I set out to write a post on Blessed Paul VI; I ended up saying as much about the synod at which he was beatified, and the Pope who presided over both synod and beatification, as I did about Pope Paul himself. I'll address Blessed Paul more directly in the near future.
Cardinal Giovanni Battista Montini is reported to have said at the time
that St. John XXIII didn't realize what a "hornet's nest" he was
stirring up in calling the Second Vatican Council. A few short years
later, Montini, as Pope Paul VI, found himself presiding over that very hornet's nest. He faced the Herculean task of trying to preserve the unity of the
Church in the face of the forces that had been unleashed, both during the
council and in the years that followed. Pope Paul's approach seemed to be based
on the maxim (often erroneously attributed to St. Augustine): "Unity in essential things, liberty in doubtful things, charity in all things". Pope John had quoted it in his first encyclical, Ad Petri Cathedram [here], and Pope Paul took it to heart. He allowed
everyone to have his say when possible, which tended to create the appearance
(and, quite frankly, often the reality) of disarray in the Church. Where
he judged it necessary, on the other hand, he firmly restated the traditional
teaching: on priestly celibacy [here], for instance, the all-male clergy [here], and most
famously, human sexuality in his most well-known encyclical, Humanae Vitae [here]. As a rule he refrained from condemnations, denunciations, and other seemingly uncharitable gestures.
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| Blessed Paul VI at the closing ceremony of the Second Vatican Council |
Pope Paul is now Blessed Paul VI, having been
beatified last weekend at the conclusion of the Extraordinary Synod on the
Family. Speaking of which, one can't help but agree with the numerous commentators who have
observed that this synod was not just Extraordinary, but extraordinary.
There's no need for me to recap all the hijinx that took place; let it
suffice to say that such public disarray in the upper reaches of the Church has
not been seen the pontificate of, yes, Paul VI.
There are some interesting connections here.
There has been a lot of speculation as to Pope Francis's position on the controverted issues and controversial maneuvering at the synod. He
gave Cardinal Kasper the opportunity to run with his long-time project of
loosening up the rules preventing divorced Catholics who have remarried without
annulment from receiving communion, and appointed administrators for the synod
who finagled to make that and other liberalizing proposals seem much more
agreeable to the assembled fathers than they actually were; he also put more
traditionally-minded prelates such as South African Cardinal Napier in a
position to counter the machinations of Kasper and his crew. As the synod
unfolded, the Pope appeared to have no public reaction to the actions of the
liberalizing faction in the first week, nor to the successful revolt of the others
in the second. He very consciously took an evenhanded approach in his
final address, mixing some "pox on both your houses" rhetoric with a
call for unity in arriving at the truth.
What does this have to do with the
beatification of Paul VI? Clearly, raising up the author of Humanae Vitae
as the culmination of a synod on the family sends a pretty strong message that
Pope Francis is not going to soften Church teaching in this area (as I
previously suggested here). I wonder if he isn't also looking to Blessed
Pope Paul as a model for how to approach the question of Church Unity. It
may seem to him that, despite the fact that a whole lot of people weren't
happy, Paul's light touch largely succeeded in holding the Church together. The one
significant exception, of course, was Archbishop Lefebvre and his
followers, now embodied in the Society of Pius X - to whom Pope Francis seems to be making some very charitable overtures for reconciliation [here]. Like Blessed Paul VI, Francis seems to be aiming for a style more pleasing to the "progressives", while maintaining (on doctrinal matters, anyway) a more traditional substance.*
*. . . I haven't forgotten about the post-Vatican II reform of the liturgy: I'll get to that in another post.
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