APOSTLE FOR OUR TIME POPE PAUL VI

92 P3243c 67-62443

Clancy

Apostle for our time, Pope Paul

VI

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APOSTLE FOR OUR TIME
POPE PAUL VI

APOSTLE FOR OUR TIME POPE PAUL VI

by

Jok G.Clancy

P. J. KENEDY & SONS
NEW YORK

Copyright 1963 by John G. Clancy, S.T.L., J.C.D.
All right reserved. This book, or parts thereof, may not be reproduced
in any form without permission in writing from the publisher, except
for brief excerpts for review purposes.

Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: 63-21413
Manufactured in the United States of America

Nihil obstat: REV. CHARLES K. VON Euw, S.T.L., S.E.O.D.
Censor Librorum

Imprimatur: RICHARD CARDINAL GUSHING
Archbishop of Boston

Brighton, Massachusetts, September 13, 1963

The nihil obstat and imprimatur are official declarations that a book
or pamphlet is free of doctrinal or moral error. No implication is con
tained therein that those who have granted the nihil obstat and im
primatur agree with the contents, opinions or statements expressed.

To my Mother and Father
and in memory of Anne

6762443

JUL16

1954

"We will love those who are near and those far
from us. We will love our own country, and we will
love that of others. We will love our friends, we
will love our enemies. We will love Catholics, we will
love the dissidents, the Protestants, the Anglicans,
the indifferent, the Mohammedans, the pagans, the
atheists. We will love all social classes, but especially
those most in need of help, of assistance, of advance
ment. We will love children and we will love the old,
the poor and the sick. We will love those who mock
us, who scorn us, who oppose us, who persecute us.
We will love those who merit and those who do not
merit to be loved. We will love our opponents: we
will want no man to be our enemy. We will love the
time in which we live: our culture, our science, our
art, our sport, our world. We will love, striving to
understand, to have sympathy, to admire, to serve,
and to suffer. We will love with the heart of Christ:
Come to me, all of you , . ."

WORDS OF POPE PAXJI, VI

Foreword

fn the long history of the Church no papal election has at
tracted the interest and attention of the whole world as did
that which brought John Baptist Montini to the Chair of Peter.
It seemed as if the entire world held its breath and waited and
watched with the silent crowd keeping vigil in the square of
St. Peter while the man who was to succeed good Pope John
was chosen.

We cardinals, who by tradition and law have the solemn ob
ligation of selecting the man who will be Peter in the Church
of his day, were well aware as we entered the conclave not only
of the grave responsibility that was ours but also that the eyes of
the world were focused upon us. It was ours to choose the
man capable of assuming the leadership of the Church of Christ
here on earth an awesome responsibility. But the one we
would elect must be the man who could continue the monu
mental work begun by John XXIII; who must be what John
was to the world. The Holy Spirit showed us the choice and di
rected our vote. We have a Pope; he has taken the name of
Paul.

But if the Church sounded a shout of joy at this announce
ment; if the Christian world breathed a happy sigh of expect-

vii

Viii APOSTLE FOR OUR. TIME

ancy; if the whole globe approved of this election, there were
still the questions on the lips of many. "What is he really like?"
"What kind of a person is this Pope Paul?" If we know his past
life and work, we can tell something of our future. Indeed, a
knowledge of the life of John Baptist Montini his youth, his
priesthood, his service in the Church and his devotion to Christ
reveals that here truly God has raised up in His Church a
great man, a holy and able man, a man whose whole life seems
in the plan of Providence to have been a preparation for this
critical task in an age of crisis.

One thing which strikes me about our new Pope is this: he
is a man of the twentieth century, a priest of the modern world,
a Pope for our time. His middle-class family background pre
sents almost a familiar scene to us Americans: his father a
journalist and active in politics; his mother a quiet woman of
firm faith. In the words of Monsignor Clancy, "there seems to
have been a Christian rhythm to the lives of the Montinis which
... in the example of his mother and father profoundly in
fluenced young Giovanni Battista."

And his early priesthood, so much of it dedicated to assisting
idealistic and disillusioned youth of the university to discover
the Christ-centeredness of the world, strikes a sympathetic note
here in our society. The great pontiff of happy memory, Pope
Pius XII, whom Monsignor Montini served so faithfully with
Christlike self-effacement, said of his pro-Secretary of State:
He possesses every priestly quality in the highest degree. His
years of service in the Secretariat of State gave him valuable
experience in administration and diplomacy, to be sure. But in
the midst of those duties which can tend to be so routine, so
impersonal, Monsignor Montini never lost sight of his priestly
vocation and its divine purpose cura animarum, the care of
souls.

Two pictures stand out in my memory which for me charac
terize the man whom our Lord has chosen to be His Vicar and

FOREWORD IX

our servant: the deep concern on Monsignor Montini's face
as he stood with Pius XII amid the wounded of Rome who
had been injured by an Allied bombing; the new Archbishop
kneeling and kissing the ground of his diocese as he entered
Milan. These reveal a man who is warm, who is compassion
ate, who feels the anguish of our anguished world.

As Archbishop of Milan he electrified that city with a plan
and program of evangelization which revealed a man who knew
the twentieth century, who knew the problems of twentieth
century men. He soon became known with affection as "the
Archbishop of the workers." His personal charity, his quiet ex
ample, his tireless energy reflected the zeal and life of the apos
tle whose name he was to take as Bishop of Rome. The full
part which Cardinal Montini played in the preparations for
Pope John's Council of Renewal cannot yet be told. Suffice to
say that his was the first voice raised in praising the vision of
Pope John, in delineating the path of renewal we must follow.
"Reform," he said, "has been through the centuries the renew
ing ferment of Catholic tradition." His immediate decision
following his election to continue the Council without post
ponement gave joy and hope to the whole Christian world.

Speaking to his people of Milan about the then forthcoming
Council, Cardinal Montini proclaimed, "Something of the
prophetic is abroad in our times." These are words which
can be most aptly applied to the man who has taken the name
of Paul as he succeeds to the cathedra of Peter. In Pope Paul
VI we can indeed see with awe that something of the prophetic
is abroad in our times.

We have a Pope, whose name is Paul. And in him we have,
as Monsignor John Clancy has so appropriately entitled his
splendid biography, "an apostle for our time." Monsignor
Clancy has performed an admirable service in giving us this
excellent and timely life of John Baptist Montini. I commend
his work highly, not only for the valuable biographical matter

X APOSTLE FOR OUR TIME

he has gathered but for the meaningful insights he discloses as
he presents this apostolic life of our Holy Father. By knowing
the past of Pope Paul we can predict with joyful enthusiasm,
our future.

RICHARD CARDINAL GUSHING
Archbishop of Boston

Contents

Foreword by Richard Cardinal Gushing vii

Author's Preface xiii

1 The Home in Brescia 1

2 "Don Battista" 18

3 Vatican Beginnings 46

4 "Cloister of Ciphers and Secrets" 68

5 "And So I Came to Milan" 86

6 Mission to Milan 113

7 Portrait of a Cardinal 130

8 Sede Vacante 154

xi

Xll APOSTLE FOR OUR TIME

9 Successor to Peter Successor to John 183

10 The Pauline Pontificate 204

Appendix 233

Index 235

Author's Preface

He has always been considered young and yet he is sixty-six
years old. He became a priest without ever having lived in a
seminary, an archbishop without ever having been a parish
priest. While still a priest he refused to be a cardinal, and in
1958, still not a cardinal, he was considered papabile. He was
close to Pope Pius XH for long years marked by extraordinary
devotion and intimacy, and yet in 1954, with the Pope aging
and ill, he was named Archbishop of Milan and left the Vati
can. He has been called a progressive intemperately, by some,
a revolutionary and yet during Vatican Council n his was a
muted voice, speaking only infrequently, and then words of
calm moderation.

More often spoken of as a skilled diplomat than priest,
and as lacking in human warmth and concern, his eight years
as the loving and beloved archbishop of Milan far overshad
owed the more spectacular thirty years of Vatican diplomacy.
Called to the Vatican by the stern and conservative Pope Pius
XI, formed by the great but exigent Pius XII, then raised to
the cardinalate by the cheerful destroyer of no longer viable
traditions, Pope John XXm, John Baptist Montini, now
reigning as Paul VI, possesses a vast and somewhat puzzling

xm

XIV APOSTLE FOR OUR TIME

experience of the Church, her people, and of the world. It is
an experience shaped and personalized by the extraordinary
complex of qualities which distinguish him brilliantly diffuse,
and of dimensions which defy easy categorization.

There is, in this attempt to tell his life, a beginning to be
made, an apology and explanation to accompany it. This is the
life of Paul VI as it has been led until his accession to the papal
throne, and an account of the first days of his pontificate. Most
of the facts presently available are here, something of the
nuance of his life, some hints, some shadow a beginning.

Four months after his election we are still on the threshhold
of his pontificate. To anticipate it is foolhardy. Yet there are
signs and portents in Pope Paul's sixty-six years which the
world may read and ponder as it offers him its hopes and its
love in his first days on the throne of Peter. A Brescian by
birth, a Roman by career, a Milanese by adoption, and now
Pope to the world to His Holiness, Paul VI, this book is
offered in loving and devoted remembrance.

JOHN G. CLANCY

Rome

New York Feast of Saint Augustine

APOSTLE FOR OUR TIME
POPE PAUL VI

1. The Home in Brescia

Half hidden by ancient plane trees, the stone of its facade
bleached and weathered, the parish church of Concesio, dedi
cated to Saint Anthony, bears the scars of age and of succes
sive remodeling with a dignity which befits a church of its
antiquity. First built in the late 1600's, it is a church in the
baroque style which replaces one that was new in the days
when Alexander VI was Pope, when the discovery of the
new Indies by Columbus was news at the court of Spain, and
when the plains of Lombardy, in which the village of Con
cesio lies, were periodically ravaged by war and plundered by
fierce condottieri, mercenaries under arms to warring states
and nobles, living off the land and the people.

Concesio itself, at the entrance to the valley of Trompia in
the foothills of the Italian Alps, has drowsed through the cen
turies, remaining a small center of the rich farming country
which surrounds it, while seven miles away the city of
Brescia has grown out to reach and almost engulf it. Today
the village shares in the general prosperity of northern Italy,
and under the impact of growing industrialization is losing
much of the appearance and mood which characterized it at
the beginning of the century. Then it still possessed the quiet

1

2 APOSTLE FOR OUR TIME

freshness and pace which drew well-to-do Brescians out of
the city from time to time to live in their country houses.
These homes still stand in the old quarter of Concesio, eight
eenth-century in style, most of them two stories high and built
around a courtyard brilliant with flowers and showing a dis
creet face to the street. The windows are shuttered, the huge
outer doors closed, the only touch of life the geraniums flow
ering on the wrought-iron balconies over the entry ways.

A modest village Concesio, and yet with a certain pride of
place. It has given four bishops to the Church: Count Fran
cesco Landrone, born in 1600; Count Sebastian Lodrone, in
1643; Giovanni Battista Bosio, former archbishop of Chieti,
in 1892; and in 1897, on September 26, Giovanni Battista
Montini. The last on this list, the second son born to Giorgio
and Giuditta Alghisi Montini, today sits in the seat of Peter
as Pope Paul VI, the 262nd successor of the Prince of the
Apostles.

The Montini family, while not of the nobilita blasonata,
that is, of the high nobility, with armorial bearings, was an
cient and respected, members in those waning years of the
nineteenth century of the highly selective Brescian elite, pro
fessional, intellectual, profoundly Catholic. In their begin
nings they had belonged to the lesser nobility which in the
fifteenth century, as the feudal and military castes began their
decline, slowly emerged into provincial prominence.

Giorgio Montini, born in 1860, was a ruggedly handsome
man of average height, the head high-domed and narrow, the
ears slightly prominent, the eyes steady and clear above the
aquiline nose and carefully trimmed mustache. He dressed
meticulously, even elegantly, and was distinguished as a
young man for his courtly and reserved manner. In his thirty-
seventh year, at the time of his son's birth, he was comfortably
established financially and free to pursue his passion for ideas,
for politics, and for journalism. Although he had studied law

THE HOME IN BRESCIA 3

at the University of Padua, he chose not to practice. He was
an untiring initiator. He shared in the founding of the La
Scuola Publishing Union, of the San Paolo Bank of Brescia,
of the Morcelliana publishing house. Later in life he was to
receive from Pope Benedict XV the leadership of the Catholic
Electoral Union of Italy one of the spearheads of Catholic
Action in the country, and he was to be its last president.

Thus he stood at the very center of the cultural and eco
nomic life of the city of Brescia, called the most Catholic in
Italy, and the Montini home was alive with the ferment of so
cial and political and cultural ideas which possessed the
Catholic Italian intellectuals at the beginning of the century.
To it came some of the most significant figures of the time
Bazoli, Longinotti, Tovini, Murri. These are names which
symbolized the struggle of fervent men to articulate on a po
litical level their commitment to Christian principles in gov
ernment, at a time in Italy of vast religious indifference and
hostility to religion on the part of its political leaders, of
anticlericalism, and all the other dreary baggage which ac
companies assault on religion and its estrangement from
public life.

With the fall of the Papal States in 1870, Pius DCs answer
to the usurping House of Savoy was the non expedit, an advice
to Catholics to abstain from presenting themselves as candi
dates for political office or from voting, acts which would im
ply a recognition of the occupation of Rome and of the in
fringement of papal rights. For nearly half a century, from
1870 to 1919, the non expedit would keep the men most
capable of counteracting the atmosphere of secularism from
taking part in the government of their country. The vacuum
was filled, in part, by Catholic Action in the religious and so
cial spheres, but there were those who felt that there should
be men in government to give witness to Christian principles.

The great political challenge of the day for Catholics was

4 APOSTLE FOR OUR TIME

breaking through the isolation from national life which fol
lowed on the occupation of Rome, leaving them living mar
ginal lives as Italians in order to protest an injustice as Catho
lics. Giorgio Montini succeeded in creating in his area an
understanding with the moderate wing of the liberals of the day.
He fought the famous Zanardelli and the Socialists with all his
vigor, thus helping to create the basis for the Popular Party
to whose formation he, together with Don Luigi Sturzo, made
a notable contribution.

Sturzo, another giant of the period, was slight, ascetic,
soft-spoken, but with a dynamism which bespoke his total
conviction. He was bom on November 26, 1871, in Calta-
girone, a town of central Sicily. After his ordination as a
priest, he pursued graduate studies at the Pontifical Gregorian
University in Rome and returned to the Caltagirone seminary
to teach philosophy and sociology. As deputy mayor and then
mayor of Caltagirone, Don Sturzo gained experience in civic
affairs and a knowledge of the needs of the people. His idea
for a preponderantly Catholic political party did not win the
support of many members of Italy's Catholic hierarchy, but
he persisted stubbornly. Out of his brilliance and persist
ence was to come the Popular Party, formed in 1919, after the
First World War, when Benedict XV withdrew the non ex-
pedit. As a member from Brescia, Giorgio Montini was to
represent the Popular Party in three legislatures of the king
dom, from 1919 until 1926. When the Popular Party divided
on the question of supporting Fascism, the clerical moderates
went over to the side of Mussolini, but Giorgio Montini was
not among them. He continued to support in Parliament
the party's original principles, although he saw his friend
Don Sturzo, stricken and ill, begin his lonely exile in England
and then in the United States. In 1926 the Popular Party was
suppressed by Mussolini, and Montini retired to Brescia, con-

THE HOME IN BRESCIA 5

tinuing to write and speak about freedom while he saw his
country slip more deeply into Fascism.

In a long letter to a friend, written in 1940, he stated: "For
a long period of years I was counselor of the commune and a
member of other public administrations and Catholic proj
ects; for twenty-five years provincial counselor; from 1913 to
1920, assessor of the commune of Brescia. In 1917, I could
not refuse, because the offer came from the highest authority
[the Pope], the presidency of the electoral union of Italian
Catholics, one of the large components then constituting
Catholic Action, but it was not a position suited to my
talents, nor could I divide my time between Rome and Brescia
where there were other obligations to fulfil; thus I resigned
in 1918. In 1919 I was elected to the Chamber, and I re
mained there for three legislatures, without praise, but then,
too, without blame."

With the defeat of Italy in the Second World War and its
decision to become a republic, the Popular Party, seemingly
so long dead, rose from the grave in 1944. In the general elec
tion of 1948 and under the leadership of Alcide De Gasperi,
it was given a mandate, under its new name of Christian
Democratic Party, to lead Italy into the brilliant recovery of
its postwar years. Don Luigi Sturzo returned from exile and
resided in Rome as the elder statesman, honored and con
sulted by Christian Democratic leaders until his death in 1959.
But Giorgio Montini did not live to see this victory. He died
in the war-troubled year of 1943, after a life of contribution
to a future he would not witness.

Perhaps his greatest role was played as a journalist. For
thirty-one years (1881-1912) he was publisher and editor of
the Brescian daily // Cittadino, He was only twenty-one when
Giuseppe Tovini, a lawyer and a pioneer in Catholic Action in
Brescia, called him from the University of Padua to this post.

6 APOSTLE FOR OUR TIME

Under Giorgio Montini's direction the daily was a paper both
of information and formation, courageous and progressive in
its defense of Catholic teachings during the many years of
his association with it, long afterward to retain the impress
he made upon it. 1 The Germans, during their occupation of
Italy during the Second World War, were outraged at // Cit-
tadino's insistence on freedom and justice, and silenced it.
But from one of its old issues, that of March 28, 1909, there
comes alive the spirit of the man who was father to Paul VI.

Addressed by Giorgio Montini to Catholics who were wary
of any alliance with the liberal ideas of the day, these words
have a crackle and thrust which is almost startling: "You have
the air of men who, having slept for thirty years, awaken sud
denly and believe yourselves to be the ultimate expression of
modernity. You fell asleep in 1880, in days when Catholics
were without organization, without strength, distrustful of
themselves, trampled by their adversaries. And since you have
been asleep, you have not seen your fellows rise day by day
from their abject situation, animated by a great faith, jealous
of their rights . . . determined to recapture completely their
civil identity, proud of their renewed energies and of the new
social duties to which a great responsiblity and inspired voice
calls them. Something else you have forgotten: Forty years
ago you fell asleep with political formulas which could inspire
a people with enthusiasm for their political potential . . .
but now these people prefer the advance of a social program
to sterile political ideas. . . . With Catholic social action we
have been able to advance a complete system of ideas and of
healing and progressive work. . . . You continue to sleep!"

Long years after these words were written, just one week
after being raised to the Papacy, Giorgio Montini's son, Gio-

1 Count Sforza once made the statement that the most deadly ene
mies of the Italians are nationalistic vanity and literary overemphasis.
Giorgio Montini suffered from neither malady nor did his newspaper.

THE HOME IN BRESCIA 7

vanni Battista, was to speak of his father, the journalist, to the
newspaper men and women of the world gathered in Rome to
cover the conclave which had elected the new Pope: "Should
We be required to say what consciousness of his profession
animated him, We believe that, without being swayed by af
fection, We could outline the profile of a person who con
sidered the press a splendid and courageous mission in the
service of truth, of democracy, of progress; in a word, of pub
lic welfare. But We refer simply to this fact not to give praise
to that most worthy man who was so very dear to Us, but to
tell you gentlemen of the press how Our mind has an inclina
tion to sympathy, esteem and confidence for what you are
and what you do. We can almost say that Our family educa
tion makes Us one of you! That it makes you colleagues and
friends!"

As the journalists broke into thunderous applause and the
Pope smiled in acknowledgment, one could almost sense his
nostalgia for those distant days when there had been a family
together in a home, a home in which the father was a journal
ist, with that compulsion which all good journalists share of
making people aware of their time and of their world. He
wanted his sons to live in their century, to embrace reality.
He taught them to be progressive; he gave them an interest in
social questions.

