Skip to main content

Blessed Paul VI




Pope Paul VI will be beatified Sunday at the Vatican.
While he is perhaps best known for his decisive 1968 encyclical on the regulation of birth, Humanae Vitae, he will also be remembered as a man of extraordinary gifts who was burdened by the tumult the Church faced during his 15-year papacy.

His election as Pope Paul VI in 1963 required of him to bring the Second Vatican Council to a conclusion and oversee its implementation. Having taken the name Paul to signify the Church’s mission to evangelize the whole world, he made nine overseas journeys, beginning with the Holy Land.
Unhappily his pontificate was marked by a series of crises. Both heterodox and traditionalist Catholics considered him feeble and vacillating, though for differing reasons, and he was tormented to the point of once saying that “the smoke of Satan” had entered the Church. It was this phrase which caught my attention to the point of research for a book on the Church in the U.S. since Vatican II.

As the story unfolds in the book, a number of traditionalists questioned Vatican II’s authority, especially its decrees on liturgy, ecumenism and religious liberty, prominent among them the Society of St. Pius X, founded by the French Archbishop Marcel Lefebvre, who was suspended from office for ordaining priests and consecrating bishops without canonical authority.

It was a time of swift change in the Church, and Paul VI was to oversee the internationalization of the Curia, an increase in size of the College of Cardinals, the elimination of the Index of Forbidden Books, reform of the procedures of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, eradication of frills of the triple tiara and the coronation ceremony,  and the establishment of permanent Vatican Secretariats for the Laity, the Family, Christian Unity, Non-Christians and Unbelievers.
Paul continued Pope St. John XXIII’s ecumenical initiative, establishing the Secretariat for Promoting Christian Unity.Vatican II also declared the Church’s acceptance of religious liberty and her coming to terms with the modern democratic state — although the full implications of this has remained unresolved.
The crux of my book centers on the gravest crises of Paul’s papacy, caused by those who were set on going beyond the Council documents. In the late 1960s, a global cultural revolution mounted an assault on all forms of authority. Paul VI was sympathetic to the nouvelle theologie that ruled the Council — ressourcement, a return to the Church’s scriptural and patristic roots, led by Henri De Lubac, Jean Danielou, Louis Bouyer, Joseph Ratzinger and Hans Urs Von Balthasar.

However, he was persistently pressed by a second new theological approach, called “aggiornamento” (“updating”) — represented by Hans Küng — that took the demands of modern culture as its principal issue.

The Council defined episcopal “collegiality” such that bishops had apostolic authority in their own right, but Paul VI’s intervention guaranteed that such authority respected papal infallibility. Of all the changes wrought by the Council, none were more dramatic and far-reaching than those affecting the liturgy, as I Take up in my fourth chapter. The conciliar decree Sacrosanctum Concilium exemplified a theology that had been emerging for a century — speaking of the Liturgy it in mystical terms, as a foretaste of the New Jerusalem, as a glimpse of heaven itself.
As is not well-known by all Catholics, Vatican II did not mandate a change from Latin to the vernacular. The Council decreed that this might be appropriate in some parts of the liturgy. Newer styles of music were encouraged, but Gregorian chant was still to have “pride of place.” However, as we know, for reasons I discuss at length, both Latin and Gregorian chant all but disappeared after the Council. Mass was celebrated facing the people; many of the prayers of the “old Mass” were revised or eliminated; permanent altars were often replaced by wooden tables, as the Mass as a communal meal was emphasized over the Mass as a sacrifice.

