A Lonely Apostle Named Paul

As Pope he inherited a revolution, then wrestled with it in spiritual anguish

Vicar of Jesus Christ, Supreme Pontiff of the Universal Church, Patriarch of the West, Bishop of Rome and Servant of the Servants of God--these are among the many titles that impose unique burdens on the Pope, the anointed spiritual leader of 683 million Roman Catholics, the world's largest body of Christians. Few of the 261 successors to St. Peter worked at that responsibility more tirelessly than Giovanni Battista Montini, Pope Paul VI. Sunday night, after suffering a heart attack while hearing Mass in bed at Castel Gandolfo, Paul, 80, died, laying down the burden.

He had assumed the Papal Tiara in 1963, in the midst of the Second Vatican Council, that theater for the most profound process of change that the church had experienced in centuries. At the time, Cardinal Montini seemed just the man to steer the church through the turbulence that confronted it. Idealistic and sensitive, a thoughtful scholar and a connoisseur of theology, he had a reputation for being open to new ideas. He was a subtle diplomat with an acute knowledge of the inner workings of the church's machinery.

But the shy, intense new Pope labored in the shadow of his jovial, grandfatherly predecessor, Pope John XXIII. It was John's revolution that he inherited, with John's open, hopeful stamp of approval upon it. In the years that followed, the movement that John called aggiornamento, or modernization, became part of a revolution larger than John had foreseen--a tumultuous moral and social upheaval around the world. Both inside and outside the church, old values were questioned, traditional authority challenged.

Paul became a study in anguish--wanting reform but fearing the consequences of too much too fast, trying to please progressives while placating conservatives. He said yes to more changes than any Pope since the 16th century Council of Trent: a thoroughgoing revision of liturgy, a streamlining of the Curia, an unprecedented rapprochement with other faiths. But his no could be emphatic and crucial: no to any genuine sharing of power with his fellow bishops, no to married priests, no to the ordination of women, and no--a still-reverberating no--to artificial birth control. The late Jesuit Theologian John Courtney Murray accurately predicted the tone of Paul's pontificate in the early years of his reign. "From a cerebral point of view," said Murray in 1965, "he is a convinced progressive. But when he starts to reflect on the duties of his office he begins to get qualms. If cracks in the ice begin to appear, he fears, who knows where they will end?"

Giovanni Battista Montini was born in 1897 in the country village of Concesio, near Brescia, in northern Italy. His father, Giorgio Montini, was a newspaper editor and an early champion of the Popular Party (a forerunner of the Christian Democrats) who served three terms in the Chamber of Deputies. Young Giambattista, second of Giorgio's three sons, was so frail and sickly that he had to get much of his education--including some of his seminary training--at home. But he learned quickly: in 1920, not yet 23, he was ordained a priest in Brescia Cathedral. Dispatched to Rome for graduate work, he became a Minutante--document writer in the Vatican's Secretariat of State. He also served as a Chaplain to students at the University of Rome, among whom he fought the tide of Mussolini's Fascism, and his work with them won him the title of Monsignor in 1925.

While the young Montini studied the works of Catholic liberals, he also listened to one of the Church's last great autocrats--his superior in the Secretariat of State, Eugenic Cardinal Pacelli. In 1939 Pacelli became Pope Pius XII. Monsignor Montini, as a Substitute Secretary of State, was soon embroiled in the delicate Vatican maneuvering between the enemy forces of World War II. It was Montini, evidence suggests, who coined the famous phrase that Pope Pius uttered on the eve of that conflict: "Nothing is lost by peace; everything may be lost by war."

After the war the relationship between the two men became strained. Pius again promoted Montini in 1952, making him a Pro-Secretary of State,* but the Pope and his protege were drifting apart politically. Pius was so hostile to Communism that he sometimes trembled when he spoke of it; Montini, on the other hand, was sensitive to the social and economic distress of postwar Italy and elsewhere, and more understanding of those who were driven to radical solutions. When Pius named Montini Archbishop of Milan in 1954 but failed to give him the Cardinal's red hat that normally went with the see, some Vatican insiders viewed the promotion as an exile.