He had a profound influence on young Giovanni Battista.
The latter's gifts as an organizer, his involvement in social
questions, his charity., his intense interest in art and philoso
phy, his love of writing, his commitment to all the aspects of
modern life these were to come to him from his father, as in
his home he received the most modern of educations, free
from the narrowness and provincial flavor which character
ized so many homes in those years before the First World
War. Above all, it was a home in which the faith was strongly
lived. Three years before his death, Giorgio Montini was to

8 APOSTLE FOR OUR TIME

write: "In my long life I have assisted at the sunset of men, of
parties, of ideologies which appeared indestructible. But one
thing with my eyes I have seen overcome the times and the
tempests: this rock on which I stand my faith which I have
always sustained. It consoles me indescribably, and in this
vision I prepare for the inevitable sunset of my life. . . ." 2

The wife of Giorgio Montini, Giuditta Alghisi, was a
fragile, shy woman, born of an excellent family of the lesser
nobility, in Verolovecchia and educated in Milan by the Suore
Marcelline. At the time of her second son's birth (Ludovico
had been born in 1896), she still had the clear, unlined com
plexion of a schoolgirl; pictures show her hair worn in the
pompadour fashion of the day, a high-collared dress making
her face appear somewhat plump, eyes heavy-browed, lips
full and gently curved. She was a perfect counterpoint to her
husband, restrained where he was impetuous, light and sooth
ing where he tended to be heavy, calming him when he ex
ploded with indignation over some pettiness or injustice. She
shared his sense of commitment to the world in which they
lived and was devoutly religious. A leader of the Catholic
women of Brescia, she was not content as were so many in
those days to keep to the house in a kind of elegant and
christianized purdah. She is still remembered for her gener
osity to the poor.

Her interest in public affairs was as wide as her husband's
and as her sons' was later to be. Ludovico would become a
member of Parliament, and her third and last son, Francesco,
a doctor and a leader in the resistance movement during the
Second World War. The second son especially was to become
a balanced blend of the qualities possessed by his two parents.
He would be influenced, too, by what he saw and remem
bered of the life in their home in Brescia, filled, it always
seemed, with the vital and intelligent leaders of the city and

2 Letter to Dr. Comotti, March 13, 1940.

THE HOME IN BRESCIA 9

the province someone always underfoot, ready to argue,
and to laugh, at the house on the Via delle Grazie. It was no
wonder that Giuditta Montini, in anticipation of the birth of
her second son, determined to seek the peace of the country
house in Concesio, so that her baby might be born away
from the noise and excitement of the city.

The house in Concesio where Giovanni Battista was born
still stands, at Via Vantini No. 14 (then No. 16) and it is
largely unchanged. There is the same courtyard, green with
plants and ivy, the shed for the farm equipment, the coach
house. The section of the house once occupied by the family,
the noble wing, passed by inheritance years ago to a cousin of
the Pope, the engineer Vittorio, and he occupies it today, to
gether with his family, during the summer months. The serv
ants' wing and the section occupied by those who worked the
Montini property is now rented by six families. The rooms of
the house are large and austere, without frivolity, the furni
ture old and massive. The walls with their pictures of saints,
the library filled with religious books, are an evidence of the
atmosphere of the Montini home.

Four days after their baby was born, Giorgio and Giuditta
Montini climbed into their carriage and rode to the parish
church to have the infant baptized. It was the 30th of Sep
tember, 1897. "It was on that day that I was really born,"
Giovanni Battista was to say later. He was the fiftieth child to
be born that year in Concesio, and the pastor, Giovanni
Fiorini, writing in his rural hand which made the r's appear
like v's, entered the information in the baptismal records of
the Church of San Antonio, on page 51, under date of Sep
tember 30, 1897: "Giovanni Battista Enrico Antonio Maria
Montini, son of Dr. Giorgio and Giuditta Alghisi, born on
the 26th at 10 P.M., was today baptized by me, Giovanni
Fiorini, Archpriest. The godfather, the Cavaliere Enrico de

10 APOSTLE FOR OUR TIME

Manzoni of Brescia." This name of Giovanni Battista the
child would bear until, sixty-six years later, he himself as
Pope would choose the name of Paul. After his election he
would hear his own name no more, nor would he again be
addressed by it until after his death, the Cardinal Dean
would bend over the bed on which he lay and softly caU
"Giovanni Battista." There would be no answer and truly
the Pope would be dead. . . .

From the first days of the new baby's life the parents were
concerned about him. He was small at birth, and he did not
respond as expected to the care and love showered on him.
The doctors decided, after the Italian fashion, that a change
of air might do him good. Following the custom of the time
among the upper classes, the infant was brought a few days
after his baptism to a wet-nurse, Clorinda Peretti, who lived
not far from Brescia in the town of Bovezzo, close enough
for the child to be frequently visited. Signora Peretti was a
strong, healthy woman with three children of her own
Margherita, Giovanni and Pietro the serene type of woman
who can always make room for one more by merely enlarging
the scope of her care and love. The child made progress
slowly, the young parents worried, and Giovanni Battista
lived through the first year of his life.

Margherita Peretti, Clorinda's daughter, remembers that
she and her brothers used to keep the baby company, and that
he was still with her mother in his thirteenth month. Shortly
afterward he was taken back to the house in Brescia, against
the doctor's advice but on the insistence of his mother. Never
theless, the next few years of his life found him still sickly,
and his mother, seeking a formula to make him well, shuttled
between Concesio, Bovezzo, and her own Verolovecchia,
where she had inherited the seventeenth-century family home.

A photograph of Giovanni Battista taken at the age of

THE HOME IN BRESCIA 11

three reveals enormous eyes dominating a rather peaked face,
solemn and innocent in this first encounter with a photog
rapher. He was plagued with frailty in these early years, and
this made his contacts with other children few and remote,
and had an important influence on the character of the sensi
tive, delicate child. He was never to forget his second family,
and as a cardinal he would visit Nina, as Clorinda was called,
when her troubles became overwhelming and she remem
bered the "piccolino" now a prince of the Church, who
might help her as she had helped him when he was fighting
for his life.

The early and adolescent years of Giovanni Battista were to
be unusual ones because of his health. On the 6th of June,
1907, he made his first holy Communion at the chapel of the
Sisters of Saint Mary the Child in Brescia; and on July 21 of
that year he was confirmed by Bishop Giacomo Pellegrini in
the chapel of the Jesuit Institute, Cesare Arid. This latter was
the finest school in Brescia, located not far from the Montini
home, on Via Trieste. Later to pass into the hands of the
diocesan clergy, who maintain it today, it had at that time the
high standards and demanding entrance requirements which
the Jesuits traditionally exact. When he was confirmed there,
young Montini, together with his brothers, was already en
rolled at the Cesare Arici in what in Italy is called the elemen
tary course, usually pursued from the age of six to ten, after
which the young student would enter the ginnasio for the
next period of his schooling, equivalent to our high school.
Giovanni Battista followed the courses at the Institute until
1914.

The Institute Cesare Arici had been started in 1882,
when Giuseppe Tovini, the father of ten children, began to
despair of their obtaining in the State schools of the time an
education which would enable them to live Christian lives and
at the same time have access to the best of European culture.

12 APOSTLE FOR OUR TIME

He persuaded some other fathers of the city to join him in
opening a school for the first five elementary classes. A build
ing was rented and Jesuit priests agreed to staff it. Two years
later, a large gift of money was offered to the school, and the
handsome building in which little Giovanni Battista would at
tend classes was built. Each year another class was added,
and the lawyer Tovini's intention was realized. "Our sons, if
they have the faith, will never be poor, and without the faith
they will never be rich," he said. After six years of operation,
the Ministry of Public Instruction, at the petition of Brescian
Masons under Giuseppe Zanardelli, refused further permis
sion to the rector, Father Zanoni, to maintain the Institute.
The battle was fought over the next four years, with victory
for the school finally coming in 1 892.

Young Giovanni Battista must have heard this story when
he asked his father about the man whose picture was set into
one of the windows of the school. He wore no Roman collar;
he did not look so severe as the Jesuits whose portraits lined
the halls. "Was he a priest?" young Giovanni asked. "No, son,
he wasn't." "Was he a holy man?" A difficult question for the
father. "That's hard to say, son. He loved his faith and he
loved his sons, and he fought for both. He wouldn't care
about being called holy. Let's settle for saying he was a good
man."

During those years at the Jesuit Institute young Giambat-
tista lived at home, and each morning during the short peri
ods when his health permitted him to attend classes regu
larly, he walked the short distance between his home and the
school. The register in which the achievements of the students
enrolled for the year 1908-1909 are contained reveal that in
this period of his formal schooling he achieved the follow
ing marks: Diligence, 10; written Italian, 8; oral Italian, 9;
translation of Latin into Italian, 9; from Italian into Latin,
9; oral Latin, 9; arithmetic, 7; history and geography, 9;

THE HOME IN BRESCIA 13

general culture, 9; catechism, 10; conduct, 10. With our in
dulgent attitude toward what children should be asked to
learn, we are somewhat surprised to realize that young Mon-
tini and his companions were at this time around eleven years
old!

Throughout his years with the Jesuits, infrequently at
school but studying at home and passing his examinations,
his reports abound in 8's and 9's, rarely a 7. He was always
first. The Jesuits were famous for their severity of discipline
and marking, a severity of which young Montini was re
minded whenever in the corridors of the Institute he looked
up at the portraits of Jesuits of other times and remembered
that their successors, proud of their traditions, were not at all
undisposed to distribute 3's and 4's to scions of some of the
most distinguished families of Brescia.

It could not be said that young Montini was indulged
either because of his family or his health. Rather it would ap
pear that under the goad of poor health (at this time it was
determined that the cause of his almost chronic disability was
a pulmonary weakness) he was obliged to become as pre
cocious of will as he was of mind. His parents surrounded
Vrim with every care and indulged him more than they did the
other two boys, but the greatest kindness they showed him
was the strict disciplining of his time, the ordering of the day
in such a way as to conserve his strength. This introduced
a rhythm of work with a minimum of play which with the
passing of each year became the structure of his life. Later in
the Vatican Secretariat of State and in Milan he was to be the
wonder and the despair of all who sought to keep pace with
him as they wryly pondered his reputation for being frail.

Yet these must have been unhappy years for young Giam-
battista. He was a boy, and the most disturbing awareness a
boy can have is to feel, to know, that he is different, and. to
experience at so early an age that isolation and loneliness

14 APOSTLE FOR OUR TIME

which only maturity and grace make it possible for most men
to support. He was not incapable of running and playing as
did other boys, but he could do neither well. He spent much
of his time reading, and thus began his consuming interest
in books. Shut off from the quick, easy contacts with young
people of his age, he grew somewhat aloof, and some of his
school companions, unable in the thoughtlessness of youth to
comprehend why he was different, and irritated that he was
always first in class, called him a grind. He reacted, but he
did not show it. His teachers would push him forward to join
the others in play; he would obey, but it could be for only a
short time.

How did he appear to others at this time? Domenico Peder-
sini, who lives in Concesio remembers that when he was a
boy, five or six years older than Giambattista, he and some of
the others in the local school would go each year to the
Montini home for the final leave-taking of the school year.
"Those invited would take their places on seats placed against
the walls of the courtyard. The mayor would be there, the
inspector, the lawyer Giorgio, his wife Giuditta and their
sons. We would recite poetry . . . and as a reward we would
be given fruit and biscuits. I can still see young Giambattista,
always pale, and dressed in a suit of dark velvet."

Another resident of Concesio who remembers him is Luigi
Bolognini, spry and alert at eighty-three. "He was a very seri
ous little boy, with a mind and reasoning capacity far be
yond his years. He was much attached to his mother and he
would often run to her whenever he had some argument with
his brothers. Giambattista never exploded into shouting or
quarrels you understand, of course, that even in noble fam
ilies the brothers quarrel but those few times in which they
made him angry he would retire into himself, brooding
over reprisals against his brothers which for the most part he
never did anything about. He was very intelligent, but a little

THE HOME IN BRESCIA 15

cold, very reserved, even as a boy. Only once did I ever see
him really angry. Luisin, one of the sons of a farmer, had tied
an old frying pan to the tail of a cat, and to tell the truth it was
pretty funny at first to see how crazy scared that cat was when
the pan banged along the ground. But we soon saw that the
more the pan clanked, the more terrorized the cat was. It was
then that Giovanni Battista, who couldn't have been more
than seven or eight at the time, stepped forward. Mind you, he
was a little fellow! He ordered Luisin to catch the cat and re
move the pan. Luisin refused to do so and the two went at each
other, their fists flying. Little Montini couldn't bear to see that
poor cat suffer. Mind you, it was the only time I ever saw Trim
really angry."

The parish priest of Farfengo, Don Luigi Benassi, in the
area where the Montinis vacationed, remembers him. "He in
herited from his mother her great wisdom and her profound
faith. Once at Verolovecchia when he heard the bells ring at
three in the afternoon to remind us of the death of our Savior,
Battista at once stopped playing and started to pray . . .
and without any human respect or self-consciousness he in
vited everyone, adults and children, to join with him in re
citing the Angelus."

"I remember, too," says Don Luigi, "once, when we were
together at my house, my grandmother, who was waiting on
us at table, told him that I wanted to be a priest but that there
was no money to send me to the seminary. There was a kind
of silence and then Giambattista said, 'Nonna Margherita,
there is always Providence.' Then, when he could get me
alone, he whispered, 'Be ready, you'll be going to Brescia.'
. . . Two days later I received a letter saying that I had been
accepted for study at the seminary with all expenses paid. I
found out then that the president of the fund was Giorgio
Montini, the father of Giambattista."

One of his school companions in 1913-1914, the last pe-

16 APOSTLE FOR OUR TIME

riod of study he was to have under the Jesuits at the Cesare
Arid Institute, was Apollonio Zerla, now a dermatologist and
bachelor who lives with his sister in Brescia. "He was the best
of us all, and we stood in awe of him, even though he was as
thin as a toothpick. We weren't very close, you understand.
They were the Montinis, one of the first families of Brescia.
Those were other times. . . . What I remember most about
him was his vocabulary. He had a way of expressing himself,
even with us, so proper and precise, sticking to the point, a
style none of us shared. He wasn't with us for very long."

And the last words from an old professor, a Jesuit in the
Arid, Father Persico, now ninety-five but lucid in his memory
of the thin young man with the hollow eyes. He remembers
Giovanni Battista as the best student it was ever his pleasure
to teach. Young Montini was very close to Father Persico,
and it was to him that he first revealed his intention of be
coming a priest, this when he was seventeen years old. "He
had marvelous talents as a writer," remembers Father Persico.
"... I taught him only physics and philosophy, but I know
how well he wrote because he used to bring me articles to
read which he had written for the school paper. He would
have become a great journalist if he had taken the other road.
Of course, he had an excellent teacher in his father. I remem
ber that he wrote articles for the student newspaper La Fi-
onda, which expressed the thinking of young people about
Catholic democracy in those days."

Giovanni Battista was seventeen when he withdrew from
the Jesuit Institute and began the next phase of his studies as
an extern student of the Liceo Arnaldo da Brescia. In effect
it meant that he attended few if any classes, studying at home
for his examinations. His tutor was Professor Miglioni di
Viarigi, whose family still keeps the postcards of greeting
sent by the young student when from time to time he went off

THE HOME IN BRESCIA 17

on vacations to strengthen his health. He loved to go to the
mountains with his brothers or friends, to hike in the clear
air, and to come away refreshed and just the least bit less pale.
The Easter vacation was spent in Concesio. He passed the
summers with his family either at Concesio or Verolovecchia,
but his favorite was Verolovecchia (once known as Verolo
Alghisia, after his mother's family) .

The whole family would go to Verolovecchia for a month,
traveling on the little Brescia-Cremona train, and from the
station by carriage to the villa where the whole town, it
seemed, would be gathered to give welcome to "la Signora"
and "il Signore" and "i signorini." Then the family would re
pair together to the parish church, and having prayed, greet
the pastor.

There seems to have been a Christian rhythm to the lives of
the Montinis, with that awareness of sacrament and mystery
even in the things of earth which, in the example of his
mother and father, profoundly influenced young Giovanni
Battista. He was turning his thoughts, still secretly, in the
direction of the priesthood, but he shared his hopes with only
one person, Father Persico, and then only to question and ex
amine his qualifications. When asked what he hoped to do with
his life, he would smile and change the subject, as young men
have done from time immemorial as they sought to know first
their own hearts.

2. "Don Battista"

In 1916, Giovanni Battista finished Ms examinations at the
Liceo Arnaldo da Brescia, receiving his degree with highest
honors. He was nineteen years old, his country was at war,
and his class, that of 1897, had been called up. He was not
accepted; again his health was the determining factor. A
photograph taken in 1916 at the Cesare Arid Institute shows
him with two friends, Castagna and Cognetto, who were just
about to leave for the front. They wear the uniform of their
country; he is dressed in a dark suit, white shirt and sober tie,
an almost-too-large hat on his head, the eyes enormous, the
lips firm. The three young men stare fixedly into the camera
as if to assist it in capturing this moment, and it is their youth
which lives so poignantly in this photograph now almost fifty
years old.

For most of the young men in Europe of Giovanni Bat-
tista's age the decision as to what they would do with their
lives was being made for them by their governments. They
were going to war, hundreds of thousands of them to die.
Seminarians as well as priests were being called up, and as
young Montini came to the decision to become a priest, a
young priest from Bergamo, a diocese not far from Brescia,

18

"DON BATTISTA" 19

was being posted to one of the Italian fronts as a sergeant in
the army. He was roly-poly, robustly healthy, cheerful; he
grew a mustache to give himself an air of bravado; he made
sly jokes and roared with laughter at the jokes of others; he
was loved by all who met him his name was Angelo Roncalli
who, as John XXIII, was to be the predecessor of Montini on
the throne of Peter.

Young Montini's desire to become a priest had been part of
his life for some years, but with that prudence and caution
which already marked him, he had remained silent about it,
seeking only direction of a spiritual nature in its regard. Did
he have a vocation? A good constitution was one of its re
quirements, and he had been plagued most of his life with
delicate health. Did he have the temperament, the stamina,
the zeal was God's grace moving him to the first step lead
ing to the priesthood?

His parents knew that he was wrestling with some inner
problem; he grew more silent, more withdrawn, even while
leaving them no doubt of his love. They suspected the nature
of his struggle, but the wrong encouragement, the slightest
pressure in any direction might have shattered Ms colloquy
with God, might have introduced some too human factor. Any
young man considering the priesthood sees his own unworthi-
ness; he realizes the distance he must travel; he cannot believe
that God is calling him when all around him are young men
he thinks far better than he and who give this vocation no
thought; he wonders if he is deceiving himself. A boy can only
do what Giovanni Battista did: open his soul to a priest, re
ceive from him an assurance that he has sufficient reason to
believe he has a vocation, and then seek out the bishop of the
diocese and reveal his desire to him. This Montini did. With
his parents, delighted and relieved that he had come to a de
cision, he went to the bishop of Brescia, Giacinto Gaggia, an
old friend of the family, and from him received permission to

20 APOSTLE FOR OUR TIME

begin his studies at the seminary of the diocese and to live at
home while doing so.

"The best seminary in the world is a good Christian home."
It is true that the Council of Trent, in its zeal for the reform of
the Church, had ordered the establishment of seminaries in
every diocese where, in isolation from the world, under the
surveillance of superiors, and following a strict regime of
work, study, recreation and prayer, young men might come to
know themselves and the Christ they sought to serve. How
ever, the ultimate responsibility for the quality and training of
the young men in each diocese lay with the bishop himself,
and it was Bishop Gaggia's decision that no good purpose
would result from subjecting young Montini to rigors in
tended to produce qualities which he knew him already to
possess: strong discipline of self, absolute purity of life, intel
lectual capacity and a love of Christ.

