Pope Paul VI

• 1. Introduction

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  Pope Paul VI, born Giovanni Battista Montini, once tried to talk a room of cardinals out of electing him. On the 20th of June 1963, the second day of the conclave, Cardinal Gustavo Testa lost his temper. He demanded that Montini's opponents stop working against him. Montini, afraid of causing a quarrel, began to rise from his seat to dissuade his supporters. Cardinal Giovanni Urbani dragged him back down and muttered, "Eminence, shut up!"

  The sixth ballot, on the 21st of June, settled the matter. Cardinal Eugène Tisserant, Dean of the College of Cardinals, asked whether he accepted. Montini answered in Latin, "Accepto, in nomine Domini", which means "I accept, in the name of the Lord." He chose the name Paul in honour of Paul the Apostle.

  What kind of man does a church choose when it is about to rebuild itself? How did a lifelong Vatican official, who never served a parish, become the pope who circled the globe? What did he give up, what did he refuse to bend on, and why does a single encyclical of his still start arguments? The answers begin at a desk in the Secretariat of State.

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• 2. Desk and Diocese

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  Giorgio Montini, a lawyer, journalist and member of the Italian Parliament, welcomed his second son in the village of Concesio, in the Province of Brescia, on the 26th of September 1897. The boy's mother, Giudetta Alghisi, came from a family of rural nobility. His brothers became a physician, Francesco, and a lawyer and politician, Lodovico. He was baptised on the 30th of September 1897. Illness often interrupted his schooling, first at the Jesuit-run Cesare Arici school and later at the Arnaldo da Brescia public school, where he earned a diploma in 1916. That same year he entered the seminary, and he was ordained in Brescia on the 29th of May 1920.

  In 1922, at twenty-five, Montini joined the Secretariat of State at the request of Giuseppe Pizzardo. The move meant he never held a post as a parish priest. His only posting abroad came in 1923, as a secretary in the office of the papal nuncio to Poland. Nationalism there troubled him. He wrote that it treats neighbouring peoples as enemies, so that "Peace becomes a transient compromise between wars." He called his time in Warsaw "useful, though not always joyful".

  On the 16th of December 1937, Montini became Substitute for Ordinary Affairs under Cardinal Eugenio Pacelli, the Secretary of State. When Pacelli became Pius XII in 1939, he kept Montini in the post, which worked roughly like a chief of staff. Every morning until 1954 Montini met the pope, and the two grew close. Montini later praised Pius XII for a way of speaking, always measured and moderate, that revealed "a noble position of great strength and fearless courage".

  From 1939 to 1947, an information office that Montini created at the pope's request handled the fates of prisoners of war and refugees. It received almost ten million requests about missing persons and sent out over eleven million replies. Mussolini's government attacked Montini several times for meddling in politics, and the Holy See defended him each time. After Cardinal Luigi Maglione died in 1944, Pius XII named Domenico Tardini and Montini joint Pro-Secretaries of State.

  In 1944 alone, the Pontifical Commission for Assistance handed out almost two million portions of free food in Rome. Montini set it up with Ferdinando Baldelli and Otto Faller. Some 15,000 people lived at the papal residence of Castel Gandolfo under its care. Church asylum was also revived, sheltering escaped Allied soldiers, Jews, anti-Fascists, Socialists and Communists. After Rome was liberated, it sheltered German soldiers, partisans and displaced people too. In 1971, as pope, Montini turned the commission into Caritas Italiana.

  A darker file opened in 2011, when a set of documents went up for auction. According to accounts based on them, Montini worked from September 1950 with former Nazis and members of the Spanish military. Their aim was a mercenary-style, anti-communist army to operate in Africa. A letter from the priest of the former Nazi officer Otto Skorzeny reportedly praised Montini's efforts to fund, harbour and give safe passage to ex-Nazis. The escape routes themselves were chiefly organised by the bishop Alois Hudal. The same accounts describe Montini as the Vatican contact for the American wartime agency, the OSS, and as deeply involved in a CIA effort to keep the left from power in the 1948 Italian elections.

  When Cardinal Alfredo Ildefonso Schuster died in 1954, Pius XII sent Montini to Milan as archbishop. He presented the new archbishop as his personal gift to the city. Because Pius was gravely ill, Cardinal Eugène Tisserant consecrated Montini in Saint Peter's Basilica. On the 12th of December 1954, Pius spoke by radio from his sickbed. Both men had tears in their eyes as Montini left for a diocese of 1,000 churches, 2,500 priests and 3,500,000 souls. He took possession of the cathedral on the 5th of January 1955.

