This Day in Religious History (Pope Paul VI Dies)

August 6, 1978—While hearing Mass in bed at Castel Gandolfo, the papal summer residence, 80-year-old Pope Paul VI, weary of contending with the unrest that had flared up in the Roman Catholic Church after the great council he had guided into being and led, died of a sudden heart attack.

Yesterday, in a social hour at Catholic House at the Chautauqua Institution in upstate New York, I saw a teenage wearing a T-shirt saying, Humanae Vitae. The shirt startled me not simply because you expect to see a teenager wearing a shirt referring to a rock star or featuring an edgy one-liner, but because it referred to an encyclical that I would wager many, if not most, of the far more numerous middle-aged and elderly attendees believed to be fundamentally flawed.

The furor over Humanae Vitae (“On the Regulation of Birth”) after its release in July 1968 took something vital out of Paul, I believe. He had issued at least one, sometimes two, encyclicals since becoming Pope in 1963. Yet, though he lived another nine years after this seventh encyclical, it became so controversial (leading many to leave the church or to live in quiet denial of its conclusions) that he never released another. Far more self-doubting than either his predecessor, John XXIII, or his successor once removed, John Paul II, he undoubtedly felt a sense of once bitten, twice shy.

It’s a shame that Paul VI became known for a document that was so uncharacteristic of the rest of his papacy. There’s a lot of validity to the claim made for him in the subtitle of a fine, objective biography of him by Peter Hebblethwaite: “The First Modern Pope.” After all, he not only wrote several encyclicals and became the first of the globe-trotting popes, but he was instrumental a) in advising John XXIII throughout the first session of the Second Vatican Council, but b) was responsible for implementing its reforms after John’s death.

By refusing to separate contraception from abortion, Paul VI made it easy for critics of the Church to caricature all its teachings related to reproduction as driven by concerns over sex instead of over human life. By overruling his own commission on contraception, he seemed to be turning his back on the consultation and collegiality with bishops that had been the hallmark of his tenure until then.

Paul VI’s death was also significant became it inaugurated the series of events that made1978 “the year of the three popes.” I remember the shock that I and even non-Catholic fellow students at Columbia felt less than a month later when John Paul I also died. At least partly out of concern lest they be called back into session again, the College of Cardinals this time elected a far younger man, Karol Wotyla. And you’d better believe that John Paul II knew how to remind people of the train of events that led to his election. When somebody raised with him the expense of a new swimming pool at Castel Gandolfo, the new pope quipped that it was “cheaper than another conclave.”

As this last anecdote indicates, the athlete was as much a part of John Paul II’s makeup as the actor or, in his last two decades, the pilgrim. Paul VI, it seems to me, was far more comfortable with ambiguity and self-doubt. An Atlantic Monthly article from six years ago shows that Paul—at that time, only the Vatican’s pro-Secretary of State for ordinary affairs rather than the pontiff—wrote a letter of protest to a colleague that helped derail a censorship investigation by the Vatican’s so-called Holy Office into Graham Greene’s novel The Power and the Glory. Years later, when he granted an audience to the novelist, a Catholic convert, Paul smiled and said, “Mr. Greene, some parts of your book are certain to offend some Catholics, but you should pay no attention to that."

A quarter century after the Holy Office had investigated the book for heretical leanings, The Power and the Glory was on the reading list for an honors English class at my high school, St. Cecilia, in Englewood, N.J. I suspect that my teacher, Sister Marie Harold, knew, like Paul VI, that the intent of the novel was not in the slightest to bring the faith or its teachings into disrepute. Rather, it was about a man caught on a wheel of fire, unable to lay down his burdens despite sensing that he was not strong or worthy enough to serve God as well as he should have. It was a message that this most Hamlet-like of popes understood all too readily.