It is something of a wonder that Paul VI does not have a great English
biographer. The popular reputation of the saintly pope is a man of
psychological complexity, though controlled by events more than controlling
them. Who has not heard, most likely at a coffee hour in a dingy church
basement, the story of John XXIII calling Cardinal Montini “Our Hamlet”? It is
true that Paul VI is not a widely loved figure, nor even, in fairness, a figure
with a cult following. But that is no impediment to a great biography in our
age. Lytton Strachey, impelled upward by malice, was able to reach the heights
of the biographer’s art in his chapter on Cardinal Manning, and I am confident
no one ever called Manning “Our Hamlet.”
I mean no disrespect to Peter Hebblethwaite’s biography.
His Paul VI was written in the early 1990s and has been reissued
since. It covers Paul’s life in great detail, and Hebblethwaite has an eye for
moments that reveal something of the man. For example, he recounts Paul’s
remarks during an Angelus late in his pontificate (on December 8, 1975), in
which Paul rhapsodizes about Our Lady spreading over Rome and not only Rome but
the whole world a blanket of her own snow, a snow of “her purity, innocence,
and beauty.”
Perhaps there is a great Italian biography of Paul VI: a
national classic like William Manchester’s life of Churchill or Robert Caro’s
behemoth series about Lyndon Johnson. That is to say, a biography that every
educated Italian at least pretends to have read. Such biographies of churchmen are
not unheard of. At one point in time, every Catholic owned at least one copy of
George Weigel’s Witness to Hope. Many owned several, if the free
piles outside used bookstores are any guide. Perhaps then, some great Paolo Sesto can be found on the bookshelves of educated Catholics and in free piles
all over Italy.
Speculation aside, I think it is fair to say that in the
English-speaking world at least Paul VI remains something of an unknown
quantity. To be sure, everyone knows the summary version: the Council, Humanae vitae, the Novus Ordo, the tears in the sacristy on Whit Monday. Some might
know of his long-running confrontation with Archbishop Marcel Lefebvre or his
policy of Ostpolitik, but even then we start to get into the weeds fairly
quickly. Certainly, few people spend much time reading his encyclicals or other
documents. I cannot remember the last time someone told me he was sitting down
with Ecclesiam suam or Marialis cultus.
The most serious consequence of this is that we have
lost much sense of Paul VI as a thinker or even as a man. We know the broad
strokes of his life, but even that dissolves Paul into context. When Pope
Francis canonized him in 2018, it was widely held that the canonization was
actually a canonization of the Second Vatican Council and was praised or, as
the case may be, criticized as such. We know much about the dramatic miracles
attributed to the intercession of modern saints such as Saint John Henry Newman
and Blessed Carlo Acutis. I wonder whether anyone knows anything about the
miracles attributed to Paul VI’s intercession. (If you are playing along at
home, both miracles involved the unexplained healing of infants in utero with serious health conditions.) If Paul’s heroic virtues were discussed
at all, they were controverted.
For myself, I like to think of Paul VI as the last great
Renaissance pope, much as I like to think of his doctrinal chief, Alfredo
Cardinal Ottaviani, as the last great Renaissance cardinal. Both men were
urbane, cultured clerics: Christian humanists of unimpeachable orthodoxy in the
tradition of Saint Thomas More. Paul’s great support for Christian democracy
and the European project were of a piece with this. So too was the core of orthodoxy
and private devotion one finds on the rare occasions one delves into his
writings. The Church took fifteen hundred years or so to produce, through slow
processes, a Montini or an Ottaviani.
Pope Francis’s Apostolic Letter on the seven-hundredth anniversary
of Dante’s death, Candor lucis aeternae, mentions that Paul had a keen
interest in the great Italian poet and politician. In 1965, on the
seven-hundredth anniversary of Dante’s birth, Paul sent a golden cross to
Dante’s tomb. Months later he sent Florence a golden laurel wreath. Finally, he
presented the fathers of the Council an edition of the Divine Comedy. In his own apostolic letter Altissimi cantus Paul found in Dante a pattern of authentic Christian humanism and the
restoration of order through the harmony of “faith and reason, Beatrice and
Vergil, Cross and Eagle, Church and Empire.”