  More than a hundred new churches rose at his initiative. He saw them as the one kind of building in modern society with no practical purpose, places meant for spiritual rest. From the 10th to the 24th of November 1957, posters across Milan announced that 1,000 voices would speak to the city. More than 500 priests, joined by bishops, cardinals and lay people, gave 7,000 sermons in factories, courtyards, barracks, hospitals and hotels. His aim was to bring faith back to a city with little religion. "If only we can say Our Father and know what this means," he said, "then we would understand the Christian faith." Some called him liberal for asking lay people to love Protestants, Muslims and atheists as well as Catholics. In 1957 he welcomed a group of visiting Anglican clergy and then wrote to the Archbishop of Canterbury, Geoffrey Fisher.

  Pius XII never gave him a red hat. At a secret consistory in 1952, the pope revealed that Montini and Tardini had both declined the cardinalate. Pius then held no consistory at all in the four years before his death. Days before the 1958 conclave, the American community organiser Saul Alinsky wrote that if the next pope were Montini, "the drinks will be on me for years to come." Angelo Roncalli won instead and became John XXIII. He was Montini's friend, and on the 15th of December 1958 he made Montini a cardinal. When John announced an ecumenical council, Montini told Giulio Bevilacqua, "This old boy does not know what a hornets nest he is stirring up."

  In 1962 the new cardinal toured Ghana, Sudan, Kenya, Congo, Rhodesia, South Africa and Nigeria. John XXIII then summoned him to a private audience to hear a report. Montini spoke for several hours.

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• 3. The Council and the Mass

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  On the 29th of September 1963, Paul VI reopened the Second Vatican Council, which had been suspended during the gap between popes. He gave it four priorities: a better understanding of the Church, reforms, Christian unity, and dialogue with the world. He asked the bishops not to invent new dogmatic definitions but to explain how the Church sees itself. To the representatives of other Christian communities he offered a request for forgiveness, should the Catholic Church bear blame for their separation. He also noted that many bishops from the East were absent because their governments had forbidden them to travel.

  The third session opened on the 14th of September 1964. Paul told the bishops that the text on the Church was the most important document the council would produce. While they debated the role of bishops alongside the papacy, he issued an explanatory note confirming papal primacy. Some saw this as meddling. American bishops pressed for a quick vote on religious freedom, but Paul insisted it be approved together with related texts, such as the one on ecumenism. On the 21st of November 1964 he closed the session by proclaiming Mary the Mother of the Church. That same day he promulgated Lumen Gentium.

  Paul named that document's universal call to holiness as the council's most characteristic and ultimate purpose. Its text says that "all the faithful of Christ of whatever rank or status, are called to the fullness of the Christian life and to the perfection of charity."

  On the 14th of September 1965, Paul created the Synod of Bishops as a permanent body to advise the papacy. The final session opened with him concelebrating alongside bishops from countries where the Church was persecuted. Several texts proposed for his approval had to be changed before he accepted them. The council closed on the 8th of December 1965, the Feast of the Immaculate Conception. In that last session he announced that he would open the sainthood processes of Pius XII and John XXIII.

  On the 3rd of April 1969, within four years of the council's close, Paul promulgated a new Roman Missal. It added three Eucharistic Prayers to the Roman Canon, which had been the only one in the Roman Rite. Languages other than Latin spread by decision of national bishops' conferences, not by order of the pope. Other rites were rewritten too. Ordinations of deacons, priests and bishops changed on the 18th of June 1968, and children's baptism on the 15th of May 1969. The funeral rite followed on the 15th of August 1969, and the rite of penance on the 2nd of December 1973.

  Not everyone welcomed the changes. The 1962 Missal had reached the public only in 1963, a few months before the council ordered it altered. Attachment to it caused open ruptures, the best known with Marcel Lefebvre. John Paul II later allowed bishops to authorise its use. In 2007 Benedict XVI let priests use either missal, calling the Mass of Paul VI and John Paul II the "Forma ordinaria". In 2021 Francis withdrew many of those permissions with the motu proprio Traditionis Custodes.

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• 4. Shedding the Splendor

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  White smoke first rose above the Sistine Chapel at 11:22 in the morning, and Cardinal Alfredo Ottaviani announced the result to the crowd. On the central loggia the new pope gave the shorter episcopal blessing as his first, in place of the longer, traditional Urbi et Orbi. In his journal he wrote, "The position is unique. It brings great solitude."

