Paul VI Reconsidered

Paul VI: The Divided Pope (Angelico Press, 2022) is James Walther's relatively recent translation of the 2008 second edition of Yves Chiron's 1993 French biography of Pope Saint Paul VI, who became Pope 60 years ago last month and was canonized on October 14, 2018. In a 2022 interview (tr. Zachary Thomas) in the French newspaper La Nef, following the publication of Chiron's latest book Histoire des Traditionalistes, Chiron claimed:  "The historian is not a judge or arbitrator. The most he can do is to be rigorous in his research and in the portrait he draws." How well he has succeeded at that admirable aspiration in his biography of Pope Paul can be debated. My own take on his effort is that this represents a reasonably well balanced biographical analysis of Pope Paul, plainly written within a religious perspective attuned to serious skepticism about the accomplishments of Vatican II and the post-conciliar aftermath - much as Peter Hebblethwaite's considerably longer and more famous 1993 biography of Pope Paul did something similar, but written within an obviously opposite perspective that largely applauded the post-conciliar settlement.

Unfortunately, what may make this English translation of Chiron's book about Paul VI seem somewhat less balanced and much more polemical than it is, however, is the intemperately ideological ad hominem hostility expressed in the Forward by Henry Sire, which harshly attacks both Pope Paul and, for good measure, Pope Francis. This intensely ideological and obviously very mean-spirited Forward will likely limit the readership of this book, which would be unfortunate, for this really is a good, readable, relatively concise biography which highlights certain valuable insights into Paul's background and his pontificate that are well worth considering in any assessment of that turbulent time in modern Church history.

Notably, Chiron highlights how atypically open to the world the future Pope's background was. Giovanni Battista Montini came from a professional, political, journalistic northern Italian family, very unlike the "Black Nobility (those Roman aristocratic families which sided with the papacy after the 19th-century unification of the Kingdom Italy, even keeping the front doors of their urban palazzi closed from 1870 to 1929). 

Paradoxically, however, the young Montini's health cause him to do most of his seminary studies at home. "He did not receive the Scholastic education which then formed the basis of ecclesiastical learning. Nor did he have any experience of community life, which instills certain lifelong rules, disciplines, and habits; nor had he experienced the separation from the world which years of seminary firmly fixed into one's being. Battista forged his own discipline of life for himself. Intellectually he would remain the autodidact that he had been before he entered seminary; in preparing for the priesthood, he continued to mix personal and profane reading with books of a properly religious nature."

The outline of Montini's pre-papal life as presented here is fairly familiar - his poor health, his studiousness, his consequent lack of pastoral experience, his post-ordination studies and early diplomatic career, his slow rise in the Vatican at the Secretariat of State, his chaplainship of FUCI during the Fascist era and his strong personal opposition to Fascism, his close association with Cardinal Pacelli (later Pius XII), his abrupt fall from favor and "exile" to Milan in the mid-1950s, his consequent inability to succeed Pius XII because Pius XII had chosen not to make him a cardinal, and his personal closeness to Cardinal Roncalli (later John XXIII). Chiron also highlights the younger Montini's "interiorist conception of religion," his "optimistic vision of the world in which the Christian life should be a 'witness',” and his "considerable interest in modern culture." He also pays considerable attention to Montini's life-long friendship with Jacques Maritain and the latter's influence on Montini's thinking both before and during his pontificate. Finally, there is Montini's apparently long-standing interest in ecumenism and in the liturgical movement. The latter Chiron associates with Montini's Benedictinism and a monastic "taste for a stripped-down liturgy, combined with a desire to see the faithful participate in it."

Chiron rightly assigns a lot of space and attention to Paul's most consequential actions - his radical reform of the Roman Liturgy, which went way beyond anything envisioned by Vatican II. In this, as in Paul's other contentious decisions and actions, Chris recognizes and emphasizes both that these were authentically the Pope's decisions and actions and also how personally conflicted Paul so often was. A Cardinal once allegedly said of Pope Paul: “He was a pope who suffered from a dichotomy, with his head to the right and his heart to the left.”

Among Pope Paul's many important non-liturgical decisions and actions, which warrant Chiron's attention, were his steering of the Second Vatican Council to its successful conclusion, his approach to collegiality during the Council's Third Session and later in creating the Synod of Bishops, his notable ecumenical gestures (especially towards the Orthodox and the Anglicans), his historically innovative travels (to the Holy Land, India, the U.N., Africa, and East Asia), the 1975 Holy Year, his renewed emphasis on evangelization, his problematic Ostpolitik, his harsh approach to Archbishop Lefebvre (which even Hans Kung considered excessive), and, of course, Humanae Vitae.

Chiron also highlights the sense of imminently increasing crisis that was already perceptible even during the Council. He notes both the "warning signs that would multiply in the months and years to come," and that "the Pope was not unaware of this escalating crisis." Personally, I can well remember how a mood of escalating crisis quickly took over the Church in the aftermath of the Council. I used to think such worries were all post-conciliar in origin. Then, I read Yves Congar's My Journal of the Council, which confirmed that such concerns were already clearly causing disquiet while the Council was still in session. During the Fourth Session's debates about religious liberty, Congar acknowledged that "anyone with a sense of pastoral responsibility could not view without anxiety ... the weakening of absolute convictions among Catholics." Just a few few months after the Council's conclusion, Congar wrote how "very disturbed" he was by "the seriously worrying situation in Holland," where some "reduced Christianity to a mere humanism, and radically espoused the theses of Bultmann, or those of Honest to God." (Already during the Council, Congar had also expressed concerns about Pope Paul's apparent ambivalences and reliance on gestures.)

As Chiron recalls, "The latter part of Paul VI's papacy was increasingly dominated by a spirit of abandonment, in the spiritual sense." From 1968 on, "he began to talk about the 'self-destruction' of the Church." In 1972, on the ninth anniversary of his election, he said: “Perhaps the Lord called me to his service, not because I had some aptitude, not to govern the Church and save her from the present difficulties, but to suffer for the Church and so that it is obviously God and not another who guides and saves her.” according to Chiron, "the difficulties that he faced in the government of the Church and the sense of abandonment to Divine Providence that was becoming his normal state of mind combined to reorient his preoccupations from the reforms of structures towards spiritual realities."

For all that Paul's pontificate proved to be of monumental significance in the transformation of the 20th-century Catholic Church, Chiron quotes one of Paul's closest friends, Jean Guitton: “Paul VI did not have the makings of a pope. He did not have that which is characteristic of a pope: resolve, the strength of resolve.”

The author summarizes his own ambivalent attitude in his final remark, commenting on the then just recently introduced process for Pope Paul's canonization: "Whether before the tribunal of history or in the judgment of the Church, Paul VI will not lack witnesses for the prosecution, nor advocates for the defense." Sixty years after his election, that is surely an accurate reflection of Pope Saint Paul VI's still ambiguous legacy to the Church.