Francis reminds us that Paul saw in Dante the exaltation
of human values—“intellectual, moral, emotional, cultural and civic”—but only
as “the fruit of his deepening experience of the divine, as his contemplation
was gradually purified of earthly elements.” I think one sees a key to Paul’s
personality and outlook in this approach to Dante: for Paul, Christian humanism
was the fruit of Christian devotion. And Paul’s Christian humanism demanded
engagement with the world and the world’s problems.
This is why Paul’s social encyclical Populorum
progressio has been excepted from the general forgetting. It
attracted some notice in 2009 when Benedict XVI chose to commemorate the
fortieth anniversary of Populorum progressio with Caritas in veritate. It has been routine for modern
popes to mark the anniversary of Leo XIII’s Rerum novarum by issuing their own interventions on the burning social and economic
questions of the age. Pius XI’s Quadragesimo anno and Saint John Paul II’s Centesimus annus are two of the most notable commemorations, but Pius XII marked the
fiftieth anniversary with a 1941 radio address and John XXIII issued Mater et magistra for the seventieth anniversary. Pope Francis has routinely cited Populorum
progressio in his social encyclicals, Laudato si’ and Fratelli tutti, and in Querida Amazonia, his apostolic exhortation following the Amazon Synod.
But Paul himself commemorated Rerum novarum—on schedule as it were—in 1971 with the Apostolic Letter Octogesima
adveniens to Maurice Cardinal Roy, archbishop of Quebec and
president of various pontifical councils under Paul. Octogesima
adveniens is less well known than Populorum
progressio, but it is a rich document that in many ways
anticipated the developments in the Church’s social teaching under Saint John
Paul II, Benedict XVI, and Francis.
One can go down the list of headings in the English
edition of Octogesima adveniens and see the social issues of the
last fifty years laid out in a kind of summary. Paul anticipated Francis’s
concerns in Querida Amazonia about the effects of relentless urbanization and
industrialization on traditional ways of life and on families and
neighborhoods. He also considered the precarious situation of emigrants,
compelled by economic or environmental factors to leave their homes and seek
opportunities in foreign countries.
More striking still, Paul seems to have foreseen the
problems of modern communications technology that have concerned the current
pontiff. Paul wrote eloquently and clearly about the responsibility of the
owners of the means of communication and asked probing questions about them,
their goals, and the relationship between technology and individual liberty.
Paul saw that the question of our freedom extends beyond narrowly political or
ideological dimensions to social, economic, and cultural life.
While it is unlikely that Paul could have imagined the
rise of Facebook and Twitter, to say nothing of Amazon. But he did not need to
do so. He understood that the question of liberty was not merely a juridical or
political question. It concerns all aspects of life, and Paul called upon
public authorities to exercise their power for the common good by defending
individual citizens and promoting the fundamental values of society.
This included care for the natural
world. Paul anticipated Pope Francis’s legendary quip about the earth becoming
an “immense pile of filth” when he warned that our common home was in danger of
becoming a “permanent menace.” He expressed concern that environmental
catastrophes were slipping beyond human control. While Paul’s treatment of this
question in Octogesima adveniens was by no
means as extensive as Francis’s in Laudato si’, the fundamental concerns of the latter are contained
in Paul’s brief comments. History has shown Paul’s concerns to be entirely
justified.
Octogesima adveniens did not limit itself to concrete
social concerns. It touches, in keeping with the popes’ interventions going all
the way back to Leo XIII’s Rerum novarum, on the broader ideological conflicts that still raged in 1971. Paul
taught that the Catholic cannot share a worldview that contradicts his faith or
his understanding of man:
He cannot adhere to the Marxist ideology, to its atheistic materialism, to its dialectic of violence and to the way it absorbs individual freedom in the collectivity, at the same time denying all transcendence to man and his personal and collective history; nor can be adhere to the liberal ideology which believes it exalts individual freedom by with drawing it from every limitation, by stimulating it through exclusive seeking of interest and power, and by considering social solidarities as more or less automatic consequences of individual initiatives, not as an aim and a major criterion of the value of the social organization.