The new archbishop nevertheless moved into Italy's economic capital with the eagerness of a new priest assigned to his first parish. To combat the influence of the Communists, he said Mass in factories, mines, jails and workers' homes. He commissioned priests to conduct street-corner crusades. He built scores of new churches in the working-class suburbs that ring the city. Pope John XXIII named Montini a Cardinal in 1958, and Montini reportedly had a hand in John's keynote address at the opening of the Second Vatican Council, which encouraged the church "ever to look to the present, to new conditions and new forms of life."

Pope John had written in his diary that he wanted Montini to be his successor. When John died in 1963, the College of Cardinals agreed. They elected him on the fifth ballot. The day after his election, Paul announced on television that the Vatican Council would continue, and he guided it through three more sessions. His interventions were rare but usually decisive. During the fourth session, in 1965, when the critical document on religious liberty seemed threatened by a filibuster of Conservative Prelates, Paul forced a vote. The declaration passed overwhelmingly, 1,997 to 224, affirming to the world that the Catholic Church respected the rights of conscience of other believers.

By then Paul had already begun to translate that principle into action. In January 1964 he journeyed to Jerusalem to meet and embrace Ecumenical Patriarch Athenagoras I,on the Holy City's Mount of Olives. The next year the spiritual leaders of Roman Catholicism and Eastern Orthodoxy withdrew the mutual anathemas that their predecessors had hurled at each other a full millennium before. Later Paul established an international commission of Roman Catholic theologians to discuss differences of creed with Anglican colleagues, and approved a similar commission with Lutherans in the U.S. Both groups achieved a remarkable consensus on such issues as the nature of the ministry and the presence of Jesus Christ in the Eucharist--key doctrines that divided Christianity in Reformation days. The two Protestant groups went so far as to concede a rationale for some kind of limited papacy.

Paul could act with surprising calm in sweeping away the disciplines of centuries. In 1966 he decreed an end to the traditional obligation of abstaining from meat on Fridays. He abolished the notorious Index of Forbidden Books, which had once included the works of John Locke, Victor Hugo and Voltaire. In theological controversy, excommunication and charges of heresy gave way to milder methods. Even Swiss Theologian Hans Kueng's celebrated critique of papal infallibility was handled gently: Kueng was simply warned not to teach such opinions in the future, but did not have to recant them.

Despite Paul's reforms, he saw the church being weakened by the dramatic departure of thousands of priests from the ministry; he called the exodus his "crown of thorns." Many of the priests left in order to marry, but Paul firmly resisted the suggestion that the centuries-old tradition of priestly celibacy be made optional. He extolled the celibate life as "the precious divine gift of perfect continence." Still, he left the door open for a successor to move further. He permitted the ordination of married deacons, who could exercise many ministerial functions, and he conceded the possibility of ordaining married men in mission countries.

Sometimes Paul raised expectations, or at least allowed them to grow, then disappointed those who hoped for change. In the spirit of Vatican II's declaration on collegiality (the sharing of authority), Paul established a synod of bishops that would meet regularly to advise him. Five times during his reign, churchmen from round the world convened in Rome to discuss such issues as clerical celibacy and evangelism. But the Pope controlled the agenda (he vetoed a discussion of the family in 1974, presumably because it would raise such questions as birth control and divorce), and he insisted on having the final say on the language of any published synod documents.

To some, his reform of the rusty machinery of the Curia was similarly disappointing. He internationalized the once overwhelmingly Italian bureaucracy, but only very gradually was real power transferred from Italian hands. The internationalization of the College of Cardinals was far more dramatic. The conclave that elected Paul in 1963 numbered 29 Italians out of the 80 Cardinals present. After his last consistory in 1977, there were only 36 Italians out of 137 Cardinals.

Paul's internationalization of church leadership was at least partly a result of his own travels. From the start, he took his chosen name seriously and became, like his evangelical namesake, "an apostle on the move." He was the first Pope in modern times to leave Europe, traveling more than 70,000 miles outside Italy and visiting every continent but Antarctica. In 1965 he flew to the U.S. to address the U.N. and to plead, in a memorably hoarse and earnest voice, "Never again war. War never again."

