The Apostle Regresses

As crowds cheered him from ancient balconies and sinking quays last Saturday, Pope Paul VI was ferried in a gondola from the mouth of Venice's Grand Canal to the quay of St. Mark's. Beneath the gleaming mosaics of the basilica, he prayed briefly, addressed a throng assembled in the Piazza San Marco, and then journeyed to nearby Udine to celebrate an open-air Mass at the 18th National Eucharistic Congress. In keeping with his pledge to be "an apostle on the move," the Pope made his 15th trip outside the environs of Rome, his sixth within Italy.

The fact that the Pontiff chose to attend the congress--an ecclesiastical spectacular that celebrates the pre-Vatican II emphasis on the Eucharist as triumphal sacrifice--seemed to symbolize Paul's growing conservatism as he approaches his 75th birthday, next Tuesday. As if to underline his cautionary mood, the Pope last week decried a potpourri of moral pollutants--including contraception, abortion, adultery and divorce--that have made modern man "vulgar, vicious and sad." "We are walking in mud," he declared. He also linked sexual permissiveness with drug addiction. "Behind the initiation to sensual pleasure, there loom narcotics."

More significant, Paul also issued a motu-proprio--a decree by his own hand--that barred women from formal investiture in even such minor roles in the ministry as lector (reader) and acolyte (assistant at Mass and other services). They have performed these functions extensively, if unofficially, since Vatican II and presumably will continue to do so. In a separate decree the Pope reaffirmed mandatory celibacy for deacons who are not married at the time of ordination or who become widowers.

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