  On the 30th of June 1963, Paul VI was crowned with a tiara given by the Archdiocese of Milan. His was the last coronation. His successor, John Paul I, chose an inauguration instead. Near the end of the council's third session in 1964, Paul came down the steps of the papal throne in Saint Peter's, climbed to the altar and laid the tiara on it. The gesture renounced human glory and power. The tiara was announced for sale to benefit charity. Its buyers arranged to display it, as a gift to American Catholics, in the crypt of the Basilica of the National Shrine of the Immaculate Conception in Washington, D.C.

  In 1968, the motu proprio Pontificalis Domus ended most of the ceremonial duties of the old papal nobility. Only the Prince Assistants to the Papal Throne kept their roles. Paul also abolished the Palatine Guard and the Noble Guard, which left the Pontifical Swiss Guard as the only military body in the Vatican. He knew the Curia from a generation of work inside it, and he reformed it in stages. The changes cut bureaucracy, streamlined congregations and brought in more non-Italians.

  On the 6th of August 1966, Paul asked every bishop to submit a resignation at the age of 75. It was a request, not a rule. On the 21st of November 1970, Ingravescentem aetatem extended it to cardinals, who would also leave their Curia offices at 80. The same document barred cardinals over 80 from voting in a conclave, creating the class known as cardinal electors. It capped their number at 120. Some senior cardinals objected to losing their vote. Paul himself had raised the total number of cardinals from 82 in 1963 to 134 in April 1969, before the age limit brought electors below 120 in 1971.

  Near the end of his life, someone asked whether he would retire at eighty. He replied, "Kings can abdicate, Popes cannot." Yet on the 2nd of May 1965 he had written to the dean of the College of Cardinals. If an illness believed incurable or long-lasting stopped him from carrying out his duties, he said, he would resign as bishop of Rome and head of the Church.

  Six consistories between 1965 and 1977 raised 143 men to the cardinalate. The one on the 28th of April 1969 named 34 and was the largest since 1946. Three future popes received red hats from him: Karol Wojtyła in 1967, Albino Luciani in 1973 and Joseph Ratzinger in 1977. In 1976, five of the twenty new cardinals came from Africa. Paul sometimes named cardinals in pectore, keeping the name secret. He did this with Iuliu Hossu in 1969 and revealed it only in 1973, after Hossu had died.

  He also tried to bring in people from outside the usual ranks. His friend Jacques Maritain declined an offer that would have made him the first lay cardinal since 1858.

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• 5. The Pilgrim Pope

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  In January 1964, Paul VI flew to Jordan, the first time a reigning pope had left Italy in more than a century. He was also the first pontiff to travel by airplane. The trip took him to the Holy Land as a pilgrim. He went on to Eucharistic congresses in Bombay and Bogotá, and he became the first pope to visit six continents. His journeys earned him the nickname the Pilgrim Pope.

  In October 1965 he spoke at the United Nations in New York, the first time a reigning pope had set foot in the Western Hemisphere. American involvement in Vietnam was escalating. He told the delegates, "No more war, never again war." He added that peace must guide the destinies of people and of all mankind.

  Some doors stayed shut. In 1966 he was twice denied permission to visit Poland for the thousandth anniversary of its Christianity. The Communist government there also refused him a Marian pilgrimage. In 1967 he visited the shrine of Our Lady of Fátima in Portugal on the fiftieth anniversary of the apparitions. In 1969 he travelled to Uganda, the first visit to Africa by a reigning pope.

  On the 27th of November 1970, a crew-cut man in a cassock lunged at Paul with a knife at Manila International Airport in the Philippines. The pope was walking with President Ferdinand Marcos and his private secretary, Pasquale Macchi. Macchi pushed the attacker away. Police identified him as Benjamín Mendoza y Amor Flores, an artist from La Paz, Bolivia, who lived in the Philippines. Paul continued the trip and thanked Marcos and Macchi for protecting him.

  During his pontificate the number of foreign embassies accredited to the Vatican doubled. Gaudium et spes, the council's pastoral constitution, stated that the Church is not tied to any form of government. The Church kept its right to choose its bishops without state interference. Paul received Soviet Foreign Minister Andrei Gromyko in 1966 and Nikolai Podgorny, Chairman of the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet, in 1967. During his pontificate the situation of the Church improved in Hungary, Poland and Romania. He also decreed an annual peace day on the 1st of January. In 1971 he created a papal office for economic development and disaster relief.

  When Apollo 11 went to the Moon, it carried 73 goodwill messages, and one came from Paul VI. It quotes the 8th Psalm. The pope wrote, "To the Glory of the name of God who gives such power to men, we ardently pray for this wonderful beginning." That message still rests on the lunar surface.