Paul was at his best on these trips, smiling often and enjoying particularly the unconventional displays of piety that greeted him in the Third World. In Western Samoa in 1970, he stood before an outdoor altar in the blazing sun while eight sarong-draped men came forward, bearing on their shoulders an immense 400-Ib. pig, a traditional Samoan gift. In Uganda he was delighted by a platoon of blue-haltered, red-skirted dancing girls who met the papal jet in Kampala. More somberly, especially in his Third World visits, Paul made a point of seeking out the poorest neighborhoods. In India in 1964, he wept at the poverty he saw.

Throughout his pontificate a procession of world leaders visited the Vatican, including some key figures from Communist countries: Yugoslavia's President Josip Broz Tito, Rumania's President Nicolai Ceausescu, Soviet President Nikolai Podgorny and Soviet Foreign Minister Andrei Gromyko. Of all the Pope's many diplomatic initiatives, including a long and fruitless attempt to mediate peace in VietNam and similarly frustrating efforts in Biafra, Northern Ireland and the Middle East, his Ostpolitik was the most successful. His overtures to the Communist world helped to win the church such concessions as limited freedom to teach, nominations of new bishops and permission for public festivals. They also settled such ancient controversies as the 18-year isolation of Hungary's Cardinal Mindszenty at the U.S. Legation in Budapest.

To political conservatives in the church, Paul was all too sympathetic to socialism. In Populorum progressio (On the Development of Peoples), the strongest and most moving of his seven encyclicals, he wrote in 1967 that the ownership of property "does not constitute for anyone an absolute and unconditional right. No one is justified in keeping for his exclusive use what he does not need when others lack necessities." The document warned prophetically that rich nations must share their wealth with poor ones or risk "the judgment of God and wrath of the poor."

Paul wrote voluminously; each year his speeches, apostolic exhortations and decrees filled more than 1,000 printed pages. But he issued only one more encyclical after Populorum progressio. It was Humanae vitae (On Human Life) in the summer of 1968, and it aroused widespread criticism for its total rejection of artificial birth control. Paul agonized over the document, but he chose to ignore the advice of a special papal birth control commission that had advised him to accept certain methods of contraception.

In forbidding artificial contraception for Catholics, Paul cited natural law, but a more important reason lay in the consequences he foresaw: "a wide and easy road...toward conjugal infidelity and a general lowering of morality." Millions of Catholics, unwilling to accept Paul's reasoning, disobeyed the encyclical.

Yet Humanae vitae was not a stubborn, willful decision. It was the work of a pastor deeply concerned by the erosion of moral values. Throughout his life, Paul was an ascetic--a dedicated worker who pushed his frail body regularly through a schedule that lasted from 6 in the morning until midnight, with little more than his meals and a siesta to break the day. Abstinent himself, he worried much and cautioned often about society's move away from traditional family patterns and its increasing self-indulgence. He warned that the rise of militant feminism risked "either masculinizing or depersonalizing women" and condemned "the most cunning aggression of conscience through pornography."

His caveats belied Paul's deep compassion for individuals. He could not, like Pope John, simply give mankind an indiscriminate embrace, but he could be surprisingly open in small audiences, as in a 1971 encounter with some rock musicians. "We are aware of the values you seek," he told them. "Spontaneity, sincerity, liberation from certain formal and conventional restrictions, the need to be yourselves and to interpret the demands of your time."

If Paul had expressed such views more often, his reign might have been less anguished. His exhortations might have seemed less imperious, and some measure of reciprocal understanding might have reached him, rekindling the hope and the courage that seemed to die in him as his pontificate wore on. The papacy weighs on its bearer like a cross of centuries, and Paul VI had to carry his alone. -

*Ever the diplomat, Pius acted as his own Secretary of State after 1944, but two pro-secretaries--Montini and the late Domenico Cardinal Tardini--directed the day-by-day work.

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