Responsibility for implementing liturgical reform was given to the Italian Archbishop Annibale Bugnini, who vindicated unlawful experimentation. After all the changes had been made, Paul VI indicated his displeasure with Archbishop Bugnini by in effect exiling him from Rome. Sadly, little was done to roll back the changes.
In some ways, the most severe crisis of faith in following the Council was experienced in priestly and religious life. For many priests and religious, renunciation of the world for the sake of the kingdom of God seemed oppressive. Thus many gave up their vocations, and many of those who remained were distressed. Religious discipline declined sharply, and vocations waned.
Moral theology also underwent a state of crisis during Paul VI’s pontificate. During the Council, there was substantial agitation for the Church to allow some kinds of artificial contraception, and Paul VI intervened to take the issue off the Council floor, appointing a special commission to study it.
As recounted in The Smoke of Satan in the Temple of God, the very fact that the commission was called caused many to assume that Church authorities themselves were ambiguous, and traditional teaching was therefore likely to change — an expectation that was confirmed when a majority of the commission recommended acceptance of contraception.
I was then that the Holy Spirit came to the Holy Father’s assistance, as Paul VI reaffirmed traditional teaching in his 1968 encyclical Humanae Vitae, though it must be said that, perhaps fearing an exodus from the Church, he appeared loath to mandate acceptance of his encyclical. Several national bishops’ conferences appeared to dissociate themselves from it, and when Cardinal Patrick O’Boyle of Washington suspended a number of priests who had rejected it, he was required by the Holy See to reinstate them.


After the Pope’s death, his former confessor eulogized, “If he was not a saint before he became pope, he became one while in office,” citing the Holy Father’s many sufferings, which he had endured with “abandonment to divine Providence.” After years of research into the papacy of Baptista Montini, I wholeheatedly agree, and await with hope coverage of the event.

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Dancing With Mr. D: Grooming the Little Children

A former pro-transgender activist said she regretted her previous work in pro-transgender activism, adding she felt she was "indoctrinated" on gender ideology in an interview with  Fox News Digital.  "I started to realize that what I had been doing at my job at the LGBT Center, it was grooming," Kay Yang, a former employee of a location in New York, said. Grooming in this context means "to get into readiness for a specific objective." Kay works as a 'deprogrammer' to help parents and children who have been 'indoctrinated' by the 'cult-like' transgender agenda. Yang herself previously went by they/them and worked as a 'trans educator' in schools for years.  Listen to her testimony.    

Homosexual Marriage

The urgency of the issue of gay marriage at this time and the compelling arguments raised against it here, make this paper an important resource: Answering Advocates of Gay Marriage KATHERINE YOUNG AND PAUL NATHANSON Claim 1 : Marriage is an institution designed to foster the love between two people. Gay people can love each other just as straight people can. Ergo, marriage should be open to gay people. Claim 2 : Not all straight couples have children, but no one argues that their marriages are unacceptable Claim 3 : Some gay couples do have children and therefore need marriage to provide the appropriate context. Claim 4 : Marriage and the family are always changing anyway, so why not allow this change? Claim 5 : Marriage and the family have already changed, so why not acknowledge the reality? Claim 6 : Children would be no worse off with happily married gay parents than they are with unhappily married straight ones. Claim 7 : Given global overpopulation, why w...

This video of a young boy twerking at Pride has homophobes outraged | Gay Star News

DANCING WITH MR. D:   This video of a young boy twerking at Pride has homophobes outraged | Gay Star News : 'via Blog this'

On the Contemporary U.S. Scene

M ichael Flynn made a lot of enemies inside the government during his career. When he exposed himself as vulnerable these pounced. How?? Anonymous and possibly illegal leaks of private conversations with a foreign national. Now, we aren't supposed to spy on Americans without probable cause, nor disclose the results of our spying in the pages of the  Washington Post   because it suits a partisan or personal agenda (overturning the results of an election). Current and former national security officials used their position, their sources, and their methods to destroy a political enemy. Why aren’t all Americans upset by this? Mr. Flynn is not the only recent occurrence of such. The  New York Times reports that civil servants at the EPA lobbied Congress to reject Donald Trump's nominee to run the agency because Pruitt was critical of the way the EPA was run during the Obama years.  Traditionally, civil servants follow the direction of the political ap...