Today, the failure of the second of these ideologies is
perhaps more obvious to us than it was in Paul’s day. But as alternatives to
liberalism are sought, Marxism remains very much a live option for many young
people. Here Paul’s tone, though forceful, is not reflexively dismissive;
he understood the appeal of Marxist thought
for some Catholics. Christians are attracted to socialism as an expression of
their ideals of solidarity, justice, and equality. But Paul, who writes at some
length about competing definitions of socialism—as “a struggle—at times with no
other purpose—to be pursued and even stirred up in permanent fashion,” as “the
collective exercise of political and economic power under the direction of a
single party,” as an “ideology based on historical materialism and the denial
of everything transcendent,” and as a scientific theory that “gives a
privileged position to certain aspects of reality to the detriment of the
rest”—saw what so few do: that these definitions do not exist independent of
the history of socialism and the “totalitarian and violent society to which
this process leads.”
Paul was equally strident about liberalism, unafraid of
cautioning that even as Christians embraced it during the Cold War as a
response to the threat of the Soviet Union, they should be on their guard. He
saw that “economic efficiency” and concerns about “the totalitarian tendencies
of political powers” should not blind us to the fact that “at the very root of
philosophical liberalism is an erroneous affirmation of the autonomy of the
individual in his activity, his motivation and the exercise of his liberty.”
Paul’s suspicion of “every system and every ideology” is
best understood not in the narrow historical context of the era, but in terms
of the connection he draws in Altissimi cantus between the exaltation of human values and the contemplative life.
Aristotle and Aquinas held that the contemplative life is the highest happiness
of man. However, as Charles de Koninck argued in The Principle of
the New Order, all modern revolutionary ideologies have rejected the
primacy of the speculative in favor of the practical reason. In Marx’s thought,
there is no room for the contemplative life, which is nothing more than an
outgrowth of the forces of production; under liberalism it is either a luxury
good or else an obstacle to a technocratic conception of order that is all too
frequently reducible to unrestricted commerce.
Paul’s Christian humanism finds its highest expression
here. One could perhaps say that he understood in terms of poetry what
Aristotle understood in terms of philosophy: the contemplative life produces
the exaltation of human values—not the other way around. Aristotle teaches us
that complete happiness is the contemplation of noble and divine things in
accordance with the virtue of such contemplation. Aquinas teaches us that the
maximum in any genus is the cause and measure of all in that genus. Paul’s
emphasis on the primacy of the speculative—expressed in his rejection of
socialist materialism and technocratic capitalism—reflects a deep philosophical
insight. Contemplation, Paul says, is the best part of man and the cause of
man’s happiness. From contemplation comes all the other happiness worth having.
The rejection of contemplation therefore makes man less than a man.
This is why throughout Octogesima adveniens, one finds Paul insisting that the only way to happiness, to true
progress, is through understanding the truth about man and God. The errors he
decries —dialectical materialism, totalitarianism, utopianism, scientism—all
distort the truth about man and God. And the effects of those distortions, for
Paul, inevitably and paradoxically lead to restrictions on man’s temporal
happiness. His denunciations of ideology are of a piece with his warnings about
urbanization and pollution, and all form part of his proposal for “the integral
development of man.”
Paul’s unflinching confrontation with modernity
continued long after Octogesima adveniens. An example of this: his
stringent condemnations of drugs. At his general audience on September 13,
1972, Paul drew a startling connection between the modern attack on chastity
and the rise of illegal drug use. He lamented the debasement of man through provocante
immondezza—“provocative filth”—that corrodes our reason and our
spiritual sensibilities, a theme to which he would return again that year, in a
long speech to the Carlo Erba Foundation on December 18. Later in November
1976, addressing an American congressional delegation on drug abuse, he
observed that a drug user was “profoundly affected in the exercise of intellect
and will, in the fulfillment of his or her true role as a human being, and
finally in the attainment of a high spiritual destiny.” The last fifty years of
widespread—and indeed now quasi-legal—drug use and pornography have proven Paul
correct.
What does this mean for the legacy of the pope who is
most commonly associated with the missal he promulgated in 1970? I would not
deny that the events of Paul VI’s papacy were significant. But to focus on them
exclusively at the expense of the man himself does an injustice to Paul. His
vision of Christian humanism speaks even now to the truth that man’s highest
happiness is found in the contemplative life, and that this happiness is the
cause and measure of all other human values.
Patrick Smith blogs at Semiduplex.