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• 6. Sister Churches

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  In 1964, Paul VI created a Secretariat for non-Christians, and a year later he added one for dialogue with non-believers. He held that dialogue was a means of finding truth, built on full equality among all taking part. As he put it, "Those who do not have it, but search for it with their whole heart, have already found it."

  In Jerusalem in 1964, Paul met Ecumenical Patriarch Athenagoras I. He was the first pope since the ninth century to visit the East, and he called the Eastern Churches sister churches. The meeting led to the lifting of the excommunications of 1054 that had marked the Great Schism. On the 7th of December 1965, a joint declaration was read at the same moment in a public session of the council in Rome and at a ceremony in Istanbul. It did not end the schism. It did show a wish for reconciliation. Paul visited the patriarchs of Jerusalem and Constantinople again in 1967.

  In May 1973, the Coptic Patriarch Shenouda III of Alexandria came to the Vatican and met Paul three times. Their common declaration and joint creed affirmed unity on a number of theological points. They also said that other differences, dating "since the year 451", "cannot be ignored".

  Michael Ramsey was the first Archbishop of Canterbury received by a pope in an official audience as head of his church. Geoffrey Fisher had visited John XXIII privately on the 2nd of December 1960. Ramsey met Paul three times and opened the Anglican Centre in Rome. Paul told him, "By entering into our house, you are entering your own house; we are happy to open our door and heart to you." Cardinal Augustin Bea, who led the Secretariat for Promoting Christian Unity, added at the end of the visit, "Let us move forward in Christ. God wants it. Humanity is waiting for it." A commission followed, and it produced the joint Malta declaration, the first joint agreement on the Creed since the Reformation. Paul called the Anglican Church "our beloved sister Church", a phrase no later pope used.

  In 1965, Paul agreed to a joint working group with the World Council of Churches. It held eight sessions over the next three years. It proposed shared work on hunger and poverty and a yearly Week of Prayer for Christian Unity. On the 19th of July 1968 the council met in Uppsala, Sweden, which Paul called a sign of the times. Lutherans were the first Protestants to offer dialogue, in Reykjavík in September 1964. Methodists began talks in October 1965, and the Reformed Churches followed four years later.

  When Cardinal Bea asked permission for a joint Catholic and Protestant translation of the Bible with Protestant Bible societies, Paul walked toward him. He exclaimed, "As far as the cooperation with Bible societies is concerned, I am totally in favour." He gave formal approval on Pentecost 1967.

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• 7. Seven Encyclicals

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  Ecclesiam suam, issued on the 6th of August 1964, was Paul VI's first encyclical. It appealed to all people of good will and called for dialogue within the Church, between the churches, and with atheism. It also called Mary the ideal of Christian perfection. Mense maio, on the 29th of April 1965, returned to Mary and argued that anyone who encounters her cannot help but encounter Christ.

  On the 3rd of September 1965, Mysterium fidei took up the Eucharist. It criticised certain contemporary theologies and practices that, in Paul's view, undermined traditional doctrine. Christi Matri, on the 15th of September 1966, asked the faithful to pray for peace in October. It named the Vietnam War, the nuclear arms race, racism and "the slaughter of innocent people" among its worries.

  Populorum progressio, released on the 26th of March 1967, argued that the world's economy should serve humanity rather than a few. It upheld the right to a just wage, secure employment, fair working conditions and union membership. It also held that real peace depends on justice. Paul repeated his call, first made in Bombay in 1964, for a large-scale World Development Organization. He rejected revolution and force as ways of changing economic conditions.

  On the 24th of June 1967, Sacerdotalis caelibatus defended priestly celibacy in the West. It answered doubts raised after the council. Yet Paul was permissive in letting bishops grant priests release from the priesthood. John Paul II ended that policy in 1980. Paul's 1975 exhortation on evangelisation, Evangelii nuntiandi, grew from the synod of bishops he held on that theme in 1974.

  On the 25th of July 1968, Paul issued Humanae vitae, subtitled On the Regulation of Birth. It answered the findings of the Pontifical Commission on Birth Control by affirming the minority report. It reaffirmed the Church's condemnation of artificial birth control. The encyclical described marriage as a union of a loving couple with a loving God, and it did not paint marriage in romantic colours. It spoke of great joy but also of difficulties and hardships.

