The Papacy: The Path to Follow

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By midmorning a crowd had filtered into St. Peter’s Square and clustered beneath the windows of the Apostolic Palace. It was only the second day of voting by the 80 cardinals who had gathered there to name Pope John XXIII’s successor.* But no one anticipated a long conclave—and the expectations were not wrong. At 11:22, smoke began billowing from the rickety metal chimney that led upward from the Sistine Chapel, where in a ceremonial stove the used ballots were burned. Twice the day before, a few puffs of white had first appeared, but then the smoke had turned a disappointing black—the signal that no Pope had been chosen. This time there was no mistake: the smoke was white—bella bianca. Moments later, the Vatican Radio, which during the 1958 conclave had twice broadcast premature election bulletins, joyfully confirmed the news.

Only six ballots had been needed; all Rome knew then that the election could only have gone to one man. Within an hour, the crowd in the square had swollen to more than 100,000, and every Roman street west of the Tiber was hopelessly snarled with traffic. When Alfredo Ottaviani, Secretary of the Holy Office and senior Cardinal-Deacon of the Sacred College, at last appeared on the central balcony of St. Peter’s Basilica with a retinue of clerics, a vast roar came up from the crowd. “I announce to you tidings of great joy,” he intoned hoarsely in Latin. “Habemus papam—we have a Pope. He is the most eminent and most Reverend Lord Cardinal Giovanni Battista . . .”

Ottaviani did not have to finish; with one voice the crowd shouted back the last name: “Montini! Montini!” Smiling broadly, Ottaviani completed his traditional announcement: “. . . who has taken the name of Paul VI.” There were gasps and applause. Then, as the slight (5 ft. 10 in., 154 Ibs.), erect new Pope, his white-cassocked figure almost engulfed beneath a broad red stole, stepped out to give his first blessing to the city and to the world, he was greeted by a thunderous shout that welled up from the sea of waving handkerchiefs. His graceful, austere gestures reminded many of Pius XII. One reporter commented: “He looks like he’s been Pope all his life.”

“A Very Long Lead.” Giovanni Montini, Cardinal-Archbishop of Milan, had entered the conclave a Pope—and defied tradition by coming out of it a Pope. He had been the odds-on favorite of journalists, clerics, and the betting population of Rome’s cafés. He was, at 65, the right age. He was that all-but-impossible combination, a “liberal” Italian who was basically acceptable to both Curia traditionalists and non-Italian progressives. He had a desirable blend of ecclesiastical experience behind him: eight years in charge of Italy’s largest diocese, following three decades of efficient, unobtrusive service in the Vatican’s Secretariat of State.

He had been a protgé of Pope Pius XII; yet he was also a friend of John’s, and he favored the continuation of the Ecumenical Council. Montini, in fact, had almost too many qualifications—and Vaticanologists even found themselves doublethinking reasons why he would not win after all. Yet when the cardinals marched in procession toward the Sistine Chapel last Wednesday to begin the conclave, there were whispers of “il Papa, il Papa” as Montini went by. The cardinal heard; he looked up in shock, and signaled for the bystanders to keep still.

What happened at the brief conclave of 1963* is officially so secret that anyone who tells incurs an automatic excommunication removable only by the Pope. But a secret in Rome often seems to be like a public announcement anywhere else. From the start, says one of the cardinals, “it was obvious to everyone that Montini had a very long lead.” Some progressives at first apparently voted for Leo Josef Suenens of Malines-Brussels and Franziskus Konig of Vienna, as a reminder to the conclave that the Bishop of Rome need not always be an Italian; perhaps they had also meant to nudge a few archconservative votes toward Montini, as the least of the possible evils.

By the fourth ballot, late Thursday afternoon, Montini reportedly lacked only four of the 54 votes he needed for election. With the sixth ballot the next morning, the vote was nearly unanimous; the cardinals lowered the canopies above their makeshift wooden thrones until all but the one over Montini were collapsed. Approaching him, Eugene Cardinal Tisserant, dean of the college, asked in Latin: “Do you accept the election canonically raising you to the post of Supreme Pontiff?” Murmured Montini: “Accepto, in nomine Domini [I accept, in the name of the Lord].”

Symbol of Unity. As Pope, Angelo Roncalli took the name of John, partly because it reminded him of John the Baptist, the precursor of the Lord, and of the other John, the beloved disciple and evangelist. Montini’s choice was equally significant. “The name is a program in itself,” exclaimed one Vatican cleric. Clearly, Pope Paul intended to recall the great Apostle to the Gentiles, who, said the editor of L’Osservatore Romano, is “a symbol of ecumenical unity, venerated by Catholics, Protestants and Orthodox Christians.” It was St. Paul who internationalized the early church; it was Paul, through his dynamic letters, who gave universal scope to the teachings of the Nazareth carpenter.

Some also wondered whether Montini might not have pondered the lives of the five strange Pauline Popes who preceded him. The first Paul (757-67) was a zealous defender of theological orthodoxy who squabbled endlessly with the Byzantine Emperor on religious problems. The second (1464-71) was a carnival-loving Renaissance prince who tried to lure Russian Orthodoxy into union with Rome. The third (1534-49) was a reformer of sorts who gave his own son and nephews cardinalates, yet also convoked the great Council of Trent. The fourth (1555-59) was an unlamented inquisitor, who boasted: “Even if my own father were a heretic, I would gather the wood to burn him.” The fifth (1605-21) was also a rigid doctrinaire, who fought bitterly with the anticlericals of his time.

The Call to Greatness. Paul VI is neither inquisitor nor nepotist nor Renaissance prince. Yet he is a strange and complex man whom few have been able to define with precision. Italian Banker Vittorino Veronese, a former chief of Italy’s Catholic Action movement, says that he has “such a very rich personality that he is impossible to classify.” Paul’s friends claim that he combines the learning and intellectuality of Pius with the openness and reforming spirit of John XXIII. Critics point out that he seems to share Pius’ imperious ways with subordinates and lacks John’s instinctive warmth toward fellow men.

As an archbishop, he produced a series of clear, decisive pastoral letters and allocutions (see box); yet some of his subordinates say that his own policies were often dangerously fluid: “There was no followup, and experiments turned out to be mere episodes.” He has been hailed as a distinguished administrator; yet his record in Milan can honestly be rated no better than fair. Appraisals of Montini range from “a great gentleman” and “a complete man” to “a Pacelli—twice over” and “a Hamlet.”

Like Hamlet, Paul VI may be marked for tragedy. Yet friend and foe alike agree that he has within him the seeds of greatness. Now he has an awesome throne and title that call for greatness. “He can be a stronger Pope than he was a cardinal,” says one Roman Jesuit. “The moment he has nothing to fear he will be better.”

Quiet Charisma. Pius XII came from the lesser nobility of Rome, John XXIII from the peasantry of northern Italy. Paul VI is a bourgeois Pope, born to the comforts of Italy’s middle class. His birthplace was Concesio, a country village near Brescia in northern Italy (and about 40 miles from Sotto il Monte, where Angelo Roncalli was born). The Pope’s father, Giorgio Montini, was a lawyer and crusading journalist; his progressive political and social views were inspired by Don Luigi Sturzo, a near-legendary priest and sociologist who was one of the founders of Italian Christian democracy. Until Mussolini’s Fascism put an end to free political action in Italy around 1924, Giorgio Montini served three terms in Parliament as a member of Don Sturzo’s Popular Party.

Giorgio Montini’s second son, “Giambattista,” was a frail, ailment-prone child plagued by colds, who had to be educated privately after poor health drove him from the Jesuit school in Brescia. But at the age of 20, young Montini was well enough to enter the seminary of Sant Angelo in Brescia. He was, then as now, somewhat withdrawn and bookish. One teacher recalls him as the best pupil he ever had, while some fellow students detected in him the quiet charisma of the born leader. “Never have I met anyone who had to say so little to establish his authority,” a classmate recalls.

After his ordination to the priesthood in 1920, Montini was sent by the Bishop of Brescia to do advanced studies at the Gregorian Institute and the University of Rome. A year later, he took up canon law at Rome’s Ecclesiastical Academy, where he was under the talent-scouting eye of Monsignor Giuseppe Pizzardo, the Vatican’s Pro-Secretary of State (and now prefect of the Congregation of Seminaries). In 1922, Pizzardo gave Father Montini his first and only permanent diplomatic assignment abroad. Named secretary to the Apostolic Nuncio in Warsaw, Father Montini lasted only a few months of the Polish winter before his health again collapsed. He was reassigned in the Secretariat of State as a minutante (document writer), and settled down to a career of diplomatic drudgery.

Watched & Nourished. Until the press of Vatican duties forced him to give up the assignment in 1933, Montini also served for ten years as spiritual adviser to the federation of Italian Catholic university students. It was a decade in which Fascism was making inroads into Catholic youth groups. Montini urged his students to stand firm but to avoid street battles with Blackshirt youth, and instead follow a course of nonviolence and noncooperation. After the threat of Fascist thuggery forced the federation to postpone one meeting, he tried to rally the downcast students: “If today we cannot go forward with flags unfurled, we will work in silence.”

One day in 1930, the Vatican Secretary of State, Eugenio Cardinal Pacelli, the future Pius XII, pointed Montini out to a friend and remarked: “I like that tense young man.” Pacelli watched and nourished Montini’s career, and in 1937 appointed him Substitute Secretary of State for Ordinary Affairs. Montini admired his lean, ascetic superior and worked endless, selfless hours for him. Yet, says one layman who knows Montini well, “he suffered strongly under Pius XII’s authority. It was a sort of father-son relationship, and it created complexes in the son. He was never liberated by the father. I saw him cry once out of frustration at something Pius was doing.”

In 1952, the Pope elevated Montini to the rank of Pro-Secretary of State for Ordinary Affairs. His opposite number was the older, more experienced Monsignor Domenico Tardini, who functioned as the Pro-Secretary for Extraordinary Affairs. In the division of Secretariat work, Montini handled the internal affairs of the church, Tardini the negotiations with diplomats accredited to the Holy See. In Rome, however, it soon became known that Montini was really the man to see on papal business. During Pius’ bouts with illness, Montini passed along the Pope’s orders to the Curia—a situation that did the young priest no good in the eyes of certain veteran cardinals.

Marked for Destiny. Eventually, the warm relationship between Pius XII and Montini became somewhat strained. One reason, apparently, was their differing views of Italian politics: Montini at the time favored a Christian Democratic opening to the left; Pius did not. Certainly Pius did hear Vatican whispers, spread by Montini’s Curial enemies, that the Pro-Secretary was “disloyal” to the Pope—and perhaps Pius believed them.

The new and cooler relationship between Pope and Pro-Secretary was apparent in 1953, when neither Montini nor Tardini was among the new cardinals named by Pius. The Pope explained that both men had turned down the offer; it was not quite that simple. Pius had first offered a cardinal’s hat to Tardini, who refused it, perhaps because he had divined the Pope’s true wishes, perhaps to checkmate his rival, Montini. Since Tardini had refused, Montini could only answer no. Then, a year later, Pius announced.that Montini would become Archbishop of Milan, a post that traditionally carries with it a cardinalate.

Pius let Montini go without the expected red hat, but not without a moment of touching sentiment. Recalls the former French Ambassador to the Vatican, who was present at Montini’s consecration in St. Peter’s: “At one point in the ceremony, during a moment of absolute silence, a feeble voice was heard. It seemed to come from the heavens. From his sickbed, Pius XII was addressing a few words to his well-beloved son, who was becoming his brother in the episcopate. I have always thought that on that day, Pope Pius XII marked the destiny of Monsignor Montini.”

“Strongly, Divinely.” When Montini journeyed northward by train toward Milan, with a black shawl over his knees and his personal possessions crammed into a borrowed suitcase, he had never been so much as a parish priest, and yet he was taking charge of Italy’s most populous diocese. To the surprise of the city, the quiet Vatican diplomat became a pastoral whirlwind. He visited Milan’s Communist districts, calmly asked for workers’ suggestions as to where they would like their new church built. Greeted with jeers and catcalls, he would advance with a sad smile on his pale face, hand half outstretched. Again and again, even lifelong Communists would find themselves kneeling to kiss the episcopal ring. He befriended Milan’s business community, yet he was also known as “the workers’ archbishop.” On his visits to factories, mines and office buildings, he always carried a portable Mass-kit in a briefcase—looking so much like a banker that Milanese irreverently dubbed him “Jesus Christ’s board chairman.”

To Montini, the church’s task was to convert Communists, not combat them —and the weapons of conversion were spiritual. He invited Franciscan and Jesuit preachers to conduct Billy Graham-style crusades on Milan’s streets, and in a city with more than 1,000 churches, added at least ten each year —primarily in the new suburbs. For Montini, the missionary task was to conquer through Christian love those “unhappy ones who gather behind Marx,” to reassure them that, as Jesus “still loves them strongly, immensely, divinely,” so the church supports “the profound need for a new and worthwhile life that is hidden in their souls.”

The Sacred Purple. One of John XXIII’s first acts as Pope was to call a consistory—and the name of Giovanni Montini led the list of new cardinals. A disciple of Pius, Montini became a close friend of John’s—in France they called him “Le Dauphin de Jean”—and at the Pope’s suggestion, he again began to take an active part in the church’s diplomatic life. Among the foreign dignitaries he welcomed in Italy: France’s Charles de Gaulle, in 1959. Invited to the U.S. in 1960 to receive, along with Dwight Eisenhower, an honorary degree at Notre Dame, he assured American bishops that a L’Osservatore Romano editorial on the church’s right to guide Catholic political thinking had no application to the fortunes of Presidential Candidate John F. Kennedy (whom he did not meet). Afterward, he visited South America, and last year he made a three-week visit to Africa, reporting back to Pope John on the church’s problems in the Dark Continent.

Ironically, for all his diplomatic savvy, Montini was also responsible last fall for one of the classic blunders in modern church history. Acting on bad advice from Milanese students, he sent a wire to Dictator Francisco Franco, protesting a death sentence that had been meted out to a young Spaniard. Franco cabled back, noting that Montini’s telegram had been released to the press before it had reached Madrid, and that the sentence had been imprisonment, not death. The Generalissimo’s message icily concluded: “I respectfully kiss the sacred purple.”

Where Wisdom Leads. Pope John took a more than usual interest in Montini’s fortunes, and showered attention on him. Montini reportedly had a hand in preparing the papal keynote speech that opened the Vatican Council. He was the only cardinal from outside Rome who was given a suite of rooms inside the Vatican for the duration of the first session. Just as John kept away from the debates, Montini kept his own silence at the council, speaking out only once to condemn the conservative schema on the nature and authority of bishops in the church. He was also asked to celebrate the Pontifical Mass commemo ating John’s fourth anniversary as Pope, and was the only non-Curia cardinal to see the Pope during his final illness.

Shortly after his election last week, Paul VI told an old friend from the Secretariat of State that he hoped to follow the example of his three immediate predecessors: “Pius XI for his strong will. Pius XII for his knowledge and wisdom. John XXIII for his limitless goodness.” There is no question of his willingness to pursue the course John took. At a funeral oration in Milan, he said: “Pope John has shown us some paths which it will be wise to follow. Death cannot stifle the spirit which he so infused in our era. Can we turn away from paths so masterfully traced? It seems to me we cannot.”

Paul VI began following the path blazed by John with his very first actions as Pope. He renamed John’s old friend Amleto Cicognani as the Vatican’s Secretary of State, and Monsignor Angelo Dell’Acqua as Substitute Secretary. The new Pope descended to the grotto beneath St. Peter’s to pray by the side of his predecessor’s tomb. And in the spirit of John’s footloose ways, Paul VI left the Vatican the day after his election—to visit Spain’s ailing primate, Enrique Cardinal Pla y Deniel.

Even more John-like in spirit was Pope Paul’s first public address, delivered in Latin before the assembled cardinals in the Sistine Chapel. There he paid tribute to his predecessor and announced that his pontificate would be devoted to the completion of the great churchly tasks John began: the Vatican Council, the revision of canon law, “the prosecution of efforts, following the lines set by the great social encyclicals of our predecessors, for the consolidation of justice in civil, social and international life.”

Paul VI promised to continue John’s work for Christian unity: “The common aspiration to reintegrate the unity sorrowfully broken in the past will find in us an echo of fervent will and moving prayer.” And he would work also for peace—”a peace which is not only an absence of warlike rivalries and armed factions, but a reflection of the order wished by the Lord, creator and redeemer, a constructive and strong will for understanding and brotherhood, a clear-cut expression of good will, a never-ceasing desire of active concord, inspired by the true well-being of mankind, an unaffected love.”

Subtle & Strong. From his words and acts, it was clear that the new Pope had aperturismo—the sense of openness to the world. But Paul’s aperturismo would not be John’s. Angelo Roncalli was a warm and intuitive man, with a fatherly love of men rather than ideas. The new Pope, says one Spanish Catholic layman who has worked with him, “is a Gothic priest not only in physical appearance but in spiritual formation. He has a subtle intelligence and a strong hand.” Subtle, strong-handed Pope Paul VI will unquestionably differ from John in his stand on the great questions that face his church:

∙THEOLOGY. No theologian himself, John XXIII had an open mind about the work of such forward-looking Catholic thinkers as Tubingen’s Hans Küng and Innsbruck’s Karl Rahner; in his encyclicals he tried to find a new, less austere language of teaching that would speak to modern man. Montini, trained in the ways of scholastic thought, is more conservative by temperament, yet also seems to be tolerant toward the new. Through Augustin Cardinal Bea, he notified Scriptural scholars at the Pontifical Biblical Institute and Gregorian University that there would be no more arbitrary monita (warnings) issued by conservative theologians at the Holy Office.

>CHURCH ORGANIZATION. When Montini worked in the Vatican for Pius XII, reports one of his old associates, he wanted “to break up that closed club called the Curia.” Although potentially a strong, even authoritarian Pope, Paul VI will unquestionably move to internationalize the central administration of the church, probably will give the bishops at the second session of the Vatican Council the same free hand that John allowed. Paul VI is known to favor the extension of episcopal authority and to promote such internal church reforms as more vernacular in the Mass.

>CHURCH UNITY. In his first speech, Paul VI seemed to speak of Christian unity in terms that non-Catholics quite understandably deplore—as a return by them to the “paternal house” in Rome. Nonetheless, Paul may not have meant it to have an imperious tone. He is known to favor serious discussions of Christian union by Catholic, Protestant and Orthodox theologians, has made a favorable impression on the Protestant churchmen who have met him. One of his first acts as Pope was to discuss with Cardinal Bea, chief of the Vatican’s Secretariat for Promoting Christian Unity, the state of Catholic-Jewish relations.

>”OPENING TO THE EAST.” Most Students of Paul VI’s past record expect that he will be more cautious than John in promoting concord with Communism. “No cardinal is as open in this way as John was,” says one intimate. Montini clearly intends to gather as much advice from his prelate friends as possible. He spent the afternoon of his election conferring with Vienna’s Cardinal Konig, Pope John’s principal go-between in the negotiations to bring Cardinal Mindszenty to Rome. Twice so far the new Pope has conferred with Ukrainian Archbishop Slipyi, whose expert knowledge of Communism comes from 18 years of Soviet confinement. Rome does not expect a quick decision on whether Paul will follow this most controversial path charted by John. “When Montini starts speaking,” says one of Rome’s leading clerical editors, “it is first a laborious thing. Then he begins to warm up, and then all of a sudden he breaks into brilliant discourse.”

If a man with some of Pius’ capacity for discourse and some of John’s openness is what the Catholic Church needs, then the cardinals last week could hardly have chosen better. According to U.S. Jesuit Theologian John Courtney Murray, the symbol of Pope John’s brief reign might well be the question mark —a token of the new problems he uncovered and the puzzles he knew the church would have to learn how to solve. Paul VI, if all goes well, might end with a period as the sign of his reign: the symbol of answers found and given.

-*Missing were Quito’s ailing Carlos Maria de la Torre, 89, and Hungary’s Josef Mindszenty, 71, whose safe-conduct from the U.S. legation in Budapest is still pending. * The conclave that elected John XXIII in 1958 took three days; Pius XII was chosen in less than 24 hours.