Paul VI

Paul VI: The Pope Who Had to Land the Council

John XXIII opened the Second Vatican Council and then died, leaving the largest reform in four centuries of Catholic history unfinished and its outcome entirely open. The cardinals elected the man who had spent thirty years inside the Vatican bureaucracy and knew exactly how much could break. Giovanni Battista Montini reconvened the council, drove it to completion, and then spent fifteen years implementing it — a task that made him, depending on the critic, the pope who modernised the Church or the pope who let it come apart. He is now a canonised saint, and the argument continues.

Concesio and the Secretariat

Montini was born in 1897 in Concesio, in northern Italy, to Giorgio Montini — a lawyer, newspaper editor and leader in Catholic Action, the lay movement that engaged Italian Catholics in public life. Politics and faith were not separate categories in that household, and they never became so for the son.

He entered the seminary in 1916, was ordained in 1920, and went on to study canon law. From 1922 he worked in the Secretariat of State, where he stayed for thirty-two years, becoming with Domenico Tardini one of the two closest advisers to Pius XII. His war was administrative and enormous: he coordinated the Vatican's assistance to refugees and prisoners of war, an operation that processed something close to ten million requests for information about missing people. It is not the kind of work that makes a reputation, and it shaped a man whose instinct was always to ask what an institution could actually deliver.

In 1954 Pius XII sent him to Milan as archbishop — a move variously read as promotion or removal — where he pursued notably progressive pastoral methods and an openness to other Christians that was then unusual. He was made cardinal in 1958, under John XXIII. On 21 June 1963, aged 65, he was elected pope and took the name Paul.

Finishing the Council

The council was his inheritance and his problem. Paul VI reconvened it and guided it to completion in 1965, which required holding together bishops who wanted far more change and bishops who wanted none, without a schism in either direction. What emerged reshaped Catholic practice: liturgical reform, including Mass celebrated in the vernacular alongside Latin; institutional reform of the Roman Curia, the papal bureaucracy he had served in for three decades and therefore understood better than any pope before him; and the creation of the Synod of Bishops, a standing body giving the world's bishops a consultative voice in Rome.

He pushed ecumenism further than any modern predecessor. His meeting with the Ecumenical Patriarch Athenagoras I led to the rescinding of the mutual excommunications of 1054 — an act that did not reunite the Eastern and Western churches but removed the formal anathemas that had stood between them for nine centuries.

He also invented the modern papacy's most visible feature. Paul VI was the first pope to fly, and he travelled to six continents, including the first papal visit to Africa. The pope had been, in practice, a figure who stayed in Rome; after him, he was a figure who went to people.

Humanae Vitae

On 25 July 1968 he issued the encyclical that defined his reign in the public mind. *Humanae Vitae* addressed married love and the regulation of birth, and its central claim is a single principle: that the unitive and procreative meanings of the marital act are inherently connected and may not be deliberately separated. Each marital act, the text holds, "must of necessity retain its intrinsic relationship to the procreation of human life."

From that principle followed the conclusions: contraception, sterilisation and abortion are forbidden, along with any act before, during or after intercourse specifically intended to prevent conception; recourse to naturally infertile periods is permitted, as is medical treatment that causes infertility as an unintended side effect. The encyclical also warned of consequences — that widespread contraception would lead to marital infidelity, a general lowering of moral standards, a diminished respect for women, and government intrusion into intimate family decisions — and appealed directly to public authorities, scientists, doctors and married couples in turn.

The reaction in Western Europe and North America was the most serious open dissent from a papal teaching in modern Catholic history, including from theologians and bishops. Reception in Latin America and much of the developing world was considerably warmer. The document remains the fault line along which Catholic argument about authority still runs.

The last decade of his reign was heavy. Conservative resistance to the council's reforms hardened around Archbishop Marcel Lefebvre. Paul VI died on 6 August 1978 at Castel Gandolfo. He was canonised in 2018.

Why Paul Is Called a Genius

The case is administrative and diplomatic rather than speculative or theological, and it is easy to underrate precisely because its achievement was the absence of catastrophe.

Consider what he was handed: an ecumenical council, half-finished, on questions — liturgy, religious liberty, the Church's relationship to other faiths and to modernity — that had divided Catholics for a century, with a global episcopate split and no mechanism for enforcing a settlement. Councils have fractured churches before. Paul VI closed this one in 1965 with its major documents passed and, more remarkably, then implemented them across a worldwide institution of hundreds of millions of people over the following decade. That required something rarer than brilliance: an exact sense of how much change a body can absorb, and in what order. Thirty-two years in the Secretariat of State had taught him the machinery from the inside, and he used that knowledge with unusual precision.

His genuine innovations should be counted too. The Synod of Bishops changed the shape of Church governance. The rescinding of the 1054 excommunications took an act of nerve. Papal travel, which now seems obvious, was his invention.

The counter-case is substantial and comes from both directions. Traditionalists hold that he presided over the dissolution of Catholic practice and identity, and Lefebvre's movement grew directly out of that conviction. Progressives hold the opposite — that in *Humanae Vitae* he chose doctrinal continuity over the lived reality of married Catholics, and that the resulting crisis of authority damaged the Church more than any reform he made. Both cannot be right, but both describe a papacy of compromise, and compromise is not usually what the word genius denotes. He was also, by temperament, a hesitant and melancholy man, and his indecision was noted by contemporaries. The honest verdict is that he possessed extraordinary institutional judgement and, on the single most consequential question he faced, made a decision that half his Church has never accepted.

Legacy

Every pope since has governed inside the settlement Paul VI built: a Church with a vernacular liturgy, a travelling papacy, formal relations with other Christian communions, and an unresolved argument about authority dating from July 1968. That is a considerable amount of durable architecture for a man who spent most of his reign being told he had gone either too far or not nearly far enough.

Achievements

• Knight Grand Cross of the Order of Merit of the Italian Republic — 1953
• Grand Cross 1st class of the Order of Merit of the Federal Republic of Germany
• Educated at Pontifical Gregorian University and Sapienza University of Rome
• Worked as Latin Catholic priest, diplomat and Catholic bishop