  Reaction was mixed. The encyclical was welcomed in Italy, Spain, Portugal and Poland, and it won much support in Latin America. At the 1968 meetings of the International Monetary Fund and World Bank Group, World Bank president Robert McNamara said that countries permitting birth control would get preferential access to resources. Doctors in La Paz, Bolivia, called it insulting to trade money for the conscience of a Catholic nation. In Colombia, Cardinal Archbishop Aníbal Muñoz Duque declared, "If American conditionality undermines Papal teachings, we prefer not to receive one cent." The Senate of Bolivia passed a resolution saying the document defended the right of developing nations to set their own population policies.

  Paul was concerned but not surprised by the hostile response in Western Europe and the United States. On the eve of publication he reportedly told Edouard Gagnon, "Don't be afraid," and predicted that in twenty years they would call him a prophet. His biography on the Vatican's website says the controversies over celibacy and contraception tended to overshadow the last years of his pontificate.

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• 8. Final Years

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  On the 29th of December 1975, the Sacred Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith issued Persona Humana, a declaration on sexual ethics. In response, the writer Roger Peyrefitte repeated claims from two of his books that Paul VI had a long-term homosexual relationship. His interview in a French gay magazine, reprinted in Italian, caused an uproar. On the 18th of April 1976, Paul addressed a crowd of about 20,000 in Saint Peter's Square and called the charges "horrible and slanderous insinuations". Special prayers were said in all Italian Catholic churches in a "day of consolation". The claims resurfaced later, in 1994 and again in 2006, but the pope had denied them, the first pontiff of the modern era to do so.

  In November 1967, Paul finally agreed to an operation for an enlarged prostate after putting it off. A team led by Professor Pietro Valdoni performed it on a simple table in an improvised operating theatre in the papal apartments. The Vatican described it only as "the malaise from which the Holy Father had been suffering for weeks". About 48 hours later, Paul discussed business from his bed with Cardinal Amleto Giovanni Cicognani, having moved from intravenous feeding to orange juice and hot broth.

  On the 16th of March 1978, the far-left Red Brigades kidnapped Aldo Moro, a former Italian prime minister who had been Paul's friend since their student days in FUCI. The country and the pope waited in suspense for 55 days. On the 20th of April, Moro appealed directly to Paul to intervene. The eighty-year-old pope wrote an open letter to the kidnappers. He said that he had no mandate to speak to them and no private interests in the matter. Then he wrote, "On my knees I beg you, free Aldo Moro, simply without conditions." Some in the Italian government accused him of treating the Red Brigades too gently. Paul kept looking for ways to pay a ransom, without success. On the 9th of May, Moro's body was found in a car in Rome. Paul later celebrated his state funeral Mass.

  On the 14th of July 1978, Paul left for the papal summer residence at Castel Gandolfo. On the way he stopped at the tomb of Cardinal Giuseppe Pizzardo, who had brought him into the Vatican half a century earlier. Though ill, he received the new Italian President, Sandro Pertini, for more than two hours. That evening he watched a Western on television and was happy only when he saw "horses, the most beautiful animals that God had created." Soon he needed oxygen.

  On Sunday, the Feast of the Transfiguration, he was too tired to say the Angelus and stayed in bed. He followed Mass at 18:00 from his bed. After receiving communion, he suffered a massive heart attack, and he lived on for three more hours. An hour before the end he said he felt dizzy and asked those present to go on praying in his place. Paul VI died at Castel Gandolfo at 21:41 on the 6th of August 1978. At his bedside were Cardinal Jean-Marie Villot, Bishop Giuseppe Caprio, his secretary Pasquale Macchi, two nuns and his physician.

  Syria declared nine days of mourning and Egypt seven. Bolivia declared five and Spain four. The Philippines declared one. Paul's will asked for a simple burial and for his correspondence and personal memos to be destroyed. He left all his belongings to the Vatican. He lies in a grave beneath the floor of Saint Peter's Basilica, in the Vatican Grottoes near other popes, without an ornate sarcophagus.

  In a private note from 1978, he wrote, "What is my state of mind? Am I Hamlet? Or Don Quixote? On the left? On the right? I do not think I have been properly understood." His confessor, the Jesuit Paolo Dezza, called him "a man of great joy". Dezza also said that if Paul was not a saint when he was elected, he became one during his pontificate.

  Benedict XVI proclaimed Paul venerable on the 20th of December 2012. Francis beatified him on the 19th of October 2014, after a miracle was attributed to his intercession, and canonised him on the 14th of October 2018. His feast was kept on his birthday, the 26th of September, until 2019. It now falls on the anniversary of his ordination as a priest.

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