Oremus

Catholic World News  - October 23, 2015  The Synod of Bishops spent Friday, October 23, discussing a proposed final statement, which will come up for a vote, paragraph by paragraph, on Saturday. The statement was presented to the bishops on Thursday evening, with Cardinal Peter Erdo, the relator general of the Synod, introducing the text. Because the statement was available only in Italian, some Synod participant were unable to read it, and there was an angry outcry when they were told-- by Cardinal Lorenzo Baldisseri, the secretary-general of the Synod-- that no copies of the sensitive document could be taken out of the Synod Hall. Eventually Cardinal Baldiserri relented, and allowed bishops to take the text home, but insisted that they could not show the document to outside translators. For a summary:

The Body of Christ and the City of Men

      The “Statement of Principles” issued by select Democratic members of the U.S. House of Representatives on June 18, disapproving of Bishops in the United States for allegedly “politicizing the Eucharist” is an example of deceitful equivocation. Essentially, the Statement maintains that the Bishops should not “politicize” the Eucharist. On this the insight of Flannery O’Connor proves enlightening: Those whose lives are not ordered by, around, and toward the Eucharist, therefore, are those whose lives are defined by some love other than love of the Christ who is present there. Rather, their lives are ordered by the earthly city, manifest in this case, by, variously, partisan political identity or individual, radially sovereign conscience. This applies across the American political spectrum, to those who deny human dignity of the unborn, the immigrant, and the person on death row. In Catholic teaching the Eucharist creates St. Augustine’s City of God, the definit...

Enlightenment thinking and "the Spirit of Vatican II"

Present in an analysis of the Enlightenment are the three themes which played an integral part in the disintegration of the liturgy: the denial of the transcendent, the resulting apostasy, and the exaltation of the community. That the movement was hostile to revealed Christianity is beyond debate. At bottom, the Enlightenment was hostile to Christian revelation for its teaching that salvation comes through Jesus Christ alone. In its stead, the Philosophes substituted a rational religion which emphasized the universal moral law shared by all men by virtue of their reason, not what they regarded as the untrustworthy historicity of the life message of Jesus. They saw this rational religion as a refining of, not a repudiation of Christian moral teaching. For example, the Mass, which celebrates the revelation that Christ’s sacrificial death reconciles us to the Father and each other, making present to the believer the same sacrifice of the Cross, was reduced to the mere celebration ...

Bishop Barron on Martin Luther

Bishop Robert Barron, in his June 13   article   titled "Looking at Luther With Fresh Eyes," describes Martin Luther as "a mystic of grace, someone who had fallen completely in love." Fr. describes Luther as the "undisputed father of the Reformation" and as "cantankerous, pious, very funny, shockingly anti-Semitic, deeply insightful and utterly exasperating." While admiring of Luther, Fr. adds: "I disagree with lots and lots of his ideas," without clarifications. Barron summarizes: "For at the core of Luther's life and theology was an overwhelming experience of grace. After years of trying in vain to please God through heroic moral and spiritual effort, Luther realized that, despite his unworthiness, he was loved by a God who had died to save him," adding, "Luther was an ecstatic, and the religious movement he launched [Protestantism] was 'a love affair.'" Was Dr. Luther in love with God...

Libido Redux: The Pill Circa 2014

If I were a female, and I am not, but if I were, and were Catholic, I would take seriously this read  concerning what happens when the rights of God are violated. I have written of these violations before, here . Let us pray that this snare of the prince of this world may not celebrate the 60th birthday of "the pill."

Libido Redux: California's Proposition 60

T he Catholic Church, founded by Jesus Christ, remains the great exception to the sexual revolution.  Facilitated technologically by the oral contraceptive and culturally by rapid secularization, this revolution successfully separated sex from babies, and, in short order, sex from marriage, sex from love, and even love from marriage, if love is understood to have a sacrificial, enduring character (think “no –fault” divorce). The sexual revolution has crushed everything in its path, including most, (not ALL) Christian churches in the West, which it rendered both impotent and sterile.  The Catholic Church has been the lone institutional holdout, earning for itself puzzlement from her friends and ferocious hostility from enemies.  Catholic teaching has insisted that both natural reason and biblical revelation teach that sex, love, marriage and children all belong together in the complementarity of men and women made in the image and likeness of God.  For both h...