Saint Paul VI

On his far from sturdy shoulders he took up one of the heaviest burdens of the twentieth-century Church: guiding the Second Vatican Council through countless fierce theological debates to a safe harbor, then continuing to steer the ship of the Church through the storm of the cultural and moral crisis after the Council, one of the most turbulent periods in modern Catholic history. He was also the first Pope of modern times to leave Europe, boarding planes to travel all five continents to proclaim the Gospel, opening the way for the worldwide apostolic journeys that his successors would continue and expand still further.

Young Giovanni grew up in an intellectual family, absorbing early a sense of social responsibility and a deep love of books and culture. But from childhood his health was very fragile and he was often sick, which made it hard for many at the time to believe that this boy would later carry one of the heaviest burdens the Church has ever entrusted to a human being.

When he entered the seminary of Brescia in 1916, his health was too weak for the strict routine of a boarding seminary, so his superiors made an exception and allowed him to live outside it and study on his own for the exams. On May 29, 1920, he was ordained a priest in Brescia, at only twenty-two.

After his ordination, Father Montini was sent to Rome to study at the Pontifical Gregorian University and the Pontifical Ecclesiastical Academy, the school that trains the Vatican’s future diplomats. One after another he earned doctorates in philosophy, canon law and theology, showing a sharp mind behind his thin, frail frame.

In 1925, he was appointed national chaplain of the Italian Catholic University Federation, known by its initials as FUCI. For eight years alongside those young intellectuals, he taught them how to engage bravely in dialogue with modern culture while holding firm to their faith under ever harsher pressure from Mussolini’s fascist regime, which saw every independent youth organization, Catholic associations included, as a threat to be eliminated.

In the dark years of the Second World War, he headed a huge humanitarian relief service of the Vatican: organizing a network to trace millions of missing prisoners of war, coordinating food relief, and, according to many later records, helping to hide thousands of Jews and resistance fighters inside monasteries and buildings belonging to the Holy See, places recognized by international law as neutral territory, out of the direct reach of the Nazi troops occupying Rome. He worked quietly, fourteen to sixteen hours a day, with no thought for personal fame, so that many of his contemporaries knew him only as a diligent official and could not imagine the real extent of the work he was carrying.

With clear judgment, diplomatic skill honed over thirty years in the Secretariat of State, and rare patience, Paul VI steered the Council’s next three sessions through debates that were sometimes fierce between the conservative and progressive tendencies among the bishops, always seeking to reconcile them, protecting the purity of the apostolic faith while opening the door to the pastoral renewal the age was calling for. It was he who guided the voting on and promulgation of the Council’s sixteen historic documents — among them the great Constitutions on the Church (Lumen Gentium), on the Liturgy (Sacrosanctum Concilium), on Revelation (Dei Verbum), and on the Church in the modern world (Gaudium et Spes) — texts that still shape Catholic life today. On December 8, 1965, he solemnly closed the Second Vatican Council; he also proclaimed Mary “Mother of the Church” (Mater Ecclesiae).

In 1965 he became the first Pope to address the General Assembly of the United Nations in New York, with a cry that stirred the conscience of a world locked in the Cold War:

“No more war! War never again! Peace must guide the destiny of the peoples!”

He also traveled to Fátima in Portugal, to Colombia in South America, to Switzerland, to Uganda in Africa, and to the Philippines and Australia, turning papal journeys from something unheard of into a normal part of the life of the modern Church. In Manila in 1970, he survived an attempt on his life by a knife-wielding fanatic who had slipped into the crowd, an event few people now remember, overshadowed by greater events of his pontificate.

In 1972, amid those years of crisis, he spoke, in anguish, words that became some of his most quoted: “The smoke of Satan has entered the Temple of God through some crack!” But however painful it was, he never sought to compromise or to withdraw his position. In 1975 he issued the Apostolic Exhortation “Evangelii Nuntiandi” (On Evangelization in the Modern World), with a line that still rings true today:

“Modern people listen more willingly to witnesses than to teachers, and if they do listen to teachers, it is because they are witnesses!”

During the fifty-five days Moro was held, Paul VI wrote a heartfelt public letter addressed directly to the kidnappers:

“I write to you, men of the Red Brigades... unknown and implacable enemies of this worthy and innocent man, I beg you on my knees: free Aldo Moro, simply and without conditions.”

He even offered to use the Holy See’s own resources to pay a large ransom in exchange for his friend’s life. But every effort was in vain. On May 9, 1978, Aldo Moro’s body, riddled with bullets, was found in the trunk of a car parked on Via Caetani, only a few steps from the headquarters of the two largest political parties in Italy: a cruelly symbolic gesture by the kidnappers.