 1978, the last year of his life, by the kidnap and murder of his close friend, the Christian Democratic politician Aldo Moro.

Paul was a complex man, affectionate, capable of deep and enduring friendship, yet reserved, prone to fits of depression, easily hurt. He was passionately committed to the Council and its pastoral renewal of the Church, yet he passionately believed also in the papal primacy, and was fearful of compromising it. Hugely intelligent and deeply intuitive, he saw and was daunted by difficulties which others could brush aside, a fact which sometimes made him appear indecisive, where another would have acted first and reflected later. He felt criticism deeply, and was acutely conscious of the loneliness and isolation of his position. His last years as pope were a sort of slow crucifixion for him, and he was often to identify himself with the suffering servant of the prophet Isaiah, unloved, bearing the world’s woes. He did not despair. In 1975, a weary seventy-eight year old, he jotted down a series of notes on his isolation: