From John to Paul – the solitude of succession
The dramatic events of 60 years ago, when the death of Pope John XXIII in June 1963 was followed by a conclave in which the work of the Second Vatican Council hung in the balance, were chronicled by the journalist and church historian Peter Hebblethwaite. His wife, the writer and theologian Margaret Hebblethwaite, has edited his account and added her own reflections.
Sixty years ago this month, on 3 June, John XXIII died. On 21 June Paul VI was elected as his successor. Pope John’s papacy had been a short one, less than five years, but it decisively changed the Church in a way that cannot be undone. The metaphor that he opened the windows of the Vatican and allowed the wind of the Holy Spirit to blow the cobwebs away is well known. He made simple but eloquent gestures of friendship to those that the Church had traditionally regarded as opponents. Most importantly, he opened the Second Vatican Council in October 1962, and gave it free rein, so that it would bring aggiornamento to the Church, “bringing it up to date”.
John by this time was dying of cancer, and lived only for the first session, but the Council took over his work under Paul VI and carried it forward. One of the greatest tributes to how much John had changed the Church was paid by the conservative cardinal Giuseppe Siri. “It will take the Church four centuries to recover from Pope John’s pontificate”, he said. John XXIII’s encyclical letter Pacem in Terris (Peace on Earth) made a powerful impact on public opinion. In his biography John XXIII: Pope of the Council (1984) my husband, the late Peter Hebblethwaite, writes that its originality could be put this way: whereas in the nineteenth century the Church defended its own institutional rights against a state perceived to be hostile, Pacem in Terris gave priority to the rights of individual human persons, and spoke up on behalf of minorities and refugees. Pope John gave a positive evaluation of three features of the modern age because he believed them to be “signs of the times”: improvement in the conditions of working men; the part that women were now playing in political life; and imperialism becoming an anachronism.
It would be idle to pretend that the Church had single-handedly promoted the social advance of the working class or feminine emancipation or decolonisation. So the Church had to admit that sometimes the “world” was ahead and could teach the Church lessons. Traditionalist and ultra-conservative Catholics rejected the teaching of Pacem in Terris. But the Vatican II pastoral constitution on the Church in the modern world, Gaudium et Spes, adopted Pope John’s “signs of the times” approach explicitly. Pacem in Terris became Pope John’s last will and testament. In his biography, Peter writes that John signed the first five copies in his private library before the television lights on the Tuesday of Holy Week 1963, wearing a stole to indicate that this was a religious event. On Maundy Thursday he talked about the encyclical to the diplomatic corps and, through the pain he was then in, his words reached a new level of simplicity: “What I wanted to do above all was to issue an appeal to love for the people of this time. Let us recognise the common origin that makes us brothers, and come together!”
On Easter Sunday he struggled to his window at noon and said: “The Easter message is full of light – not death but life, not conflict but peace.” In May he received a message from President John F. Kennedy: “The US administration deplores and regards as unfounded the insinuations made in the press and in certain political circles.” He was referring to the charge that Pope John was a naïve dupe of the Communists. When he was told on 31 May that “the time has come. The Lord calls you,” John said: “I’m sure the sacred college will provide for the succession without any difficulty, and I’m sure the bishops will bring the Council to a happy conclusion.” He added, “In my opinion, my successor will be Montini.”
Among the final messages he received as he was dying was one from Nikita Khrushchev, the Russian leader, and one from another atheist: “In so far as an atheist can pray, I’m praying for you.” Throughout the night of 2 June, Pentecost Sunday, there were 20,000 people in the cathedral of Milan praying for the Council and for the Pope, and their Cardinal Archbishop Giovanni Battista Montini told them that they needed to “gather up his inheritance and his final message of peace …Perhaps never before in our time has a human word – the word of a master, a leader, a prophet, a pope – rung out so loudly and won such affection throughout the whole world.” At 3 a.m. John woke and said twice, with great emphasis, “Lord, you know that I love you.” That evening his breathing became faint and stopped, and his brow was ritually tapped to verify that he was dead.
I now take up the story from Paul VI: The First Modern Pope, which Peter published nine years after his biography of Pope John. Fifty-one cardinals had assembled in October 1958 for the conclave that elected Angelo Giuseppe Roncalli. Due to his broadening of the college, by June 1963 there were 81 eligible to vote, including 12 from Latin America, seven from North America, three from Asia, two from Oceania and one from Africa. Only 29 were Italian, including Montini. A few days before he left Milan for the conclave, Peter wrote a letter to Douglas Woodruff, the then editor of The Tablet, with whom he had been in regular postcard contact since the war, vigorously supporting the latter’s article in defence of Pius XII against the charge that he had been inactive on behalf of the Jews against Nazi persecution. It reached The Tablet office an hour after the news that Montini had been elected and was published in the edition that reported his election. In his last sermon in Milan, Montini had preached on Jesus’ words to Peter: “When you are old you will stretch out your hands and another will gird you and carry you where you do not wish to go” (John 21.18). He was reportedly in tears.
Although Montini was considered papabile, Peter wrote that the outcome of the conclave was by no means certain. The Anglican representative to the Vatican, Canon Bernard Pawley, thought that Montini’s chances of election had declined because “in the present state of tension” between pro- and anti-conciliar factions, “they will have to agree on a ‘third man’,” probably “the colourless Confalonieri”. The first three ballots were inconclusive, with votes split between two pro-conciliar cardinals – Montini slightly ahead of Giacomo Lercaro – and an anti-conciliar candidate. But then something untoward happened. Cardinal Gustavo Testa, a close friend of Pope John, lost his temper and told his neighbours, in a voice loud enough to be heard by others, that they should stop their squalid manoeuvring and think of the good of the Church. Testa’s words were understood as a plea to stop plotting against Montini, who had the best chance of the three of being elected and who Testa was – somewhat reluctantly – backing. The rules had been broken: no discussion was allowed in the Sistine Chapel during a conclave. Reportedly, Cardinal Siri “hit the ceiling”, and the fourth ballot went ahead in the accustomed religious silence. It took three more ballots for Montini to inch forward to the two-thirds majority needed. Pawley took a bottle of champagne along to the Secretariat for Christian Unity.
But Montini was not destined to enjoy being Pope. Six weeks later, on 5 August 1963, he wrote in a private note, “The post is unique. It brings great solitude. I was solitary before, but now my solitariness becomes complete and awesome … Like a statue on a plinth – that is how I live now. Jesus was alone on the cross … The consolation of confiding in others will be rare and discreet.” At the launch of his biography of Paul VI in 1993, Peter – who was to die the following year – spoke of the many possible readings there could be of Paul’s pontificate. You could have a Benedictine reading, for Montini’s first idea was to be a monk, and from Benedict he got his habit of listening. You could have a feminist reading, because he began to put women on the road to Rome. You could have a Latin American reading, which would stress his liberating presence at the bishops’ meeting of Medellin, where he said he would approve what they decided in advance. Or an African reading, which would recall his words in Kampala: “You can, and must, have an African Christianity.” You could have a Muslim reading too: few people know that he had belonged to a group which prayed together on Friday evenings in the spirit of the Qur’an.
Paul established important new foundations such as the Commission for Justice and Peace, the Secretariats for Non-Believers and for Non-Christians. He also founded the International Theological Commission and the Synod of Bishops. The achievements of his 15-year papacy can be overlooked amid the abuse he received for Humanae Vitae, his 1968 encyclical on birth control. He was seen as the ignorant, prudish old maid who had not the faintest idea what he was talking about and had no business in the bedrooms of the liberal bourgeoisie. His confessor, Paolo Dezza, said: “If he was not a saint when he was elected Pope, he became one during his pontificate.” My own view is that Paul VI was not only the best qualified man for the job at that time; he was also a holy man. I was convinced of that when I saw him at audiences – both at a large one in St Peter’s when he was carried on the sedia gestatoria and seemed desperate to get down and meet people, and in the small private audience of some five minutes my family had with him. It came about because my father had edited a book about St Peter’s, but he seemed so genuinely interested in us. In the end perhaps that is what matters most – when you can love and respect the head of your Church despite the disagreements.
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