If there was any doubt in the bishop's mind it centered not
in the character but in the personality of Montini. A diocesan
priest is not ordained to shut himself off from the world to
pursue his personal spiritual and intellectual perfection, but to
bring Christ to others, to win them to Him by every means,
human and divine. The diocesan priest must not live solely in
the world of ideas his is the world of people, and they must
sense in him compassion for flawed humanity, his own and
theirs. They must be able to welcome as a man the one who
comes to them from Christ. The bishop may not have in
tended, even at that time, that Giovanni Battista should serve
in a parish of the provincial diocese of Brescia. Montini's
mind, for one thing, was too valuable not to be constantly
challenged, something which would not be possible in the
villages of the Brescian countryside. But the bishop had to
know, before in conscience he could ordain him, what he had
to know about all his candidates: that the priesthood which
would come to Giovanni Battista would be for others, not

"DON BATTISTA" 21

merely for himself; that no matter how frail he was now and
would remain, he would be willing to spend and to be spent.
Was he too shy, too withdrawn, too introspective, too cold to
give himself to others? These also were questions which the
bishop asked himself before coming to his decision.

For the next three years young Giovanni Battista lived
quietly at home, but attended classes with other students for
the priesthood who lived in the seminary in Brescia under the
rectorship of Father Mose Tovini, nephew of the founder of
the Arici. The seminaries of the time were not distinguished
for their emphasis on social and political questions, many of
them narrow and provincial as opposed to catholic in their
concern for life and men. But at home this son of the Montinis
listened and shared in the conversation in the house on Via
delle Grazie. While at the seminary he studied the usual
courses in philosophy and theology and church history and
scripture, at home he continued to grow in knowledge of the
political and social forces shaping the world, a world which
was to emerge so changed after the war that was convulsing
Europe, a world of which he was very much aware.

There was always a balance in the forces that shaped Gio
vanni Battista intellectually. He lived in no ivory tower; his
father, the practical journalist who was soon to enter the
Italian Parliament, would not have tolerated it. Nor would
Giorgio Montini's son ever become a priest fit only for sacristy
musings, remote from the currents of his time. His condition
of health, seemingly such a burden and impediment, was one
of the contributory factors in the shaping of his life. It kept
him at home, and it was in this home he learned to love free
dom, to know that it had to be fought for over and over again.
He learned the power of the written and spoken word, the
necessity for a man not only to be good but to be committed,
to be an apostle of the good, a communicator of truth.

A communicator of the truth was what his father had al-

22 APOSTLE FOR OUR TIME

ways sought to be, and in these years of testing his son sought
to be one too, but on a level and in a manner and with a success
geared to his youth and calling which enormously pleased
Bishop Gaggia. The young man spent much time teaching
catechism to children preparing for their first holy Commun
ion at the Sanctuary delle Grazie, and also although with
marginal success to older children at the Oratory of Saint
Philip Neri, in the time assigned after school when they
longed to be out playing. The serious young man with the
gentle face and voice spoke to them about the things of God;
he did not seem to mind too much when they shuffled their
feet to remind him that the time was up. In the parish of San
Giovanni he organized a little Company of San Luigi, the
saint of purity; it lasted only so long as he with his enthusiasm
was around to sustain it.

He loved children and young people generally, and they
responded to him. Often he was found with the boys of the
student Association Alessandro Manzoni and with the staff of
the student newspaper La Fionda, which he and Andrea
Trebeschi, later to be a lawyer and to die at Dachau, founded
to speak of democracy and to combat on a student level the
anticlericalism and other antichurch attitudes of the time. Its
title, meaning "The Slingshot," bespeaks a youthfulness and
a brashness, a kind of independent nonconformity which it
is interesting to discover at this point in Montini's develop
ment.

The boys of the Association were poor for the most part,
with the problems and needs of poor boys everywhere. He
gave them affection and attention; he visited their families; he
interceded with their fathers all with that unaffected manner
which bespoke his breeding but which lacked any note of
condescension. His boys loved "Him as young people were al
ways to do, and his greatest joy as a priest would be to spend
his time among the young. Again his health played a role.

"DON BATTISTA" 23

Having been denied many of the normal contacts with young
people of his own age while he was growing up, now that he
seemed to have somewhat outgrown his disability, he found
that he had a natural facility in communicating with them, an
instinctive understanding of them, and that they responded in
kind. There was no longer any doubt in his bishop's mind that
the priesthood of Giovanni Battista Montini would be for
others.

On November 21, 1919, he received his ecclesiastical garb
from Monsignor Defendente Salvetti, and became known, al
though still half a year away from ordination, as "Don Bat
tista," Don being the affectionate, informal term of address
for a priest in Italy. He seemed slimmer than ever in the black
cassock, the white collar immaculate against his fair skin.
The gravity which had always marked him seemed to deepen;
these three years had given linn insights into his vocation, its
scope and its obligations which might have been terrifying to
one less prepared than he. When, on May 29, 1920, he was
ordained a priest by Bishop Gaggia, and kneeling before the
prelate, his young hands clasped by those of the old man, he
promised obedience and reverence to him and his successors,
he rose no longer only a member of the Montini family but a
priest to all men.

His first Mass was offered in the Sanctuary delle Grazie in
Brescia in the presence of his family and friends, among
whom were proudly numbered "his boys." He wore a chasuble
made from the wedding-gown of his mother, and it was to her
and to his father that he first brought Communion at that
Mass, as it had been they who had been the first to kiss his
anointed hands on the day of his ordination.

As a priest he was to spend little time in the diocese of
Brescia. Already the bishop had formulated his plans for the
young man, but for a while Don Battista was to exercise his
ministry in Verolanuova, a suburb of Brescia. A story is still

24 APOSTLE FOR OUR TIME

told with sly delight of the new priest who one day, while
walking through the neighborhood, looking frail and wan in
his cassock, his wide clerical hat sitting squarely on his head,
was spotted by a good-hearted farmer who stood aghast at the
slightness of his figure. Running into his chicken-house, he
picked up a handful of eggs and brought them to the startled
young passer-by. "Here, here, Don Battista," he said, "take
these along; they'll do you a world of good!" How to carry the
eggs was something of a problem, but to refuse would have
embarrassed the man. So Don Battista carefully removed his
hat, dropped the eggs into it, and with a hearty "Grazie" to
the farmer strode off down the road. His father roared with
laughter that night when he told him the story.

He celebrated his twenty-third birthday with his family, and
on November 20 he left for Rome, sent by his bishop to live
at the Lombard College in the Via del Corso and pursue his
studies in philosophy at the Gregorian University maintained
by the Jesuits, and simultaneously to take courses in the fac
ulty of letters at the University of Rome. His capacity for work
was being challenged; his future was being shaped. And he
was in Rome!

It could not be said that Don Battista entered fully into the
life of Rome in this first year of the 1920's. He lived the cir
cumscribed life of the Lombard College just reopened after
the war under the rectorship of Monsignor Ettore Baranzini,
the present archbishop of Syracuse with its routine and re
strictions, the first to which young Montini had been subjected
outside of his home. His was the life apart of all young men
who go to Rome for their seminary studies or to continue their
education as priests, and he was as occupied as anyone must
be who is pursuing degrees in two different universities, study
ing languages, and at the same time trying to exercise an
apostolate to others through his priesthood. He was still being

"DON BATTISTA" 25

formed, but as much by the events of the day as by his studies.
Italy, in 1920, dissatisfied with the scant fruits of victory after
the First World War, was a country restless and convulsed as
it took the first tentative, probing steps, which were soon to
become giant ones, leading in 1922, to Fascism and Benito
Mussolini.

The name of the Fascist dictator was to have personal as
well as historical meaning to the Montini family. Don Bat-
tista's father had been elected to the Parliament in 1919, and
was in Rome when his son arrived to take up residence at the
Lombard College. As a member from Brescia of the Popular
Party, Giorgio Montini was among the minority urging cau
tion, for there were already signs that the Italian State was
tending toward totalitarian government. The ideas and ideals
of the Popular Party were the antithesis of totalitarianism. It
proclaimed its Christian character, and was liberal in uphold
ing civil and political liberties as the right of all, without party
monopolies or prejudice against religion, race or classes. Such
sanity, especially sanity clothed in Christian garments, was
not to appeal to the Italian government at the time, Although
the Popular Party had won 99 seats in Parliament out of 508
in the election of 1919, and was to do more than any other
Italian organization to bar the way to Fascism, Mussolini con
tinued to tighten his grip on the country.

The young student at the Lombard College could, of course,
have taken no part in the battle being waged by Giorgio
Montini and his colleagues, but he knew of the battle and of
the principles it involved. From those days forward he was
always to show an aversion for any form of dictatorship or
curtailment of fundamental liberties.

On January 22, 1922, Pope Benedict XV died suddenly. 1

1 The fourth Pope since the Kingdom of Italy took possession of
Rome, Benedict XV was the first at whose death the Italian government
lowered the flags to half-mast in token of mourning.

26 APOSTLE FOR OUR TIME

A sad little man who has deserved better of history, he had
spent his strength during the First World War in trying to
bring about peace between the nations in conflict. Although
he had been excluded from the Peace Conference, it was to be
belatedly acknowledged that his peace proposals of 1917
were closely paralleled by Wilson's Fourteen Points of the next
January. He was a man of enormous capacity and personal
charm, without the qualities of genius but possessed of a vast
prudence and patience. Small, frail and ugly, he had worked
indef atigably to bring about recognition of the Church's moral
influence in the world. His diplomatic skill had softened old
bitternesses between Italy and the Papacy and a rapproche
ment now appeared possible. The war had convinced the
Vatican that an Italy more than ever nationalist would never
surrender Rome as its capital. On its side the Quirinal had
come to recognize that however many governments come and
go, the Papacy would not renounce its claim to independence
of any temporal power. While Benedict XV did not fail to
reiterate the protest of his predecessors against dependence
upon the Kingdom, it now appeared that a solution would not
be held incompatible with a nominal amount of territory, one
sufficient to house the offices and staff of the Holy See, the
palaces of the Vatican and of the Lateran, the summer resi
dence of the Popes at Castelgandolfo, and certain other papal
possessions such as churches and sanctuaries within the city
of Rome and in other parts of Italy.

During the war Italy, watching the growing prestige of a
Papacy stripped of secular sovereignty, had come to realize
that there was a power other than that derived from the pos
session of Rome and of the old Papal States, and that this
power was coming to be recognized more and more by other
nations. At the beginning of Pope Benedict's pontificate only
fourteen States had been represented at the Vatican; at his
death the number had grown to twenty-six. After the conflict

"DON BATTISTA" 27

was over, his worldwide appeals had saved thousands from
starvation in Central and Eastern Europe.

Benedict XV, the frail, sensitive nobleman was succeeded
by the archbishop of Milan, Achille Ratti, former prefect of
the Vatican Library and former nuncio to Warsaw, a rugged,
forthright man as intransigent in his way as the mountains he
loved to scale. 2 As his reign began, the Church was girding
herself anew to deal with the forces being shaped in the world
by the rise of Communism and Fascism; it was cautiously
willing to cooperate in bringing order and harmony to Italy,
but determined to maintain its allegiance to freedom and hu
man dignity. During the reign of Pope Pius XI, Mussolini
would lead his "march on Rome" and become the dictator of
Italy; a dictator would seize power in Germany; Italy would
invade Ethiopia; the civil war in Spain would explode, and the
doughty Pontiff would leave the world just as it sought to com
mit suicide with the beginning of the war in 1939. In fearless
encyclicals he denounced Fascism, Nazism and Communism;
he sought to effect a transfusion of the spiritual and moral and
intellectual forces of the Church into the arena of world affairs.
Inheritor of the Roman Question, perhaps his greatest his
torical achievement was to bring about in 1929 the Lateran
Treaty 3 in which the Italian government recognized the in
dependence and sovereign power of the Papacy over its do-

2 Sir Alec Randall, secretary, at this time, of the British Legation to
the Holy See, in his book Vatican Assignment (London: William
Heinemann, Ltd.) refers to his "strict discipline,'* his "uncompro
mising austerity"; describes him as "independent and unyielding." Dur
ing his Milan years he was known as a "clerical liberal": a man closer
to the ideas of Leo XIII and Rampolla than of Saint Pius X and Merry
del Val.

3 Of Pope Pius and the Lateran Treaty, Randall says (op. cit., p. 58) :
"It needed someone of a dictatorial nature to clinch an agreement with
a dictator." 1921 was the year in which Pope Pius made his famous re
mark about being willing to negotiate with the devil.

28 APOSTLE FOR OUR TIME

main of the Vatican State and its extraterritorial possessions,
an independence and sovereignty which the Holy See had al
ways contended that it possessed.

In the first year of Pius XTs pontificate, 1922, the serious
twenty-five year old priest from Brescia, immersed in the task
of gaining two doctorates, was called to the attention of Mon-
signor Giuseppe Pizzardo, the newly appointed Undersecre
tary of State at the Vatican. One of Pope Pius' first acts had
been to confirm as his Secretary of State the Lord Cardinal
Pietro Gasparri; and his assistant, Monsignor Pizzardo, small
and birdlike, with his quick darting eyes and restless energy,
was given, among more monumental tasks, that of recruiting
additional personnel for the Secretariat. Father Montini had the
intellectual capacities, the family background and priestly qual
ities which would have recommended him in any case, and it
was now that the generosity of the bishop of Brescia and his
personal interest in the young man culminated in Monsignor
Pizzardo's invitation to Don Battista to prepare himself for the
diplomatic service of the Church. To Father Montini's mild
protest that he was already pursuing two doctorates, Mon
signor Pizzardo gave him an airy wave of the hand and re
plied, "What difference does one doctorate more or less make?"
He was to enter the Pontifical Academy of Noble Ecclesiastics,
the training school for diplomat-priests, and to continue his
studies in canon law at the Gregorian University. His studies
for this degree were done at the Gregorian but the degree was
to be issued, after an examination and defense of his thesis,
by the Milan Pontifical Seminary.

Thus summoned in the first months of the new pontificate,
Don Battista took the first recognizably significant step in the
career which was to bring him to the papal throne forty-one
years later. Entering the somewhat gloomy Academy in the
Piazza Minerva, flanked on one side by the Pantheon, facing
an early Gothic church built on the site of a temple to Minerva,

''DON BATTISTA" 29

he began his two-year course in languages, diplomatic style
and history, while at the same time he continued to follow his
courses at the Gregorian. More significantly, he was at the
Academy to be observed and judged. The Vatican diplomatic
service was wholly Italian in those days, 4 and the young men
beginning their slow ascent in the Church through that service
had to be thoroughly screened. They would hold positions of
deep sensitivity in Rome and posts all over the world; many
would be called from those posts to accept a cardinal's hat,
and one of them might even, through the vote of his peers,
ascend the throne of Peter.

Those who had begun as Father Montini was beginning
looked down on him from the oil paintings that covered the
walls of the Academy. There were Pacca and Consalvi, and
even Merry del Val; Delia Chiesa, too, who became Benedict
XV. Pope Leo Xin had been there as a student, in the days
when the diplomatic service was truly limited to the sons of
nobles, and when the young priest noblemen brought their
personal servants to care for their needs. But these were more
democratic days, and the rooms of the servants, high on the
fifth floor under the roof, were now occupied by students. They
ate indifferent food, they celebrated Mass in the baroque
chapel or in neighboring churches, attended classes in the
library and at the Gregorian, took each other's measure and
were in turn weighed, measured, and probed in all ways known
to wise and cautious Rome.

Years later, on April 25, 1951, on the occasion of the cele
bration of the foundation of the Academy, the then Sostituto
of the Secretariat of State, Monsignor Montini, setting forth
the reasons for the continuation of Vatican diplomacy and its
training school for diplomats, and emphasizing the sense of

4 Cardinal Hinsley of Westminster made vigorous representation to
Pius XI about the all-Italian character of the Curia, but the Pope was
indifferent.

30 APOSTLE FOR OUR TIME

history it inculcates, had this to say: "When we were in the
seminary we were taught to love souls, to love the parish, to
love the diocese. Here we learned to love all peoples, to widen
our hearts, to enlarge their scope with a magnanimity which
is truly Roman, to open our souls to nations and to continents,
to become aware of history in its most obscure aspects in order
to deal with the most encompassing problems of human life.
Here the school says to the students: you will be the servant of
great causes and of high interests. A school, I repeat, of
universal charity ... the Academy . . . says to its stu
dents: the higher you rise, the greater must be your service;
remember that to rise means to accept the weight of new re
sponsibilities and realize what it means to be a representative:
it is to serve as a symbol for another that is to say, he must
increase, I must decrease. And in the measure that you rise,
your mission will make you tremble, and you will be obliged
to sanctify yourself by prayer and in humility for the fulfil
ment of those duties that will be demanded of you."

In his address to the future diplomats of the Holy See Mon-
signor Montini defended papal diplomacy from charges that
it was a survival of the past, "an almost ritualistic diplomacy,
its personnel assuming traditional attitudes and recruited from
closed social circles; a diplomacy swathed in forms and eti
quette no longer in the spirit of our times." While he conceded
that some of the "objections" had a certain foundation, he
went on to say that they ignored the essential reality that "it is
neither on such forms nor forces that the Church relies . . .
she draws her vital forces from within." He defined the di
plomacy of the Church as more than ever "a form of love for
people," and added: "If civil diplomacy tends to reduce the
antagonisms in the world by making reason prevail over force,
and to contribute to the growth of the prosperity of individual
States in the harmonious concert of an ever larger interna
tional organization, it finds in ecclesiastical diplomacy almost

"DON BATTISTA" 31

a model to which it can look; not so much because of any
technical skill that the diplomacy of the Church might display
or any successes it might obtain (for both the one and the
other may be lacking), but rather because of the ideal from
which it takes its departure and toward which it tends: the
universal brotherhood of man."

"Does this Academy," Monsignor Montini went on to ask,
"fulfill its mission to its students? Does it really prepare them?"
He then chose two examples, the one, he said, illustrating
the simplicity of spirit and the adaptability which animates the
students of the Academy; the other an example of self-
abnegation and of courage approaching the heroic.

"I remember," he said, "a very young colleague at the
Academy, who after finishing his course was assigned to a
distant country of South America. Before leaving he acquired
as much information as he could regarding the country to
which he was posted. Finally we asked him: 'What conclusions
have you reached about the country and the appointment?*
'I have learned,' he said, 'that I will need a pair of leather
pants in order to ride horseback.' " "And indeed he did,"
added Monsignor Montini, "because at a time when, he was
alone and charge d'affaires, he traveled for fifteen days on
horseback to reach a remote area in order to establish an
apostolic vicariate."

His other example centered in the return from behind the
Iron Curtain of certain of his colleagues from the Secretariat
of State. "The countries in which they had been stationed had
broken off relations with the Holy See, and they had been
obliged to leave. We went to the railroad station to meet them
on their return . . . and this is what our friends said to us,
in simple but humanly moving words: What we regret is not
being able to stay and to suffer with our brothers.' "

"This," said Monsignor Montini, "this is the Academy and
these are the things which justify it." Then, addressing the

32 APOSTLE FOR OUR TIME

young students who sat where once he had sat, he added:
<c May all of you be such representatives, may all of you have
the sense, the spirit, of this representation. Diplomacy is a
representation. We must have the sense of being representa
tives of Christ, of the Church. This is our purpose, and this
is our title of glory to be able to say: *I am Christ; I am the
Church."

In May of 1923 Don Battista was summoned by Monsignor
Pizzardo and informed that he had been made addetto, or
second secretary, to the nunciature in Warsaw, and that he
was to leave immediately. He knew no reason for the appoint
ment, an unusual one since he had not completed his course
at the Academy; he was simply to go. There was a quick fare
well to his parents, and armed with a diplomatic passport, he
left Italy for the first time.

His journey took him across Austria with its onion-domed
churches, into Germany and across the plains of Poland, to
Warsaw. The nuncio, Archbishop Lorenzo Lauro, who had
succeeded Achille Ratti in Poland and was later made a car
dinal, received Don Battista as a father. The young man so
far from home, with his slight frame and exquisite manners,
generated sympathy and warmth wherever he went with the
nuncio during his few months in Poland. His manner was
totally self-effacing, he had a prodigious capacity for work,
and the uditore (auditor) of the nunciature, Monsignor Carlo
Chiarlo, later one of the cardinals of the conclave which elected
Paul VI, had no reason to regret the quiet and helpful pres
ence of the young Brescian. Don Battista was recalled to
Rome the following November, since it had been thought best
not to subject him to the rigors of the Polish winter. Thus his
test in the field came to an end.

Father Montini returned to the Academy, his purposiveness
sharpened by those months of practical experience, and in
October 1924, he entered the Secretariat of State as addetto,

"DON BATTISTA" 33

was named minutante* in April 1925, and there ascending
always to higher posts he remained until he was named
archbishop of Milan in 1954. Those thirty years would be
years of refining, they would distill the man until only the
fiber of his character would remain; they would drain him of
any residue of self until his name would become at the Vatican
the very emblem of the perfect servitor of the Pope. His strong
personality was not destroyed but submerged, his mind and
will not subverted but submitted, with his priesthood his first
passion, enriched by his perfect obedience to what he was
asked to do. The "diplomat priest" he would be called, the
"patrician priest" also, but his first and greatest pleasure was
in the title "the priest of the students." It came about this way.

Pius XI, among other of his distinctions, was to become
known as the Pope of Catholic Action, 6 and in the first years
of his pontificate he was encouraging in the Catholic world,
and especially in Italy, the involvement of the laity in the work
of the Church under the guidance of priests deputed by the
hierarchy. In Italy it was an antidotal action to the lingering
effects of the non expedit, to the long years of lethargy and
indifference on the part of the country's Catholic laity who
were content to leave the work of the Church to the priests,
and to the equally long centuries of clerical control. There, as
elsewhere in the world, a general awareness had not yet
dawned that the Church's witness was in the marketplace, in
the forum of men's activity and ideas, not a witness of worship
only but one of social regeneration as well.

Pope Pius was by no means the first to formulate this con
cept; it was as old as Christianity itself and had been stressed
by his immediate predecessors, but it was he who gave it new

5 A minutante must read all reports on a given question, summarize
them and integrate them into one trenchant precis.

6 Pope Pius called Catholic Action ". . . the apple of Our eye," in a
letter to Cardinal Bertram.

34 APOSTLE FOR OUR TIME

impetus. In Italy it would become at times for the Fascists an
irritating counterpoise to their own ambitions for dechristianiz-
ing the country, an organized response by Catholic citizens on
various levels of national life to attempts to deify the State, to
restrict human rights, to subvert the young, and to dazzle
university youth with talk of national glory divorced from
moral principle and spiritual basis. At times it hesitated, at
times it compromised, and even seemed at times to capitulate,
but there were always those who came forth to give it fibre and
a new sense of purpose.

Monsignor Pizzardo had been appointed general chaplain
for Catholic Action in Italy, and in 1924, at his suggestion,
the chancery office for the diocese of Rome appointed Don
Battista as spiritual advisor to the students of the University of
Rome where there was a chapter of FUCI, the Federation of
Italian Catholic University Students. Thus he entered, in his
own words expressed years later, into "that cage of lions which
the university students of yesterday were: they were not as re
flective, as thoughtful as those of today." He welcomed the
appointment as would any priest who spends much of his day
behind a desk dealing with reports and not directly with hu
man beings. His concept of his office was typical. There would
be no mere strident confrontation of himself and of his students
with those who opposed or laughed at them, no struggle for
ascendancy with the university as battleground. Rather he
quietly and effectively opened to his students what it meant to
be a human being, showing them how Christianity deepens and
enriches man's every faculty, and how every true Christian
witnesses to the truth which is in him.

Long years afterward, Monsignor Sergio Pignedoli, who
knew Don Battista in those days and who would later become
his auxiliary in Milan, was to write: "The great prestige that
he enjoyed in the eyes of his students, both in his articulation
of their spiritual problems and, more important, in his ability

"DON BATTISTA" 35

to resolve them, was centered in Ms assured and total concept
of Christianity ... for him its essence lay in the interior
formation of conscience." Yet he would have had scant suc
cess had he not known how to enter the students' lives, to
laugh and joke with them. This he did with an ease which
suprised those who were already contributing to the myth of
his coldness and aloofness.

From his quarters at the Academy of Diplomacy he moved
to a house on the Via Aurelia. Every minute free from his
duties at the Vatican found him with the students, and they
responded to his devotion first with caution and then with
affection. They stood somewhat in awe of him. His knowledge
of the writings of Maritain, Bergson, Spengler, Thomas Mann,
the Church Fathers, was staggeringly impressive to their young
eyes. He was particularly concerned that these young people,
most of them from the middle and upper classes, should not
live sealed off in their comfortable lives from the squalor and
misery which abounded in Italy. Every week he led them to
one of the most forsaken areas of Rome, the Porta Metronia,
to touch and smell poverty and to respond as Christians to the
need of their fellow men after the example of Saint Vincent de
Paul, in whose name they were organized.

In 1925, the scope of his activity was widened with his
appointment as national assistant to the Federation of Italian
Catholic University Students. He retained his chaplaincy at
the University of Rome, but the area of his concern was ex
tended to the whole of the Italian Peninsula. These were dif
ficult and sensitive days for FUCI. Founded thirty years be
fore, it seemed to be lacking in purposeful direction, in danger
of becoming exhortatory and pious instead of intellectually
militant. The Fascists were now strongly entrenched in the
country, and the Catholic federation was a natural target for
their attacks since it was made up of thousands of young
Italians opposed to Fascism, although possessing membership

36 APOSTLE FOR OUR TIME

in GUF, Fascist University Youth, 7 and not unwilling, in the
way of youth, to add emphasis to principle by occasional re
sort to scuffling.

There were also internal difficulties for the Catholic student
organization. 1925 was a Holy Year in the Catholic world,
and FUCI, meeting in national congress at Bologna, sent a
telegram of homage to the King, unaware of the significance
of this move in the tense and delicate situation of Church-
State relations in Italy. Young people are not given to weigh
ing all the consequences of their actions, and the members of
FUCI who voted the homage were unaware of, or at least gave
little thought to, the fact that the Roman Question was still a
living, burning issue in Italy and at the Vatican, and that al
ready tentative steps were being taken to resolve it. Anything
which tended to intrude on the negotiations, no matter how
casually, was bound to cause concern at the Vatican, deter
mined after more than fifty years to put an end to the impasse.
It was felt that the directors of FUCI should have been more
sensitive. As a consequence of internal difficulties, a change of
leadership was decided; Don Battista was appointed assistant
and a new president was appointed in the person of a young
man, Igino Righetti, barely twenty, who was to become as
close a friend to Don Battista as anyone in his life.

The two succeeded to their posts immediately, and Don
Battista was on hand to greet the members of the Bologna
congress when they arrived in Rome to obtain the Holy Year
indulgences and, if possible, to be received by the Pope. It is
said that Pius XI, to evidence his displeasure at the telegram
of homage to the King, refused to receive them, and it was
Don Battista who had to announce the decision. They had all
gathered at the Church of Saint Philip Neri, not far from the
Vatican, prepared to march in procession to hail the Holy

7 Made necessary by the social and economic restrictions imposed by
the Fascists on those not joining their organizations.

"DON BATTISTA" 37

Father. When they were told that there would be no reception,
the young people sat stunned. One of the chaplains called out:
"There are some occasions when the Te Deum should be sung,
and others when the De Profundis is called for!" And Don
Battista, standing near the tomb of St. Philip, intoned the Te
Deum.

This incident indicates the difficult situation in which Don
Battista had been placed. He was on the staff of the Vatican
Secretariat of State and he was leader, together with Righetti,
of the Catholic students of Italy. From one side came exhorta
tions to caution, to reserve; from the other the impetus to
action, to witness. It was the first important act of diplomacy
which Montini was to effect: the reconciliation in his own life
of these two currents, as well as the guiding of the student
organization between the Scylla of Vatican admonition and
the Charybdis of youthful impetuosity. Righetti was as one
with Montini in his thinking. Born in Rimini,, where he had
founded a small journal, the Ariminum, he once wrote: 'To
live dangerously is a program which too many have set for
themselves. Sacred Scripture tells us, on the contrary, that he
who loves danger shall perish in it." Yet it seemed almost
impossible not to live dangerously in those days.

The headquarters for FUCI in Rome were in the Piazza
Sant'Agostino. The first issue of their newspaper, La Sapienza
(Wisdom), a weekly, appeared in May, 1925. It already re
flected the Righetti-Montini emphasis that FUCI become a
militantiy intellectual elite. To this publication Father Montini
contributed the first of what would be a regular series of
articles on the spiritual and intellectual challenges facing the
young in those already distant days. "To observe, seek, study,
this is the life of the children of light," he wrote in his first
article. This and subsequent articles were impressive for the
scope of ideas and problems which he presented to the young
men and women of FUCL He was not content with vague

38 APOSTLE FOR OUR TIME

generalizations; he took Ms office and Ms young people seri
ously, an attitude reflected in these first writings in Sapienza
and in Azione Fucina, wMch grew out of Sapienza.

Monsignor Geremia PaccMoni, who was close to Montini
and Righetti, is quoted as saying: "Whenever we had our
meetings, I was the one to go to the Vatican to pick up
Montini. It was a big problem because they let him go always
with the greatest reluctance. And also because wherever we
went chaos followed the Fascists followed us everywhere.
Very often our meetings began in one city and ended in an
other."

The greatest disturbance took place at Macerata in 1926.
The meeting at Macerata was planned to celebrate the thirtieth
anniversary of FUCI's founding. It was to take place on
August 27, 28, 29, and 30, the last day to be one of pilgrim
age to Assisi. The editorial in the August 25th issue of Sapienza
in urging its members to attend, said: "This will not be a
meeting of songs and banquets. There is a heaviness and chal
lenge in the air wMch imposes on us the obligation of a
correct and austere gathering. FUCI wants to live it must
live. This organization must ever be dedicated to the intel
lectual apostolate, because to proclaim programs of action is
nothing if we are not above all perfected by Christian virtue."

On the eve of the meeting, representatives from Genoa
and Turin were assaulted by Fascist thugs, but the first day of
the reunion itself went smoothly until, at the close of the ses
sion, the Fucini, as they were called, led by Montini and
Righetti, marched to the university of the city to lay a wreath
on the memorial to students fallen in the war. When the Fucini
sought to leave the university, singing their hymn, they were
attacked. Fascist youths, singing their own militant, "To arms,
we are Fascists!" grabbed the FUCI flags and the battle was
on. At first the national police stood by, then moved in lei
surely. Seven Fucini were hurt; two were arrested, one of them

"DON BATTISTA" 39

a priest. No Fascists. Protests were made to the authorities by
those in charge, including Montini. A story is told that when
the Fascist governor complained to Don Battista that a young
Black Shirt had received a serious head wound, the chaplain
said, "Your Excellency, it really was not our boy's fault. The
Fascist was tugging so hard at a flag being held in the air that
finally the student simply could not help letting it come down
on the other chap's head."

The Fucini withdrew from Macerata and went to Assist,
where in the town of the gentle Saint Francis even the Fascists
were somewhat more subdued. From Assisi they went to
Rome, this time to be received warmly by Pope Pius. It is told
that the eye of the Holy Father, who prided himself on being
informed about everything, fell on one of the students who was
still quite heavily bandaged as a result of the fracas at Macerata.
He asked about the young man's injury and listened as Mon
tini and Righetti explained what had happened; then, turning
to poor Monsignor Pizzardo, with annoyance showing in his
heavy voice, the Pope asked: "And why don't you tell me
about these things too?" 8

After the Later an Treaty of 1929, the tension between the
Fucini and the Fascists subsided, but in 1931 it exploded
again. The meetings of FUCI were raided, their halls burned,
the students assaulted, and finally all Catholic youth organiza
tions were suppressed by the government. Pius XI reacted
with his famous encyclical Non abbiamo bisogno, and at one
point the Holy See invited all those at the head of youth
groups to take refuge in the Vatican. The struggle for the
youth of any country can be a bitter one. In June of that year,
Montini and Righetti decided to suspend all public meetings
but to continue to meet secretly. This they did for a few
months. A student of the time later wrote: "We had no doubt
that our chaplain was one with us. We felt that a kind of

8 The story is probably apocryphal.

40 APOSTLE FOR OUR TIME

fraternal friendship united us, a friendship cemented both in
the hours of joy and in the hours of testing."

In October, Mussolini intervened personally, and public
meetings of the Catholic student organization were resumed,
but the Fascist Party stepped up its pressure and persecution,
desirous of suppressing FUCI and leaving only their own
youth organization, GUF. One strategem was to bypass FUCI
as being irrelevant by assigning chaplains to GUF. Montini's
strategy was along lines of non-collaboration, of passive resist
ance, of preparing for the future when there would be no
Fascism. "If we can't march with banners flying," he said
"let us work in silence."

He was accused by some of not taking a strong enough
stand, of not being committed, of being too moderate, while
the austerity which he invited the students to share as they pre
pared themselves for the future was not at all to the liking of
the old guard in the organization who remembered the days of
food, laughter and song, of camaraderie based on mere "to
getherness"; there was for them something too principled, too
reasoned, too calculated, almost too austere, in Montini's ap
proach. And also a disciplined lay elite was a source of
uneasiness to many.

But Don Battista was his father's son, and his brother
Ludovico remembers that "when we were boys, our father
used to say constantly, 'We must prepare ourselves to see the
light. No easy truces for us. We must know what shoes we will
wear; and when we are of age, off we will go!' " His father
referred to the days he knew would come when the Church
and Catholics would be free in Italy; his patience and good
cheer must have irritated the extremists as much on one side
as on the other. So, too, did his son's at this stage as it would
later.

There lives today on the outskirts of Brescia a man who
thirty-five years ago was one of the priests most hated and

"DON BATTISTA" 41

feared by the Italian Fascists. His name is Father Giulio
Bevilacqua, a member of the Congregation of the Oratory, and
he is eighty-three years old. Before his transfer to Rome in
1928, he was involved in constant polemics with the Fascists.
The party newspaper, Popolo di Brescia, attacked him in an
article appearing in 1926, and when his reply in an article
entitled "Why I Cannot Be a Fascist" appeared in // Cittadino,
the newspaper once directed by Don Battista's father, the latter
paper was suspended.

When he was removed to Rome, Father Bevilacqua was
met by Father Montini, and for five years they lived together
in an apartment on the Via Terme delle Daciane, on the
Aventine. The old man says: "I used to say to him: do less
work less, not more, do you hear? Leave a little for the
others to do. Don't be up every night until two o'clock; it's
bad for your health." But the advice did no good. Referring to
Father Montini's work with the students, Father Bevilacqua
adds: "He gathered around him a true aristocracy of faith and
culture. He knew how to use ordinary language with the vigor
of truth showing through, and his voice was warm and inti
mate . . . the voice of a person who knew how to take part
in a dialogue. ... He spoke to the young with a faith nour
ished by the treasures of the gospels and the liturgy. And this
faith in God manifested itself always in the whole man, be
cause Don Battista loved the creative human spirit under its
every aspect art, thought, culture, science. He was every
thing to the boys, following them in their activities of each
new day with unflagging freshness and imagination."

On March 15, 1933 Monsignor Montini received a letter
from Archbishop Pizzardo which read in part: "In considera
tion of the increasing work of your important office in the
Secretariat of State, you have repeatedly requested that I ob
tain from the Holy Father permission for you to withdraw
from your assignment as ecclesiastical assistant to the Catholic

42 APOSTLE FOR OUR TIME

University Students. . . . The Pope . . . has graciously con
sented to allow you to dedicate all of your outstanding gifts
to the delicate tasks of the Secretariat of State. . . . In inform
ing you of this I cannot conceal my regret in seeing you leave
a post which you have held for eight years and discharged
with true love and devotion."

Azione Fucina, the FUCI bulletin, in reprinting the whole
letter, comments: "Monsignor Montini, in giving us the copy
of the letter here reprinted, has expressed a formal desire that
it not be accompanied by any comment, because only silence
can express the sentiments of his heart at this moment. We
cannot, however, fail to reveal that we will remain always
closely united to him, because we will always feel ourselves
guided by that same love for the Church of Jesus Christ and
of his Vicar which pervaded and has been unforgettably mani
fested to us in the work Monsignor Montini has devoted for
eight years to our association. To speak of gratitude is su
perfluous." Monsignor Guido Anichini, who succeeded Mon
tini, wrote years later in his book Fifty Years of FUCI:* "Cer
tain orders must be accepted with serenity, knowing as one
does that superiors have their just and broad perspectives in
such matters." Thus closed a chapter, a change made not
without pain, but one accepted with as much generosity as
would be the change to Milan twenty-one years later.

Speaking of him years later, Archbishop Pignedoli said:
"There is (in him) a natural and ever-present nostalgia for
everything having to do with university life and its spiritual
and cultural problems. A prime quality which Monsignor
Montini possessed is fundamental for assisting people of any
age, but of first importance for the young confidence. He
himself looks at life with the confidence of the young; he sees
even the most difficult problems with a characteristic freshness
of eye and heart."

8 Rome: Editrice Studium [n.d.].

"DON BATTISTA" 43

Later the cardinal of Milan would say about these days:
"For me it was a discovery. If I know anything I owe it all to
these dear friends of years past, because they were for me a
stimulus, a living lesson which I could not have received
either from books or even from the example, shining under
every aspect, of the world of priests."

Montini was never to lose his interest in the Catholic stu
dent organization. In 1936, he assisted in setting up the
famous "Seminars of Camaldoli," weeks of study for men
from FUCI who were later to be numbered among the leaders
of the postwar Christian Democratic Party. Montini's recom
mendation to them was: sociology, sociology, and more soci
ology. On June 25, 1943, the day Mussolini fell, the Code of
Camaldoli was proclaimed, and set forth the basis for a Chris
tian social order in Italy.

Montini was not there; he was at the Vatican. Righetti was
not there he had died in 1939, at the age of thirty-five, his
last request that his unborn baby, if a boy, be named Gio
vanni Battista Righetti-Montini. Together they had founded
the small publishing house, Studium, brought up to date and
revised the magazine, Studium, giving it a Roman setting and
control after long years of identity with Bologna. 10 Together
they had recast the program of FUCI on more intellectual
lines, tightened and strengthened its organization, fought its
battles and drawn close together in the sharing of hopes and
difficulties. Together they saw grow out of the national con
gress of FUCI held in Cagliari, Sardinia, in the summer of

10 Studium, the FUCI review, and its bulletin, Azione Fucina, never
contained anything of Fascism in them, at most expressions of Italian
patriotic sentiment. "Studium never put a grain of incense on the altar
of Fascism. It maintained a certain cultural level at a time when the
rest of Catholic Action was content to preach and give itself to devo
tional practices." Richard A. Webster, "The Rebirth of the Christian
Democratic Party in Italy," in // Mulino, Bologna, August, 1959, p. 26.

44 APOSTLE FOR OUR TIME

1932, the Association of Catholic University Graduates which
sought with notable success to give witness in professional and
social life to what its members as students had first learned as
theory.

In an introduction to a book on Righetti, 11 Montini wrote:
"He remains almost as if carved in the memory of his friends
who will not find anyone to replace him, and they will always
feel the need of turning to him in memory, not only to feel
themselves young and good, as is the need of those who are
getting on in years and who have had the good fortune in the
years of their conscience's awakening to find a companion, a
teacher of rare merit who gave them understanding and guided
them through adolescence into maturity, but also to relive
conversations, cherished and persuasive as few could be/'

During the period of their association, Monsignor Montini,
teaching the history of pontifical diplomacy at the Academy of
Diplomacy, found time also to publish three small volumes:
The Way of Christ, Introduction to the Study of Christ, and
A University Conscience. All these were the fruit of his medi
tation on the role of the Saviour in the lives of the young, and
they clearly show that in those days of political tension the
emphasis of the still youthful but now balding monsignor was
not on better and more subtle political infighting, but on
giving a more personal witness to the Master. It was this same
desire which found him organizing week-end retreats in the
Basilica of Saint Paul Outside the Walls where the Benedictine
Abbot Schuster (who was to be his predecessor in the see of
Milan) welcomed the youths who came.

Monsignor Montini preached every Sunday in (he Church
of the Sapienza in Rome; he spent hours hearing confessions,
and his charity to the poor grew to be a legend among the poor
themselves. In 1933, still in touch with "his boys" who were

11 Augusto Naroni, Igino Righetti (Rome: Editrice Studium, Rome

"DON BATTISTA" 45

now graduated, he founded together with them a unit of the
Saint Vincent de Paul Society which held meetings and worked
from the Church of Saint Anne, the little parish church of
Vatican City. The area of their apostolate was the squalid, de
pressed section of Primavalle. Blessed are they who go to the
poor in the name of Christ, he told them.

Those who thought they saw the whole man in his Vatican
diplomatic setting saw one facet alone. If they failed to see the
priest they did not see Montini, for it was this that marked
everything he did. It was this quality of his priestliness, di
recting all his other talents, which caused him in his thirty-
seventh year to be recognized by his superiors as one who
could make an outstanding contribution to the diplomatic
service of the Holy See.

3. Vatican Beginnings

Those sensitive to their times and to the currents of those
times knew in 1933 that they were no longer living in a world
where, in spite of wars and the upheaval of continents, busi
ness could go on as usual and Christianity could remain as it
had for centuries. The violent disruption of society caused by
the First World War had brought about the collapse of such
cultural structures as the belief in progress toward a better
world and the triumph of reason over brutality, into which
Christianity had fitted naturally and comfortably. With the
props taken away, it was slowly being revealed that while the
average modern man still professed certain traditional beliefs,
they had long ago been emptied of their inner reality, and that
pseudo-spirituality or naked nihilism had gradually possessed
men's souls.

Europe for centuries had been ravaged not only physically
by war but spiritually by the secularist thought born with the
Renaissance, which had assumed control at the time of the
French Revolution and whose final harvest was now being
realized. Holy Russia was firmly in the grip of atheistic Com
munism, an uneasy truce existed between the Church and
Fascism in Italy, and in Germany the confused Catholic

46

VATICAN BEGINNINGS 47

Centre Party had, in 1932, voted with the Nazis to make
Hermann Goring the first Nazi president of the Reichstag, and
in this year would vote for the "enabling act," effectively
throttling the Republic and making Hitler dictator. Mussolini
was already planning expansion in Africa, of which the rape
of Ethiopia would be a part; Spain was building to the crisis
of its civil war, a rehearsal for the war Hitler would launch
against Poland in 1939. The United States, mired in depres
sion, was hearing its new President, Franklin Delano Roosevelt
vibrantly reassure his country that it had nothing to fear but
fear itself.

At this juncture in world history, Monsignor Montini
would arrive each morning in the courtyard of San Damaso in
the Vatican, walk or ride on the slow, water-propelled elevator
to the third floor of the palace, pass through the Hall of Maps,
saluted by the guards, and enter the Secretariat of State to
deal with the quota of problems assigned to him. The world
of his service was quiet, almost serene, even though it was
aware of the most sensitive currents or convulsive eruptions in
the Church and in the world. "It is calm and tranquil," he
would say years later, "because it wishes to be. Because its
supreme purpose is to seek for peace, to create peace!" *

Although as minutante more and more important assign
ments were being given to him, and although his opinions
and advice were followed in many projects and areas of re
search, Monsignor Montini was still one of many in the service
of the Secretariat, not yet in the top echelon. He was to serve
under three Secretaries of State, each in his way to contribute
to his formation as a diplomat.

The first was Cardinal Pietro Gasparri, a brilliant jurist of
farmer stock, nicknamed "il Contadino" the peasant. He had

1 Cardinal Merry del Val, Secretary of State to Pius X, when asked
what were the guiding principles of Vatican diplomacy, replied, "The
New Testament"

48 APOSTLE FOR OUR TIME

gruff geniality, the quick mind and wit of the unself conscious
peasantry, ready to relax and make a joke, but unflagging
and meticulous in every detail having to do with his office.
Only in his dress was he indifferent to detail, his zucchetto
askew, snuff stains on his cassock. He had received the red hat
from Pope Pius X in recognition of his services in the project
of codifying canon law. A man of great diplomatic adapta
bility, he served as Secretary of State under two pontificates,
that of Benedict XV and of Pius XI. It was he who rep
resented the Vatican in the settlement of the Roman Question,
and who, as must all Secretaries of State, had articulated per
fectly the mind of the Pontiff, Pius XI, in these delicate
negotiations. "Almost all Cardinal Secretaries of State in
modern times," as Sir Alec Randall writes, "have one thing in
common: that it is impossible to say just where the influence
of the Secretary of State came in. ... A Cardinal Secretary
of State is essentially self effacing in relation to the Pope he
serves." 2 The Pope whom Gasparri served until 1930, and
who was to advance Monsignor Montini "was a man of strict
discipline and uncompromising austerity, aloof, an independ
ent man, even an unyielding one, with little pliancy in his
nature. He kept his own counsel and admitted few to his
thinking." 3

The man chosen by Pius XI to replace Cardinal Gasparri
on his retirement as Secretary of State would himself be
described in much the same words, but to these would be
added the adjectives "baffling," "brilliant," "mercurial." This
was Cardinal Eugenio Pacelli, a man of exquisite figure
and manner, a linguist, still in his fifties, who had distinguished
himself as nuncio to Bavaria and later in Berlin, and who
now was at the peak of his powers and seemingly of attain-

2 'The Pope's 'Alter Ego,' " in The Tablet (London), May 4, 1963.

3 Alec Randall, Vatican Assignment (London: Win. Heinemann,
Ltd., 1956).

VATICAN BEGINNINGS 49

ment. He was to draw young Montini, whose elegance, intel
ligence and reserve attracted him, into closer ties of work and
responsibility, so that even at this time it came to be said,
exaggeratedly, that Monsignor Montini's very being and per
sonality had been absorbed into that of Pacelli.

The final Secretary of State under whom Montini would
serve succeeded Cardinal Pacelli when the latter became Pope
Pius XII in 1939. Luigi Maglione was a prelate of great charm
and dignity, former nuncio to Berne and Paris, proud of his
Neopolitan heritage, explosive as southern Italians can be,
but trained through the years to subdue and channel his natu
ral self-assertiveness. He was appointed Secretary, it was said,
because the new Pope, although preferring in those crucial
days of 1939 to keep in his own hands the handling of the
Church's diplomatic affairs, wished to please some of the
cardinals who had elected him and who wished to see Maglione
honored. When, in fact, Maglione died in 1944, he was not
replaced.

In 1937, and still under the pontificate of Pius XI, Mon
signor Montini was named Sostituto of the Secretariat of State,
succeeding Monsignor Domenico Tardini, who in turn re
placed Archbishop Giuseppe Pizzardo as head of the Section
of Extraordinary Affairs, Pizzardo having been named car
dinal. Thus thirteen years after being called to the Secretariat
by the then Sostituto, Pizzardo, Monsignor Montini succeeded
to the post, a rise to which the word meteoric may in this case
be applied. And thus, too, his name is first linked with that of
Domenico Tardini. Together they would act as Undersecre
taries of State while a Cardinal Secretary held office, but from
1944 to 1954 they would serve together under Pius XII, acting
as his own Secretary of State.

Two more dissimilar types could not at first be imagined.
Domenico Tardini was a Roman, and he never lost his Roman
wit nor his impulsive, ironic, colloquial way of talking; his

50 APOSTLE FOR OUR TIME

observations, scarcely diplomatic at times, were to become the
delight of Rome. Short and stocky, his hair close cropped and
grizzly, walking with a stoop, his face drawn and dyspeptic,
lacking in elegance, gruff with his subordinates, he was to
work in tandem with the tall, erect monsignor from Brescia,
already noted for his punctilio and reserve, in a perfect com
plement of type and talent. They possessed an instinctive af
fection and respect for one another, because in each there was
a total lack of self-seeking. In both cases the office sought the
man for the excellence he possessed.

As Sostituto (a word which cannot be adequately trans
lated by Substitute; it is best understood as the title of one of
the two Undersecretaries), Monsignor Montini's duty as head
of the Section of Ordinary Affairs was to handle, with the
assistance of his staff, informal day-to-day relations between
the Vatican and dioceses, governments, and private individuals
in areas which did not fall under the competence of one of the
Roman congregations or of Monsignor Tardini's Section of
Extraordinary Ecclesiastical Affairs, which dealt with the
formal relationships between the Church and governments.
The ordinary business of the Church which the Pope might
wish to discharge by means of his Secretariat of State fell
to the section under Monsignor Montini. As a section, the
first section under Tardini was traditionally the more im
portant, and its Italian character and personnel were jealously
maintained by him during his tenure. Monsignor Montini was
always, on the contrary, to welcome the addition of personnel
of other than Italian background, and the second section
which he led today owes to frim the international character
which distinguishes it.

In May of 1938, Monsignor Montini accompanied the
papal legate, Cardinal Pacelli, to the Eucharistic Congress in
Budapest, a mark of the special place he already possessed in
the affection and esteem of Pacelli. He was not often able to

VATICAN BEGINNINGS 51

indulge his love for travel during those Vatican years, but the
visit to Budapest, the vision of the city alight with torches,
the Eucharistic procession down the Danube, the hundreds of
thousands on their knees before their Lord, moved him
strongly, then and later, as Budapest underwent the passion
for which this congress seems almost to have been the prelude.

He sent his family a photograph of himself in Budapest,
smilingly crossing the street before the royal palace in the
company of Bishop Tredici (later to be one of the co-
consecrators when Montini became archbishop of Milan),
the collar high and white, the arm swinging jauntily, the
silver-buckled shoes skirting a puddle of water. His father
sent the photograph to his sister Bettina, and wrote on it:
"I am sure that you too will be consoled to see the smiling
face of our dear little son. He begins his vacation at the end of
August."

Vacations were about to become the rarest of Monsignor
Montinf s experiences, memories almost, as the fateful year
1939 dawned. At the age of eighty-one, the Pope who had
started life as a librarian scholar and finished it as the fighting
Pope, died. His last wish, it was said, was that his successor
be the one who was closest to him and best suited for the
Church in the age of war, the winter of the Church just dawn
ing his Cardinal Secretary of State, Pacelli. But Secretaries of
State are notoriously unlikely candidates; they have taken too
many positions; they have irritated lord cardinals and lord
princes; governments have been admonished by them and in
turn have not been amused. And when to all this is added
the weight of the incantation, "He who enters the Conclave a
Pope exits a cardinal," it seemed clear that Pacelli could not
possibly be elected.

Nevertheless Eugenio Pacelli was promptly chosen on the
third ballot in one of the shortest conclaves in history. He

52 APOSTLE FOR OUR TIME

took the name Pius in memory and honor of his predecessor
and began the reign which would begin in war, would witness
peace, and bring the Papacy, through the personal vigor and
indefatigable witness of the Pope himself, to that peak of
prestige from which the gentle John, his successor, would
smile on the world and speak to it in such a way that suddenly
it would seem wonderfully possible for men, all men, to love
one another again in a kind of new Eden. The age of Pacelli
made the age of Roncalli possible.

Beside Pius XII, throughout most of his reign, until sud
denly he was appointed to Milan, Monsignor Montini was to
be a part of the greatness of that pontificate. Many affairs of
state which Pius XI had directed from a small private office
with the aid of two assistants were now placed under the
Secretariat of State and personally under Monsignor Montini.
He would eclipse in closeness to the Pope and identity with
him his colleague Tardini, and yet Tardini would remain in
Rome in 1954 while Montini departed for Milan and later
would become Secretary of State under John XXIII. Monsignor
Montini was never to be Secretary of State: he would share the
office for two years with the ever present Tardini, from 1952
to 1954, but an office shared is simply that, and he would
leave the Secretariat without being named to join the dis
tinguished Secretaries of State of the modern Church: Ram-
polla, Merry Del Val, Gasparri and Pacelli.

The "prophecy of Malachy" had foretold a pontiff who
would be a Pastor Angelicus, and Pius XITs first efforts as
pastor were in the direction of preventing the war which every
one knew was coming and which the nations of the world
seemed to be awaiting in a kind of fatalistic apathy. The
memory of Julius II who rode out to battle was evoked, but
Pius was no Julius. "They have given us a Pope of peace and
what we need is a Pope of war!" He spoke movingly, pas
sionately for peace; his voice, like that of Benedict, was not

VATICAN BEGINNINGS 53

heard. His beloved Italy waited calculatingly and then moved
to join Germany, and all of Europe was in flames. The
Vatican, a sovereign State since the Lateran Treaty of 1929,
was to test and prove that sovereignty as well as its complete
neutrality in the following war years. They were years, too,
in which the true testing and proving of Monsignor Montini
would be made, as the Pope gave into his hands the mounting
and directing of the massive relief work of the Vatican.

A service for the prisoners of war was instituted by Mon
signor Montini, the Vatican Radio employed to bring infor
mation concerning them to their loved ones, and he was also
to be instrumental in setting up an office for the resettlement
of the thousands who had been removed from their own
countries to concentration camps. No phase of mercy or as
sistance, immediate and personal as it might be, was over
looked by the monsignor who worked eighteen hours a day,
matching hour for hour the Holy Father whose schedule of
work was already legendary.

To his office each day came prelates and ambassadors,
generals and journalists to it too came the frightened people
who filled Europe and who filtered through Rome in these
early years of the 40's. Such people were Aldo Mopurgo, his
wife, his mother, and their little son Augusto, aged four.
They were Jews, and in 1942 Jews in Europe went in fear of
their lives. The Mopurgos were stranded in Rome, their only
hope being escape from Europe. They were advised to seek
help at the Vatican and the man who greeted them warmly
and offered it was Monsignor Montini. The Mopurgos now
live in Kew Gardens, Long Island, New York, and they
remember that day vividly. "At the Vatican I was introduced
to Monsignor Montini," says Mr. Mopurgo. "What a man!
What a heart! He was the easiest man in the world to talk to,
and he made me feel very good because he was so very warm
and understanding. We couldn't work and we were afraid for

54 APOSTLE FOR OUR TIME

our lives. We wanted to get out of Europe. He gave us new
hope. He told us exactly what to do. He was very kind and
very efficient" Through Monsignor Montini they obtained a
visa to go to Ecuador, but when they tried to cross the
Spanish border from France it was closed by the Spanish
authorities. Their luggage was in Spain, and they were in
despair. It was winter, and there seemed to be no hope.

"My husband decided to rush back to Rome and see the
only man we could turn to our Monsignor Montini," says
Mrs. Mopurgo. "He gave my husband an introduction to
General Franco's brother-in-law and soon we had the neces
sary permission from the Spanish embassy."

The Mopurgos stayed in Ecuador until 1946, when they
entered the United States and became citizens in 1951. Mr.
Mopurgo's mother died in 1962, and little Augusto, who fled
across Europe in winter at the age of four, his only crime
that he was a Jew, is now in Italy as an architect for the
American Archaeological Excavations of Princeton. One hu
man drama, one family given hope by the slim monsignor
with the enormous eyes who could make the great and the
simple feel in conversation with him that only they mattered
and that his only task of the day was to talk to them and, if
possible, assist them.

In only one arena was the Vatican not neutral that of
human suffering. During the war thousands of Jewish refu
gees were assisted by the Holy See; they found shelter in
churches and institutions which, although outside Vatican
City itself, were considered extensions of the Vatican by rea
son of "extraterritoriality" and thus immune to search and
seizure. According to one Jewish leader familiar with the
background, no less than 15,000 Jews were sheltered at Cas-
telgandolfo, the summer home of the Pope. Throughout Rome,
priests and nuns, often at great personal risk, smuggled Jews
to places of sanctuary in churches, monasteries and other in-

VATICAN BEGINNINGS 55

stitutions. More than 180 places of refuge were made avail
able in Rome and secret asylum given to more than 7,000
refugee Jews. "Rome became one great cloister and all in it
were safe." When ransom in gold could not be raised by the
Jewish community in Rome, Pope Pius XTT personally sent
the sum needed. The worst excesses of anti-Semitism never
took root in Italy. After the war the Grand Rabbis of Rome
and Budapest would personally thank the Pope for his efforts
on behalf of their people.

But after the war too there would be voices raised to ques
tion the policy, or the lack of it, on the part of the Holy See,
toward the deportation and mass murder of Jews throughout
Europe with the aim of the extermination of the race desired
by the Third Reich. If only, it was whispered, the Pope had
taken drastic action, excommunicated Hitler, or repudiated
the concordat between the Vatican and Germany, if only he
had protested in the name of morality and humanity, he
could have stopped it all.

It is in this context that the pontificate of Pius XTT is an
illustration of the specific difficulties facing a supranational
institution confronting a world made up of competing na
tional sovereignties. There is a limit to the power of the
Papacy. The Pope is a spiritual sovereign, not a political
power in the modern sense ("How many divisions does the
Pope have?" Joseph Stalin was to ask) , incapable of protect
ing his children and their shepherds from persecution within
their own lands. "The days are long past when a Pope could
by his authority stop a war, bring about a truce, or change a
government's action by excommunicating its rulers, or when
nations could declare themselves subject to the Pope because
this guaranteed their independence." 4 Pope Pius was poign
antly aware of this even if his postwar critics were not.

"There is evidence that he felt himself in an agonizing

4 Alec Randall in The Listener, London, June 27, 1963, p. 1067.

56 APOSTLE FOR OUR TIME

dilemma. He was acutely aware of the fact that energetic pro
tests had driven the ruthless and wicked man who dominated
most of Europe to even more terrible extremes." 5 The Pope's
correspondence with Bishop (later Cardinal) Preysing of Ber
lin demonstrates his true convictions. Writing on February 27,
1943, to commend the bishop for his declarations denouncing
the inhumanities of the National Socialist dictatorship, Pope
Pius said: "We are grateful, Venerable Brother, for the clear
and plain words which you have addressed under divers cir
cumstances to your faithful, and through them to public opin
ion. We are thin Icing among others of your exposition of June
28, 1942, of the Christian concept of law; of your declara
tion on All Souls' Day, last November, regarding the right of
all men to life and love; We think particularly of your pas
toral letter of Advent circulated in the ecclesiastical provinces
of West Germany, upon the rights of God, of the individual
and of the family."

The pastoral letter to which the Pope referred was Bishop
Prey sing's reply to Hitler's decision to exterminate the Jews.
Cardinal Frings and the future Cardinal von Galen had it
adopted by all the bishops of Western Germany and read
from the pulpit in every parish. It said in part: "All the funda
mental rights of man the right to life, to bodily integrity, to
liberty, to property, to a marriage which does not depend on
the arbitrary will of the State cannot be denied to those
not of our blood or who do not speak our language. ... To
deny these rights, or to act with cruelty against our fellow
men is an injustice not only to the foreigner but also to our
own people."

In his letter to Bishop Preysing, Pius XII said of the
Berlin Catholics: "As chief Pastor of the faithful, we are
anxious to see your Catholics preserve their convictions and
their faith pure from all compromises with principles and

5 Op. cit.

VATICAN BEGINNINGS 57

acts which are in contradiction to the law of God and the
spirit of Christ, and often even tarn them into derision. We
have been consoled to learn that Catholics, especially those
of Berlin, have shown much charity toward the oppressed
non-Aryans, and in this connection We address a word of
paternal gratitude and deep sympathy to Monsignor Lighten-
berg, who is now in prison." 6

"There is no doubt," says Sir D'Arcy Osborne, "in fact His
Holiness said as much to me on one occasion, that he believed
he had condemned Nazi atrocities in a letter he himself had
written, in his wartime Christinas messages and other
speeches." "There was no doubt," continues the British war
time minister to the Holy See, "of his convictions and inten
tions but there was admittedly no clear and unequivocal con
demnation. . . . Were not the Germans, including Catholic
Gemans, so hypnotized and morally enslaved by Hitler as to
be impervious to any warning or appeal?" Osborne says in
the same context: ". . . the language of his addresses was
often so prolix and obscure that it was difficult to extract his
meaning from its extraneous verbal envelope (I have been
told that his style was based on a marriage between Cicero
andBossuet)." 7

The dilemma was inescapable. And because there are here
all the elements of the classic tragedy of a good man con
fronting evil and knowing the excruciating pain of being
unable to confound it, it called for dramatization. A young
German, Rolf Hochhuth, brought his play, Der Stellvertreter,
to the Berlin stage in February, 1963, and plans were made for
presentations to follow in London, New York, and Paris.

e Monsignor Lightenberg, provost of the Berlin cathedral chapter,
was a leading spirit in an organization which Bishop Preysing had cre
ated to aid Catholics of Jewish origin. He died in the convoy on his
way to a concentration camp.

7 D'Arcy Osborne, in London Times, May 20, 1963.

58 APOSTLE FOR OUR TIME

"The Vicar (der Stellvertreter} " says George Steiner in
Ms article in the London Sunday Times for May 5, 1963,
entitled "Papal Policy and Mass Murder," inquires with un
believing cold fury into one "of the most abject episodes of
modern history: the refusal of the Vatican to intervene against
Hitler's slaughter of the Jewish people." Steiner asks a series
of inflammatory questions: "Why did Pope Pius XII make
only the most perfunctory of protests when Jewish families
were dragged into Gestapo vans under his very windows?
. . . What mesh of cowardice, indifference or high policy lay
behind the fact (glowingly noted by Hitler's envoy to the
Holy See) that the Pope 'though urged to do so by various
parties' had avoided any 'trenchant pronouncement against
the deportation of the Jews'?" He quotes Mauriac: " 'We
did not have the consolation of hearing the Successor of the
Galilean, Simon Petrus, condemn with unequivocal plain
words and not with mere diplomatic hints, the crucifixion of
innumerable kindred of the Lord's.' " "The Nazis feared the
possibility of Papal and Catholic action," says Steiner. "The
King of Denmark put on a yellow star. The Vicar of Christ
did not. . . . The Vatican, informed by Polish clergy of
what was happening hour by hour in the ovens and bunkers of
Belsen, assured them that prayers were being said for 'our
Jewish brothers.' " "Why this evasion," asks Steiner, "why this
terrible silence?"

Hochhuth, 8 in his at times wildly imaginative reconstruc-

8 "Rolf Hochhuth ... a Protestant of thirty-two years of age, be*
longed formerly to a Nazi youth organization. 1 was fourteen in 1945,'
he said, *and the total collapse of Germany shook me profoundly. I
could not help thinking this: What would you have done had you been
of an age to act? This led me to study what the supreme representative
of the Christian idea had done in regard to all those crimes.' ... He
affirms that his play is not anti-Catholic. 'It is too Christian for one to
think this,* he says, and on several occasions he has paid homage to the

VATICAN BEGINNINGS 59

tion of history, believes the answer lies in the coldly com
plex, antisocial and essentially diplomatic temperament of
Pius XII, and under him the Vatican's specific view of the
Second World War. In Der Stellvertreter, Pius XII sees Bol
shevism as the final supreme evil. Hitler is a passing menace;
limited defeat might even render him a useful citizen. The
slaughtered Jews may represent part of God's mystical design;
He will make good their agony. Soviet victory would mean
the end of Christianity. Individually the Pope appears as a
man of deep mercy, but as head of the Church militant he
cannot risk an open fight with Hitler. There is a confronta
tion in the play between the Pope and the young Jesuit Ric-
cardo Fontana, and Fontana flees in horror from the Pope's
lesson in statecraft. He dies in Auschwitz, taunted by the
"Doctor of Auschwitz" who tells him that the Church, refusing
to act now, will at a future safe date canonize him to her credit.
"No speck of ash from the ovens of Belsen will be allowed to
stain the white garment of Pius XII." The play ends in de
spair.

From his prison, the young Jesuit Alfred Delp soon to be
executed by the Nazis, had written some years before: "The
Vatican and the Church are to be considered. So far as con
crete and visible influence goes, the attitude of the Vatican
is not what it was. ... Of course it will be shown eventually
that the Pope did his duty and more, that he offered peace
. . . that he dispensed alms and was tireless in his work on
behalf of prisoners of war, displaced persons and so on all
this we know and posterity will have documentary evidence
in plenty to show the full extent of the papal effort. But to a
large extent all this good work may be taken for granted and
also to a large extent it leads nowhere and has no real hope of

innumerable Catholic priests who defended the Jews." Informations
catholiques Internationales, April 1, 1963.

60 APOSTLE FOR OUR TIME

achieving anything. That is the real root of the trouble
among all the protagonists in the tragic drama of the modern
world there is not one who fundamentally cares in the least
what the Church says or does. We overrated the Church's
political machine and let it run on long after its essential
driving power had ceased to function. It makes absolutely
no difference so far as the beneficial influence of the Church
is concerned whether a state maintains diplomatic relations
with the Vatican or not. The only thing that really matters is
the inherent power of the Church as a religious force in the
countries concerned." 9

While Pope Pius may not have been as forceful as hind
sight might urge, he was incapable of a morally unworthy
action, not to speak of any calculated policy in the matter.
The German bishops, following a meeting held March 4-6,
1963, published a statement paying tribute to the memory of
Pope Pius XII, to his efforts to avoid war and bring about
peace, and to his aid to suffering men and peoples. "We there
fore find it particularly scandalous," they declared, "that it is
among the German people that the action of Pope Pius is
falsely represented and his memory profaned.** But his best
defense has been written by the man who saw him wrestle
with the indecision to which he was prone, 10 determined to
protect his prospects as a possible mediator, that he might
assist in putting an end to the sufferings of humanity. He was
not asked and herein, as Vicar of the Prince of Peace, lay
his greatest suffering. The following letter written by the
cardinal archbishop of Milan, one of the last he was to write
before entering the conclave which elected him Pope, is from
the man who knew Pius XII best at this time, and knew also
of the agonies a man can suffer though he be dressed in the

9 The Prison Meditations of Father Alfred Delp (New York: Herder
and Herder, 1963).

10 Cardinal Tardini in his book Pio XII is the authority for this.

VATICAN BEGINNINGS 61

white of innocence, live in a storied palace, be the judge of
prelates and princes, and a successor to one who himself
suffered the pain of indecision ("Simon, Simon, I have prayed
for you that Satan not sift you as wheat") .

The letter written by Cardinal Montini to the editor of the
London Tablet, and published in its issue of June 29, 1963,
reads as follows:

Dear Sir, It gave me much pleasure to read the article entitled
"Pius XII and the Jews," which appeared in your excellent period
ical on May llth, 1963: it was a most welcome defence not only
of Pope Pius XII, of venerated memory, and of the Holy See, but
also of historical truth and sound logic, not to speak of common-
sense.

It is not my intention here to examine the question raised by the
author and the producer, Rolf Hochhuth and Erwin Piscator re
spectively, of the play Der Stellvertreter ("The Vicar"): namely,
whether it was Pius XIFs duty to condemn in some public and
spectacular way the massacres of the Jews during the last war.
Much, to be sure, might still be said on this point, even after the
very clear and cogent article in L'Osservatore Romano of April
5th; for the thesis of Herr Hochhuth's play that, to quote Mr.
George Steiner's review in the Sunday Times of May 5th, "We are
all accomplices to that which leaves us indifferent" bears no re
lation whatever to the personality or the work of Pope Pius XII. I
cannot myself conceive how anyone could bring such a charge (let
alone make it the subject of a play) against a Pontiff who might
well, had he wished, have declared with a clear conscience to the
whole world: "No effort on our part was lacking, nothing that
anxious solicitude could suggest was left untried to prevent the
horrors of mass deportation and exile; and when despite our just
expectations this proved impossible, we set ourselves to do every
thing in our power to mitigate, at least, the cruelties of a state of af
fairs imposed by brute force." But history a very different thing
from such artificial manipulation of facts to fit a preconceived idea
as we see in Der Stellvertreter will vindicate the conduct of Pius
XII when confronted by the criminal excesses of the Nazi regime:

62 APOSTLE FOR OUR TIME

history will show how vigilant, persistent, disinterested and coura
geous that conduct must be judged to have been, when viewed in
its true context, in the concrete conditions of that time.

For my part I conceive it my duty to contribute to the task of
clarifying and purifying men's judgment on the historical reality
in question so distorted in the representational pseudo-reality of
Hochhuth's play by pointing out that the character given to Pius
XII in this play (to judge from the reviews in the Press) does not
represent the man as he really was: in fact, it entirely misrepresents
him. I am in a position to assert this because it was my good for
tune to be drawn into close contact with Pius XII during his pon
tificate, serving him day by day, from 1937, when he was still
Secretary of State, to 1954: throughout, that is, the whole period
of the world war.

It is true that the precise scope of my duties did not include for
eign affairs ("extraordinary" affairs, as they are called in the lan
guage of the Roman Curia) ; but Pius XITs goodness towards me
personally, and the nature itself of my work as "Sostituto" in the
Secretariat of State, gave me access to the mind and, I would add,
to the heart of this great Pope. The image of Pius XII which Hoch-
huth presents, or is said to present, is a false one. For example, it is
utterly false to tax Pius with cowardice: both his natural tempera
ment and the consciousness that he had of the authority and the
mission entrusted to him, speak clearly against such an accusation.
I could cite a host of particular facts to drive this point home, facts
that would prove that the frail and gentle exterior of Pius XII, and
the sustained refinement and moderation of his language, concealed
if they did not, rather, reveal a noble and virile character capa
ble of taking very firm decisions and of adopting, fearlessly, posi
tions that entailed considerable risk.

Nor is it true that he was a heartless solitary. On the contrary, he
was a man of exquisite sensibility and the most delicate human
sympathies. True, he did love solitude: his richly cultivated mind,
his unusual capacity for thought and study led him to avoid all use
less distractions, every unnecessary relaxation; but he was quite the
reverse of a man shut away from life and indifferent to people and
events around him. Rather, it was his constant desire to be in-

VATICAN BEGINNINGS 63

formed of everything. He wished to enter fully into the history of
his own afflicted time: with a deep sense that he himself was a part
of that history, he wished to participate fully in it, to share its suf
ferings in his own heart and soul. Let me cite, in this connexion,
the words of a well-qualified witness, Sir D'Arcy Osborne, the
British Minister to the Holy See who, when the Germans occupied
Rome, was obliged to live confined in the Vatican City. Writing to
The Times on May 20th, Sir D'Arcy said: "Pius XII was the most
warmly humane, kindly, generous, sympathetic (and, incidentally,
saintly) character that it has been my privilege to meet in the
course of a long life."

Again, it is not true to say that Pope Pius XITs conduct was in
spired by a calculating political opportunism. It would be just as
true and as slanderous to assert that his government of the
Church was motivated by considerations of material advantage.

As for his omitting to take up a position of violent opposition to
Hitler in order to save the lives of those minions of Jews slaughtered
by the Nazis, this will be readily understood by anyone who avoids
Hochhuth's mistake of trying to assess what could have been effec
tively and responsibly done then, in those appalling conditions of
war and Nazi oppression, by the standard of what would be feasi
ble in normal conditions or in some hypothetical conditions ar
bitrarily invented by a young playwright's imagination. An attitude
of protest and condemnation such as this young man blames the
Pope for not having adopted would have been not only futile but
harmful: that is the long and the short of the matter. The thesis of
Der Stellvertreter betrays an inadequate grasp of psychological, po
litical and historical realities. But then the author was concerned
above all to write an interesting play.

Let us suppose that Pius XII had done what Hochhuth blames
him for not doing. His action would have led to such reprisals and
devastations that Hochhuth himself, the war being over and he now
possessed of a better historical, political and moral judgment,
would have been able to write another play, far more realistic
and far more interesting than the one that he has in fact so cleverly
but also so ineptly put together: a play, that is, about the Stellver
treter who, through political exhibitionism or psychological myopia,

64 APOSTLE FOR OUR TIME

would have been guilty of unleashing on the already tormented
world still greater calamities involving innumerable innocent vic
tims, let alone himself.

It would be as well if the creative imagination of playwrights
insufficiently endowed with historical discernment (and possibly,
though please God it is not so, with ordinary human integrity)
would forebear from trifling with subjects of this kind and with his
torical personages whom some of us have known. In the present
case the real drama, and tragedy, is not what the playwright im
agines it to be: it is the tragedy of one who tries to impute to a
Pope who was acutely aware both of his own moral obligations and
of historical reality and was moreover a very loyal as well as im
partial friend to the people of Germany the horrible crimes of
German Nazism.

Let some men say what they will, Pius XII's reputation as a
true Vicar of Christ, as one who tried, so far as he could, fully and
courageously to carry out the mission entrusted to him, will not be
affected. But what is the gain to art and culture when the theatre
lends itself to injustice of this sort?

With my sincere respects, devotedly yours,

8BG. B. CARDINAL MONTINI
Archbishop of Milan

Throughout the war the Vatican maintained its relations
with both the Axis and Allied powers, the representatives of
the latter housed in the Vatican, 11 the former until the de
clining years of the war free to go between the Vatican and the
city of Rome, closed to their confreres who had become the
enemy. Monsignor Montini dealt with impeccable cordiality
and neutrality with all the representatives. During the larger
receptions in the Vatican all representatives of the diplomatic
corps accredited to the Vatican were present, and by reason
of seniority the ambassador of Germany, Dr. Diego von Ber
gen, and the British minister, Sir Francis D'Arcy Osborne,

11 Cf. Thomas B. Morgan, The Listening Post (New York: G. P.
Putnam's Sons, 1944), p. 207.

VATICAN BEGINNINGS 65

would have found themselves sitting together. Monsignor
Montini chose to sit between them, dividing his attention im
partially, his every smile and gesture in one direction repeated
in the other.

Mr. Myron Taylor, personal representative of President
Roosevelt to the person of the Holy Father during the war
wrote: ". . . the two principal Under Secretaries of State
were Monsignor Domenico Tardini and Monsignor Giovanni
B. Montini on both of whom it was always possible to depend
for sympathetic and intelligent consideration of problems,
whether burdensome or not." ^

One of the Pope's greatest anxieties after Italy's entry into
the war was the possibility that Rome might be subjected to
aerial attack. For months he and his staff tried through diplo
matic channels to persuade the Italian government to demili
tarize target areas and proclaim Rome an open city. On May
18, 1943, he addressed a personal plea to President Roosevelt
expressing the hope that the people of Italy would be given
consideration and that their many treasured shrines of religion
and art would be spared from ruin. The President replied by
pledging that Allied airmen "to the extent humanly possible"
would refrain from bombing purely civilian objectives, but
the Pope's redoubled efforts to have Rome declared an open
city were not at that time successful on either side.

On July 19, 1943, at 11 A.M., American planes carrying
out an assault on railroad junctions in the periphery of Rome,
bombed a section of the city in which the ancient Church of
Saint Lawrence Outside the Walls was located. Many of the
bombs fell on the surrounding civilian district, a crowded sec
tor chiefly inhabited by workers, and on a hospital, religious
buildings, and on one of the largest cemeteries in Rome.

From the windows of his study, where he was receiving

12 Wartime Correspondence between President Roosevelt and Pope
Pius XII (Macmfflan: New York, 1947), p. 7.

66 APOSTLE FOR OUR TIME

official visitors, Pius Xn could see the raid, which lasted for
two hours. Soon after it began, he cancelled his remaining
appointments and stood watching as he recited the prayers
for the dying. Very shortly after the bombing was over he
was in the area, accompanied by Monsignor Montini, consol
ing the wounded and weeping people, moving among them,
careless of the dirt and blood on his cassock. He had directed
Monsignor Montini to bring all the cash he could obtain,
about two million lire, and the latter distributed the money to
those most gravely in need. They found that the Basilica of
Saint Lawrence had been hit several times; the roof had fallen
in and the fagade and vestibule were destroyed; in the neigh
boring cemetery, bombs had torn up the graves and wrecked
among others the tombs of the Pontiffs own family, the
Pacellis. Deeply affected, the Pope climbed up on the rubble
of the basilica to pray. "Up to the last day of Our life," he
said some years later, "We will remember this sorrowful occa
sion."

On returning to the Vatican he wrote at once to the Presi
dent of the United States: "We have had to witness the har
rowing scene of death leaping from the skies and stalking
pitilessly through unsuspecting homes, striking down women
and children; and in person We have visited the gaping ruins
of that ancient and priceless papal basilica of Saint Lawrence,
one of the most treasured and loved sanctuaries of the Ro
mans. . . . We feel it Our duty to voice a particular prayer
and hope that all may recognize that a city whose every dis
trict, in some districts every street, has its irreplaceable monu
ments of faith or art and Christian culture, cannot be attacked
without inflicting an incomparable loss on the patrimony of
religion and civilization."

The next day in a letter addressed to Cardinal Francesco
Marchetti-Selvaggiani, vicar general of Rome, Pope Pius in
even stronger terms recalled his repeated appeals to both

VATICAN BEGINNINGS 67

groups of belligerents "to respect the inviolability of peaceful
monuments of faith and civilization." This letter, published
in Osservatore Romano, said that the "authority with which
We, although unworthy, are invested, the recognition of our
thorough impartiality and liberality toward all, apart from
nationality and religion, would have given us at least the con
solation that both the belligerent parties would have lent an
ear to our mediation on behalf of Rome."

No official protest was made to the Allies but Pope Pius
renewed his appeals for the proclamation of an open city.
The American President indicated his approval but pointed
out that Mussolini had so far resisted every demand to demili
tarize Rome. The city was bombed for the second time on
August 13, 1943, and as before, the Pope and Monsignor
Montini were among the first on the scene in the San Giovanni
district near the basilica of Saint John Lateran where the
bombs had fallen, giving comfort to the wounded, praying
for the dead, and distributing alms. After this raid, through
the representations of the Pope acting directly and through
his Secretariat of State with the powers on both sides, Rome
was declared an open city and Pope Pius XII received a title
which as a Roman was particularly dear to him: Defensor
Civitatis Defender of the City.

4. "Cloister of Ciphers and
Secrets"

When the Secretary of State, Cardinal Maglione, died in 1944,
and Pius XII appointed no successor to him from the College
of Cardinals, it was obvious that the Pope was content with
what had been the working arrangement for some time: acting
as his own Secretary of State with the assistance of Montini
and Tardini. The arrangement was to be criticized as it con
tinued through the years. With all their ability, knowledge,
and helpfulness, it was felt that the two could not in all cir
cumstances fill the position of a fully authorized Cardinal
Secretary of State. Access by members of the diplomatic corps
to the Pope grew increasingly difficult, and grumbling was
heard concerning excessive centralization and insufficient con
tact, in matters of detail, with the outside world. The Pope,
especially after the Holy Year of 1950, became more isolated
from both diplomats and cardinals, lavishing his time and en
ergies on countless audiences to all classes of people.

Thus it was to Monsignor Montini that diplomats and car
dinals came, to his small waiting room with its uncomfortable
gilt chairs, the damasked-wall salon, the large office with its

68

"CLOISTER OF CIPHERS AND SECRETS" 69

desk piled high with papers ("these are the cards I play with
all day, 5 ' he would say deprecatingly), and to him they would
say what they wished to have communicated to the Holy Fa
ther.

"The paradox about Montini, the diplomat/' it was said,
"lies in the apparent lack of diplomacy, the seemingly unself-
conscious willingness to speak openly and frankly." Yet a col
league of those days testifies that no word left the lips of the
Sostituto without its having been fitted carefully to the thought
he sought to express; no unguarded word, no careless phrase,
yet always the willingness to enter into dialogue and say as
much as he could and as much as his visitor desired without
doing violence to his office and loyalty to the Holy Father.
"He is . . , a man who, speaking with whoever goes to seek
him out, does not shut himself off, as so many do and as he
himself has a right to do, in a meandering tour of the subjects
which are his proper competence, but he willingly ranges far
beyond. He has interests and curiosities and experiences in the
widest fields of culture, he always has some information he
wants from his visitor in these fields, and his own judgments
and observations in areas far removed from his everyday activ
ities are always personal and reasoned."

Endlessly seeking to accommodate, to reconcile, to pacify
and assist, advancing the views of a government or a supe
rior, any diplomat may emerge without the hardness, the con
viction at the core of his being, which would make him, should
he be called, a leader rather than the leader's interpreter.
Translators, no matter how brilliant, do not necessarily, when
they turn to writing books, produce works of genius. Monsig-
nor Montini was for the years he worked under Pius XII an
interpreter, a translator into word and action of the mind and
heart of the Holy Father. But the role as he conceived it was
essentially a creative one, demanding a sensitivity to nuance
and intention which would articulate by organization, by

70 APOSTLE FOR OUR TIME

word, by letter, the fully formed or half -expressed wishes of
the Pope.

Popes do not rule by inspiration. Theirs is the way of men,
aided by grace, of using human means with the assistance of
men whose brilliance and loyalty make them worthy of intimacy
and trust. Pius XII had at his disposition a Curia of talented
and devoted men, yet it was to one man that he turned most
often. The reason cannot be sought in the one often adduced:
that in their thinking on all questions they were perfectly and
intuitively identified. There is reason to believe that the think
ing of Pope Pius XII on the world and on the Church was
more perfectly shared by Monsignor Tardini, a perspective, in
some areas, of limited dimensions, less modern and compre
hensive than Monsignor Montini's, even though it must be
insisted no other Pope gave to the modern world a body of
teaching on religious and ethical questions equal to that of
Pius XII.

But as the perfect servitor of the Pope, Montini chose to be
a shadow, as Pacelli had been a shadow of Pius XI, meticu
lously implementing the policy of the Pontiff whatever be the
personal reservations as to its wisdom, never uttering a per
sonal opinion or committing himself on any public issues. 1
'This XH was an exacting master. Reserved, cautious,
brusquely obstinate, outwardly mild but easily irritated, he de
manded of all who served him that they keep him informed,
not advised." 2

Perfect obedience does not mean the prostration of the heart
and mind; the one who serves and obeys continues to be a man,
with his own obligation to truth and the vision of how it must
be discovered and implemented. Monsignor Montini served
the Pope and truth in perfect harmony for fifteen years.

1 Dante defines the true counselor as "one who discerns, wills aright,
and accepts."

* Alec Randall, in London Tablet, May 4, 1963.

"CLOISTER OF CIPHERS AND SECRETS" 71

Shortly before Monsignor Montini's parents died (the father
in 1943, the mother a year later) the Pope said to them:
"Your son possesses every priestly quality in the highest pos
sible degree." It was to Montini, the priest, not the diplomat
or servitor, that the prayerful, ascetic, even holy Pope, pointed
when he sought to tell the parents what it was he most es
teemed in their son. Every good priest respects the integrity
of his fellow priests in their witness; if Pius XII sensed re
serves of thought and action in his Sostituto, he did not ask
that they be opened to him or violated. Thus in harmony and
mutual respect they worked for the Church. The right eye of
the Pope, the Roman press called him, and the irrepressible
Romans would say: "Why go to the Monte (Mountain) when
things can be more quickly done by going to Montini (little
Mountain)?"

In May, 1945, Monsignor Montini celebrated the twenty-
fifth anniversary of his ordination as a priest, and Pius XH
wrote him in part: "Since we are aware that those who esteem
your high qualities, and their number is legion, are preparing
to celebrate this date, we wish to anticipate the celebration
with this Our letter, We who for so long and better than any
other know your outstanding gifts, your notable talents, your
diligence and your piety." Accompanying the letter was the
gift of a handsome chalice, and Monsignor Montini used it in
celebrating his anniversary Mass in the Chiesa Nuova of Saint
Philip Neri.

The postwar years saw the work of the Secretariat intensify
in the direction of assisting in the relocation of the millions
rendered homeless and stateless by the war. These were the
years of anguish for the Church in Eastern Europe, "the
Church of Silence," as it would become and would be named
by Pius XII, with the prosecutions of prelates such as Minds-
zenty, Stepinac, and Beran. In order to highlight the injustice

72 APOSTLE FOR OUR TIME

of their sentencing, the Vatican through the Secretariat of State
presented a complete picture of the true roles which these men,
now accused of treason and crimes against the state, had
played in the life of their countries. Montini was mentioned
in the trials which sought to discredit churchmen in Czecho
slovakia and Hungary. In the August 3, 1949 issue of the
Czechoslovak Communist paper Rude Pravo, an article charges
that the head of an "Organization X," had decided to make a
martyr of Archbishop Ber an because the organization was dis
pleased by the relaxing of East-West tensions. "The members
of the organization, who were linked in some mysterious way
with ... the general of the Jesuits and Monsignor Montini,
were directing sabotage, espionage and various other disturb
ances in countries that refused to submit to Capitalism." 3

"After the imprisonment of Cardinal Mindszenty, many of
his responsibilities were assumed by Archbishop Josef Groesz
of Kalocsa, whose duty it was to keep in contact with the Holy
See and resist all pressure for the establishment of a national
Church. He was arrested therefore in May 1951 and brought
in for sentencing the following month. With the same mystify
ing calm (as shown by Mindszenty) ... he confessed to
everything required of him. . . . Archbishop Groesz involved
Pope Pius XII, Cardinal Spellman and Monsignor Montini of
the Vatican Secretariat of State in a fantastic plot to make him
self the head of the State with the title Homo Regius." 4

In these postwar years Monsignor Montini, always deeply
interested in social questions, took a leading part in the found
ing of the Pontifical Work of Assistance (to the poor and
dispossessed), the Association of Christian Workers (ACLI),

3 Robert I. Gannon, The Cardinal Spellman Story (New York:
Doubleday, 1962), p. 346.

4 Op. cit., p. 340. These fantasies reflect, perhaps, a persistent nerv
ousness on the part of Communist-dominated countries concerning the
influence of America on the Vatican.

"CLOISTER OF CIPHERS AND SECRETS" 73

and of the Women's Italian Center (CEF). He supported
strongly the priest-worker movement in France, by which
priests sought to witness to Christian principles in dechristian-
ized areas of life by living and working among the Christless
masses. Many of these priests were subverted by the very
milieu they sought to change, and the defection of many
among them was a shocking and sobering experience for this
prelate, so sympathetic to modern trends and experiments.

Monsignor Montini supported the concept of the priest-
worker movement with an audacity and enthusiasm which
contrasted sharply with the suspicion and even hostility with
which it was regarded in certain quarters in Rome. When its
activity was sharply curtailed he was in agreement that new
protection and directives had to be provided, but he never
wavered in support of its basic concept: to give witness to
Christ in those places where His name was no longer known.
Some years later in Milan he said to a group of French priests:
"France is the animating spirit of life in the Church. Her
books are read everywhere. When a heresy breaks out some
where else no one knows anything about it, but if it is in
France all the world speaks of it. I have often said to French
bishops: the whole world expects from the French people a
solution from the Church's point of view. ... If the submis
sion (of the priest-workers) had been total, I believe you
would have saved the institution." 5

Italy, in 1948, held its first general election following the
war, with the Communist Party strongly organized and heav
ily financed, the Christian Democratic Party making its first
appearance, the Monarchists hoping somehow to retain the
royal house so long identified with now discredited Fascism.
It is from this period that Italian conservatives began catego
rizing Montini as "progressive" or "of the Left," their feeling
being that the decline of the Italian monarchy in 1946 could

5 Informations catholiques Internationales, July 1, 1963, p. 20.

74 APOSTLE FOR OUR TIME

have been prevented by him had he asserted himself strongly
with the Pope who, it was said, was wavering. But the Allies
in 1946 had no intention of allowing the tarnished monarchy
to confront the growing power of Communism in Italy, and
anti-Fascist Italians saw the future of Italy as associated with
the United States and Britain, headed at this time by the Demo
cratic Party and the Labor Party respectively.

In 1950, the organizing of the Holy Year was largely the
charge of Monsignor Montini as, in 1953, was that of the
Marian Year. The intention of peace in the Holy Year was
officially articulated by Monsignor Montini in May, 1949.
"The Holy Year," he said, "is part of the present Pontiff's line
of conduct; it is intended as a prolongation, an application, of
the program in everyday language we say politics of the
Holy See." This was the hope, but Monsignor Montini was
sufficiently a realist to see the chasm between hope and actu
ality. The world had come to think of peace, he said, as merely
a cessation of battle, a failure to resist. Not this, not the aban
donment of principle, not the desire to enjoy life and the
compromise making this possible, and certainly not the en
forced peace of totalitarian regimes none of these was peace.
The Holy Year, he urged, was not merely to express aspira
tions toward peace, but provide inspiration for action. It would,
no doubt, quicken the spirit of religion which, genuinely em
braced, would contribute to the peace of the world by turning
men's thoughts to the Fatherhood of God. Even at this time,
Monsignor Montini struck an ecumenical note by adding that
the Holy See expected "a powerful effect upon all men of good
faith, not only Catholics."

Of great interest to Monsignor Montini was the visit which
he made between August 20 and September 9, 1951, to Can
ada and the United States. This visit was the subject of some
speculation in the American press, although the coverage
given his visit, which was termed "unofficial" was negligible.

"CLOISTER OF CIPHERS AND SECRETS" 75

The New York Times ventured the explanation that there
were papal objections to the Japanese peace treaty which
Montini had come to the United States to express, but this
was officially denied by Monsignor Montini, who described
his first trip to North America as a holiday tour. He flew
from London to Montreal and while in Canada visited a num
ber of Catholic prelates and institutions, the shrines of Saint
Anne de Beaupre and Cap de Madeleine, also Ottawa, King
ston and Ontario. In Ottawa he lunched with the then prime
minister, Saint Laurent, and one of his stops was at a jam
boree of 3,000 Boy Scouts at Vandreuil near Quebec.

He entered the United States through Niagara Falls, N.Y.,
and was greeted at the border by the late Bishop John F.
O'Hara, C.S.C., of Buffalo, who later became cardinal arch
bishop of Philadelphia. From Buffalo he flew to Washington,
D.C., where he was met at the airport by the then apostolic
delegate to the United States, Archbishop Amleto Cicognani,
now cardinal and secretary of State of Pope Paul VI. In Wash
ington he spent four days visiting such historic sites as Mount
Vernon, the home of George Washington; toured the head
quarters of the National Catholic Welfare Conference, the
central coordinating headquarters of the U.S. hierarchy, and
met the staff at a reception to which executives of the Fed
eral government, the diplomatic corps and of national labor
unions were invited. In St. Louis he was the guest of Arch
bishop (now Cardinal) Ritter; next he swung west to Denver,
then to Chicago, where his host was the late Cardinal Stritch.
While in the latter's see city, he quietly mingled on Sunday,
September 2, with the congregations in several churches, in
cluding two for Negro Catholics. In Detroit he stayed with its
archbishop, the late Cardinal Mooney, and asked to visit the
assembly lines of one of the big auto factories. He had a per
sonal reason for visiting Pittsburgh; Monsignor Walter S. Car
roll, head of the English language section of the Secretariat

76 APOSTLE FOR OUR TIME

of State, with whom he had worked for nine years, had died
suddenly in Washington in 1950, and Montini came to visit
his family and pray at his grave. Back on the East coast, he
stopped in New York where he was the guest of Francis Car
dinal Spellman, and under his guidance saw many Catholic
institutions as well as tourist sights in and around the City. On
September 9, he recrossed the Atlantic, and made a brief visit
to Ireland on his way back to Rome.

The routine which Monsignor Montini followed for years
began at six in the morning with his meditation, Mass, and
thanksgiving in the Chapel of Julius II, followed by a break
fast of coffee and milk and bread served by his faithful house
keeper, Maria. He was in his office at about eight and his first
appointment of the morning on alternate days was with the
Holy Father. Appointments and paperwork kept him at his
desk until two o'clock and after. The Holy Father usually took
a walk in the Vatican gardens at about three, and this was
often the hour when Monsignor Montini took his lunch in
variably of soup, grilled meat and vegetable, fruit and a glass
of wine and after it a short siesta. He would read his brevi
ary, and at six o'clock be back in the office until nine or nine-
thirty. The Holy Father usually went to bed after one in the
morning, and Monsignor Montini kept his timetable as well;
he was on call day or night, and if the Pope needed him at any
hour the monsignor was ready. He was never far from the
phone which connected directly with the office of the Holy
Father, and he grew accustomed to its ring and to the soft
voice saying, "E quiPacelli (Pacelli here)." He took no holi
day for years, and only in 1950 had he agreed for the first
time to take a month off, spending two weeks at a Fiuggi spa
and the others in Concesio.

The world of Monsignor Montini, which was rather a win
dow on the world, was one in which the long perspective

"CLOISTER OF CIPHERS AND SECRETS" 77

was taken, a perspective in which history is reckoned by eras
rather than years, "a cloister of ciphers and secrets," but in its
less sensational reality a place of sober and dedicated work.
Responsible to a sensitive and meticulous man, he was in turn
sensitive and meticulous in his day-to-day dealings with his
staff, demanding but just, gentle for the most part but capable
of eye-flashing disapproval when work or attitude did not
meet his high standards. His "Relatively immediately," spoken
softly or written in his careful hand on work assigned, had a
galvanic effect on the slower moving staff men. He was impa
tient of pietistic platitudes. "Too many barks of Peter, too
many fishers of souls!" he wrote dryly on an address prepared
by a subordinate and submitted to him for approval.

He was not lavish with praise for work well done work
should be well done but he showed his appreciation by the
warmth with which he welcomed those who came to him with
personal problems. A knock at his office door, a moment to
listen to the soft-spoken "Avanti come in," and the visitor
entered the office, bare and efficient, its only disorder the piles
of documents and papers filling the desk and spilling over onto
adjacent tables. He was appreciative of brief, concise explana
tions and grateful to anyone who would be quick and be gone,
but he never showed impatience with the prolix or hesitant,
sitting quietly while his visitor spoke, his bright eyes fixed on
his face. "With his eyes," said Maria, his housekeeper for
many years until he left Rome and she was sent back to her
native Abruzzi with a sewing machine, sewing lessons, and a
bicycle as gifts, '*with his eyes he could read your soul. Some
times he would fix me with a glance and say, *Maria, tell me
the truth!' and I would tell him the truth because I loved him
and also because of those eyes!"

The eyes, somewhat disconcerting at first, are penetrating
without being curiously probing, reflecting both the intelli
gence and warmth of the man. His patience and "unflappabil-

78 APOSTLE FOR OUR TIME

ity" were legends in the Secretariat. "Only once," said a col
league, "did I ever see Mm lose control and get excited; only
once, and that was on the 10th of June, 1940, the day Italy
entered the war." His schedule of work, his care of detail, his
courtesy and efficiency were at once the inspiration and de
spair of those who sought to emulate him and who were
obliged to admit ruefully that they possessed neither the stam
ina nor inner drive of this totally dedicated man. The man
who was to succeed him in his office, Monsignor (now Arch
bishop) Angelo dell' Acqua, himself a model of hard work
and genial efficiency, said of his predecessor's schedule of
work: "He demonstrated his abnegation and love of the
Church, his dedication to duty illuminated by a great simplic
ity of life, a life of exceptional goodness and of continuing
unselfishness, which earned him first our admiration and then
our total affection." "He treated us," said a minor employee
of the Vatican, "as if we were the most important of diplo
mats."

On January 12, 1953, Pope Pius XII convened a secret
consistory of the cardinals in order to reveal to them the names
of those he intended to raise to the cardinalate in a future pub
lic consistory. In the course of the meeting the Pope said:
"There is one further matter which we cannot pass over in si
lence. It was our intention to raise to the Sacred College the
two distinguished prelates who preside, each in his own Sec
tion, over the Secretariat of State, and their names were the
first entered on the list of Cardinals-elect already prepared by
Us, However, these two prelates, giving palpable evidence of
their virtue, have so insistently requested that they be dis
pensed from accepting so high a dignity that We have con
sidered it opportune to accept their repeated petitions and de
sires in this matter. But in doing so We have also wished to
reward their future in some manner; and in fact, as you know,

"CLOISTER OF CIPHERS AND SECRETS" 79

We have given them a higher title which better and more fully
corresponds to the field of their hardworking activity."

The apostolic brief formally creating the two monsignori
Pro-Secretaries of State gave them precedence immediately
behind the cardinals, and preceding patriarchs, archbishops
and bishops; they were also given most of the privileges of
cardinals listed in the Code of Canon Law. Monsignor Mon-
tini's tasks and his relationship to the Pope remained the same.
When the delighted members of his staff went to greet him in
his new role, he received them all with a smile and handshake
and spoke beautifully, not of his new distinction, but of the
joy of service to the Holy Father. It is not the servant but the
service that matters, was the theme of his little talk as it was
the theme of his life in the Secretariat. Deprived of the op
portunity of doing the priestly work of preaching and hear
ing confessions, of talking to the young about Christ, of being
a priest with his people, Monsignor Montini, secretly and
prodigally, was a priest to the people in the charity which he
distributed during his years in the Vatican. "We exist for
others, not ourselves," he once said, "and what we possess is
not for ourselves but for them."

His only passion of acquisition centered in books, and his
apartment in the Vatican was lined with them: books on so
ciology, theology, literature, biography, choice books to satisfy
the hunger he felt for renewal in mind and spirit after the
draining hours spent serving others. He was a voracious reader
of newspapers, as became the son of a journalist, an acute ob
server of trends, critical of journalistic intemperance and
wildly speculative pondering and pontificating in print. In
his address to journalists after his election to the Papacy he
would say: "For this coverage (of Pope John's death and the
conclave), which was on the whole so dignified and reverent,
We owe you Our praise and Our gratitude. We believe that

80 APOSTLE FOR OUR TIME

Our praise and gratitude correspond to the praise and grati
tude of your numberless readers. . . . Should We dilute the
expression of Our gratitude because of any flights of fancy, in
accuracies, or anything unsuitable that may have been noticed
in reports and interpretations of this event, too pertinent to
Our person and over-controlled by public opinion? We will be
indulgent toward those arbiters of journalism and alas, they
are not so few and instead fix Our eyes on the aggregate
value of your service of disseminating information; in general
We have seen it to be considerate and well disposed toward
Our humble person, and serious and respectful toward the
Holy See, so We willingly give it the reward of Our public
recognition and of Our gratitude."

In 1954 the health of the Holy Father gave cause for con
cern. Always impatient with physical infirmities, Pius XII
drove himself to work against the advice of doctors, at seventy-
eight adhering to the schedule which had been his for years.
He seemed more dependent than ever on Monsignor Montini.
Yet in November of that year the Pope, in a move which
caused surprise and speculation in Vatican circles, named
Monsignor Montini archbishop of Milan in succession to Car
dinal Schuster. Monsignor Montini was, the Pope said grace
fully, his "gift to the people of Milan."

Monsignor Montini was stunned and overwhelmed. To the
Pope he said, "Holy Father, do you think I am capable of this
charge?" And the Pope gave him an embrace as his answer.
The apostolic letter of appointment written by the Holy Father
to his Pro-Secretary said: ". . . You, O beloved son, appeared
to Us the person most indicated [for the post] because by an
almost daily intimacy We know your excellence and talents,
your strength of soul and your sincere piety joined to zeal for
the salvation of souls. Thus in the long years in which you
have been close to Us in dedicating yourself to the care of

"CLOISTER OF CIPHERS AND SECRETS" 81

ecclesiastical matters, not only have you merited well of the
Apostolic See but you have also had a means of gaining much
experience of men and their affairs, so much so as to appear
to Us to be the one best prepared to assume the spiritual gov
ernment of that metropolis." A curial cardinal who knew
Montini well said of him at this time: "There are those who
are equal to him in intellect, but I have met none who are his
spiritual superiors. None!"

There were tears in Monsignor Montini's eyes as he made
his farewells to the Secretariat and to the diplomatic corps.
The entire corps turned out for the farewell ceremony, and in
its name the French ambassador, Count Vladimir d'Ormesson,
spoke of the strong impression made on them all by the Holy
Father's gesture of sacrifice in naming Monsignor Montini to
Milan. To Montini he said: "Monsignor, in the very heart of
Catholicism and in the service of a great Pope, you have
passed years of intensive and magnificent work; but you have
also passed years of heavy import in the history of poor hu
manity. Some among us have been able to appreciate, in the
worst moments of the torment in which we have all lived, the
constant delicacy of your heart, your spirit of justice and of
charity. . . . We who came here so often ... to set before
you many of the questions which preoccupied us, how could
we have failed to be aware of the generous understanding, the
keen intuition, the balance of mind and the inexhaustible de
sire to find the just solution in all matters which we have en
countered in you? . . . Permit me to add that what we have
respected and most loved in you is that behind the diplomatic
official we have always found the priest. Be assured, Monsig
nor, that in our eyes it is this which is most important."

Monsignor Montini was visibly moved as he rose to address
the diplomatic corps. He thanked them for their kindness,
their courtesy, their delicacy. He recalled to their minds what
they had been through together during the war: "How can we

82 APOSTLE FOR OUR TIME

forget those Christmas Masses, those gatherings of all the
diplomats of countries at war with one another, who during
that sacred night filled with human and divine mystery,
seemed to forget the conflict and to find it a natural thing to be
close to one another in celebrating the peace, the fraternity
and the love of Christian civilization?" Then, with a smile,
remembering the Holy Year and the importunities by which
the members of the corps had been besieged by visitors from
their countries :". . . Holy Year with its great and spectacular
moments, during which the diplomatic corps exercised, even
to the point of heroism, the virtue of Roman hospitality!" And
then seriously: "Is it not true that the diplomatic relations
with the Holy See, which honor the countries you represent,
have always been on both sides inspired by the most sincere
loyalty?"

He told them that in his going nothing would be changed:
"In those who succeed me here you will always have what I
have ever sought to offer you: the highest measure of esteem,
the highest recognition, the firmest and most devout intention
of working with you for the good of the world." Monsignor
Montini then accepted from the corps the gift of a magnificent
episcopal ring, shook the hand of each member for the last
time, and spoke to each a word of gratitude and affection.

On the 12th of December as a light drizzle fell on Rome, in
the baroque splendor of St. Peter's, the least baroque of Ro
man prelates lay face down on the floor of the sanctuary as
he had on the day of his ordination to the priesthood, and
heard the Sistine Choir in the name of the thousands present
beseech God and His saints to bless and sanctify him in his
episcopal office, to confirm him in grace that he might serve
the Milanese 6 as he had served the sovereign Pontiff, with

e Thousands of Milanese in St. Peter's for the ceremony broke into
applause for their new archbishop, forgetting that only the Pope is ap
plauded in the Basilica.

"CLOISTER OF CIPHERS AND SECRETS" 83

total devotion. The Holy Father himself had wished to conse
crate the new archbishop and had given him his pectoral cross,
but he now lay seriously ill in the adjoining palace, and Mon-
signor Montini received the fullness of the priesthood from
the bearded Frenchman, Cardinal Tisserant, dean of the Col
lege of Cardinals, with co-consecrators the bishop of Brescia,
Giacinto Tredici, and the vicar capitular of Milan, Domenico
Bernareggi, titular bishop of Famagosta.

Nevertheless the courageous Pope was not to be absent. At
a moment in the ceremony, over loud-speakers installed in
the basilica, the low, clear voice of the Pontiff was heard speak
ing from his apartment. He declared himself to be spiritually
present at this episcopal consecration which, because of his af
fection for the one being consecrated, he had reserved to him
self, but that Providence had not allowed him to fulfill his
intention. He went on: "It is indeed consoling for the Father
who has not been able to impose his hands while invoicing
the Holy Spirit, to raise them at this moment to bless his faith
ful collaborator, one who has today become his brother in the
episcopacy."

Brother to Pope and bishops, father to the faithful of Milan
who awaited with pride and anticipation the prelate whom
the Pope was sending them, Archbishop Montini prepared to
leave Rome, its memories and associations. The way in which
he spent his Christmas night that year is revealing. In the
Secretariat of State he had been quite secretly a moving force
behind the work done by his friend Don Carlo Gnocchi in
assisting children who had lost limbs or been disfigured in
explosions during the war and afterward from unexploded
bombs and mines. A center for them had been established in
Rome at the Foro Italico, and Montini helped support it di
rectly and through appeals to others for assistance. Don
Gnocchi had also given shelter to young victims of polio, at
Monsignor Montinfs insistence, after Montini, in 1952, had

84 APOSTLE FOR OUR TIME

visited a summer colony established for them at Ostia. He said
afterward, "I was literally assaulted by the mothers of these
young ones, overcome with the anguish of not knowing where
to bring their children after their brief stay near the sea. The
children afflicted by polio in Italy alone number some sixty
thousand, and I could not forget those eyes full of maternal
pleading. I could not forget what I had seen the arms and
legs of these children like thin, dry branches. Never in my life
would I be able to forget!"

After this visit to Ostia he had turned to Don Gnocchi, a
vibrant, totally dedicated man; few words were necessary be
tween them. A section of Don Gnocchi's institute for youth
was set aside for these young victims, and it was to them that
Montini came to spend his first Christmas night as archbishop
of the mighty see of Milan. As they awaited the archbishop's
arrival, Father Gnocchi and a visitor were going through the
mail piled on the priest's desk. The "useless letters," as Don
Gnocchi called them, those containing only praise of his work,
went immediately into the wastebasket; those containing more
substantial evidence of support were laid aside. At one point
Don Gnocchi opened a letter from an anonymous citizen of
Milan praising the archbishop and himself for the work they
had done together; Father Gnocchi tore it up and threw it
into the wastebasket with the remark, "That's not worth
much." But looking at the basket a few minutes later, his sharp
eyes spotted a fragment of paper carrying the words, "one
million lire" (about $1,500).

When Archbishop Montini arrived he found Father Gnoc
chi and the visitor on their knees on the floor, the contents of
the wastebasket all around them, frantically looking for the
other pieces of the check. With a chuckle and the remark,
"Next time, Don Carlo, be more careful," the archbishop
dropped to his knees and searched with them until the last
piece had been found. Going out afterward he found all the

"CLOISTER OF CIPHERS AND SECRETS" 85

little ones gathered to meet him; one small girl, a polio victim,
her legs twisted, wanted to accompany him and, putting her
hand in his, tried to walk painfully beside him. The arch
bishop bent down, picked her up and carried her in his arms,
and there were tears in his eyes. For the little sufferers who
filled the chapel he said his three Masses that night his last
Christmas in Rome.

As the time for his departure drew near he wrote in a letter
to the Pope: "To say what are my sentiments at the moment
of leaving this blessed home is not possible. But quieting the
whirlwind of memories, of impressions and of thoughts . . .
I feel the overwhelming need to tell Your Holiness of my in
tense filial gratitude for the favors, whose very number and
magnitude I can never count nor measure, which have been
bestowed on me by the paternal, generous, ever renewed and
ever loving goodness of Your Holiness."

"Archbishop Montini leaves Rome with nothing, nothing
except what he carries with him of our appreciation and love,"
said a Roman newspaper on the day of his departure. And so
he went; sitting in the railroad carriage on a cold January day,
a shawl tucked around him to keep him warm, his possessions
other than his books contained in a suitcase borrowed from his
brother Ludovico, his thoughts no longer in Rome but in the
Milan which awaited him. He remembered the question he had
asked the Pope when he received his appointment: "Holy Fa
ther, do you think I am capable of this charge?" And he re
membered and was consoled by the answer the Holy Father
had given him.

5. "And So I Came to Milan"

Saint Augustine

In the middle of the great plain of Lombardy stands Milan,
the financial, commercial, literary and cultural pivot of Italy.
The region of which it is the heart and center was once the
battlefield of Europe; fed by Italy's largest river, the Po, it is
one of Europe's richest regions, covering 7.6 per cent of
Italy's national territory but containing over 15 per cent of its
inhabitants. The city itself has a population of 1,581,000, but
in the sprawling suburbs and clustering villages and towns of
the commune are another 1,569,000 people. The Milanese
reputation for business enterprise goes back to the twelfth
century when its merchants and bankers made Lombard
Street in London a symbol of commerce and finance. Indus
trial, fast moving, creative and sophisticated, Milan lacks the
warmth and color and charm of most Italian cities, and, some
what self-consciously and defensively, projects a verve and
pace which makes it, more than other Italian cities, identical
in mood and problems with other great metropolitan centers
of the world.

In its thinking as in its commerce, Milan has always, es
pecially in modern times, looked across the Alps to find its
cultural and political challenge. The eighteenth-century En-

86

"AND so i CAME TO MILAN" 87

lightenment took root there; Napoleon was anointed and
crowned himself king of Italy in the cathedral, itself a symbol
of Milanese ultramontane thinking; and the Risorgimento
found ready welcome. It is a city proud of its present, aware of
its past, a very symbol of modem urban civilization, "rich,
clean, productive, full of diversions and amenities, but soul
less and leaning to neurosis and despair." In this it is a re
flection of the restlessness and disenchantment which pervade
the whole of Italy today. "Western 'social progress,' which has
everywhere produced unsatisfactory emancipation and a com
plete urbanization of the soul, is a relatively recent force in
Italy. Finding themselves committed to the visible benefits
and the concealed contradictions of the modern world, the
Italians, remarkably naive where they are not exceptionally
cunning, have experienced shocks of revulsion and alarm at
every social level." *

But the greatness of Milan today reflects only dimly the
greatness which has been hers at various times through the
centuries. From Milan, in 313, Constantine issued his edict
of toleration which made of the outcast Christian Church a
respectable one. Here, in 390, the Bishop Ambrose, former
Roman prefect of the city, by acclamation made the spiritual
leader of the Milanese, stood before the door of his basilica
and barred entrance to Theodosius, Emperor of the West, un
til he had done penance for the massacre of 7,000 at Salonica.
The tormented Augustine was converted here. Here the Ren
aissance flowered, and to this city, in 1564, sent from Rome
by his uncle Pope Paul IV, came the twenty-six-year-old
Cardinal Charles Borromeo, a man "whom Jews might bless
and Protestants adore," to reform a people and a Church in a
see where no archbishop had resided for over eighty years.
Ambrose and Charles these names enclose Milan in more
than a thousand years of her history, the one standing at the

1 John J. Navone, in The Commonweal, March 15, 1963.

88 APOSTLE FOR OUR TIME

entrance to its medieval era, his back turned to the crumbling
Empire: the other, Borromeo, standing at its close, both con
secrating by their sanctity a Church which in her liturgy re
members Ambrose, 2 and which in her life still reflects the
dynamism of the tall, thin, ugly young man from Rome who
restored her pride and practice to the ancient Church of Mi
lan.

Nearly sixteen hundred years after Ambrose and four hun
dred after Carlo Borromeo, their successor, another "man
from Rome," Giovanni Battista Montini, was preparing, on
January 5, 1954, to enter his archdiocese to take on the most
challenging assignment in all Italy. Another predecessor in
Milan, Achille Ratti, later Pius XI, had said: "It is easier to be
Pope than archbishop of Milan." The archdiocese, sprawling,
vast, and complex, with over three million Catholics, heavily
industrial but agricultural too, with social and religious prob
lems of enormous intricacy, a top Communist regional party
to combat and reconcile, with the backwash of the war adding
to and confusing the perspective, presented Archbishop Mon
tini with a challenge which dwarfed any other in his life. The
quiet corridors of the Vatican, the genteel encounters, the
diplomatically and religiously aseptic life had been left be
hind, and he would have to be at the top of his powers, end
lessly creative and exhaustively engaged, if his people and
their problems were to yield to him. "He who knows Milan
knows the world of the twentieth century." He came in nomine
Domini, in the name of the Lord, but others had come in that

2 The Ambrosian rite, disputed in its origin but generally thought to
be Roman, has certain distinguishing characteristics: a different ar
rangement of the Kyrie; an offertory in the cathedral of bread and
wine by the lay people; the Credo sung just before the Preface; no bells
at the Consecration; the breaking of the Host just before the Pater
Noster; the Agnus Dei used only at requiem Masses. The sequence of
color of the vestments is also different, with black used for Lent. Most
feasts have a proper Preface.

"AND so i CAME TO MILAN" 89

same name and had been overwhelmed by difficulty and in
difference. If Milan was, as the French ambassador to the
Vatican had said, "cut to his measure," it still remained for
him to prove that he was not merely "a diplomat who cele
brates Mass," but one who could touch hearts and move not
only those who awaited him with joy but the thousands for
whom his coming was a matter of supreme unconcern.

Archbishop Montini reached the town of Lodi, in the prov
ince of Emilia, adjoining Lombardy, at a few minutes after
four o'clock in the afternoon of the day on which he left
Rome. The rapido train on which he traveled made an un
scheduled stop for the archbishop to leave the train, and
when he descended he was met by prelates of the archdiocese
and representatives of the provincial and city governments
who would have the honor of accompanying him into his
archdiocese. He walked quickly along the special carpet laid
for him and into the station hung with draperies hastily as
sembled from dusty cupboards, for it was years since Lodi
had received so distinguished a visitor. The welcome over, the
archbishop left the station, and as he did a group of railroad
workers, shunted behind barricades with other curious or de
vout, called out to him, "Archbishop, give us your blessing!"
And the archbishop's quick eyes sought them out; he smiled
and traced a blessing over them, and he was in the car heading
out of Lodi.

The procession crossed into Lombardy over the Lambro
River. Once on Lombard soil, the archbishop stopped the car,
and kneeling on the damp, slushy pavement, his hat laid care
fully beside him, he prayed to the Virgin: "Under thy protec
tion, O holy Mother of God . . ." and, having said a prayer
to the Holy Spirit, he leaned forward and reverently kissed
the land of Lombardy. Dusk was falling, the only illumina
tion provided by the headlights of the cars, throwing into re
lief the kneeling archbishop and those surrounding him

90 APOSTLE FOR OUR TIME

amazement, alarm, concern and delight flitting over their
faces, their hands extended as if to assist or prevent him.
When he rose to his feet the archbishop opened his arms in a
wide embrace, but his words, "And now . . ." were drowned
by the roar of the motors. That his gesture was unexpected is
clear, yet it was a typical Montinian gesture, born of emotion
and his keen sense of symbolism, and it sped before him into
Milan to the intense gratification of the Milanese. They knew
of the brilliance and fame of their new archbishop, but they
had had as yet little knowledge of those personal characteris
tics which render one simpatico, a word which is a synthesis
of the appealing qualities which Italians find important, even
in archbishops.

Archbishop Montini spent the first two nights which pre
ceded his taking formal possession of his archdiocese in the
town of Rho, a few miles from Milan. There he was the guest
of the Oblate Fathers in their college attached to the Sanctu
ary of the Virgin of Sorrows, founded in 1755. A crowd was
on hand to greet him and to keep him late into the night ap
pearing on the balcony of his room to bless them. January 5th
he observed as a day of retreat.

At two o'clock on the feast of the Epiphany, the archbishop
left Rho, telling the people with gentle charm that he could
happily spend the rest of his days there. His journey was a
short one, bringing him in half an hour to the historic church
of Sant'Eustorgio within the city limits of Milan, the church
from which the cortege of a new archbishop, in earlier days
mounted on a white mule, traditionally proceeded through the
streets to the cathedral. Sant'Eustorgio is the church which
claims, with greater pride than accuracy, to possess the relics
of the Three Magi. A great banner, now hung from its facade,
welcomed the archbishop: "From the Basilica of the Magi in
Saint Eustorgio may the star of Bethlehem guide the way of
His Excellency, the Most Reverend Giovanni Battista Montini,

"AND SO I CAME TO MILAN" 91

come in the name of the Lord on the day of Epiphany among
his people, to lead them in their meeting with the Divine." On
the threshold of the church the archbishop was met by the
mayor of Milan who presented to him a crucifix which he
kissed reverently. After entering the church for a short adora
tion, he went to the presbytery for the donning of his pontifi
cal robes and the presentation of his rochet to the pastor, an
other tradition. What was not a tradition but a gesture, simply
and beautifully expressed, was a written and personal invita
tion to 1,200 of the city's poor to be his guests at dinner that
day.

As the 140th archbishop of Milan made his entrance into
his see city, the day was biting cold and a driving sleet was fall
ing, but he chose to ride in an open car, the mayor of Milan
beside him, the rain forming puddles on his hat and sliding
off onto his shoulders and lap. "I want the people to see me,"
he said. Before and behind him on horseback rode the uni
formed carabinieri. Through the ugly outskirts of the city the
procession wound slowly, through acres of cement and blocks
of flats, new streets like gashes opening on every side. It was
a cheerless, almost desolate sight, 3 the only warmth provided
by the people huddled under umbrellas or peering through
windows from the comfort of their houses, waving and clap
ping as their archbishop waved back or raised his hand in
blessing.

When the procession reached the Cathedral in the center
of the city, the great square in front was packed with people,
their umbrellas bobbing and bumping as they jostled one an
other to catch a glimpse of the archbishop, by now thor
oughly drenched. He seemed oblivious to his damp condition,
lingering on the steps of the cathedral, taking off his glasses to
dry them, blessing the people once again. Inside the immense

3 Months later Archbishop Montini said: "Milan appeared to me as
an immense, hostile forest."

92 APOSTLE FOR OUR TIME

Duomo, hung with draperies and tapestries, its vaulted heights
resounding with the music of welcome, the archbishop made
his adoration before the Blessed Sacrament, and then mounted
the handsome, massive pulpit in the cathedral of Ambrose
and Charles. He stood for a moment, mitred and silent,
flanked by candle-bearing acolytes, a gothic figure in the
gloom which the hundreds of lights and tapers could not
wholly dissipate.

Thirty thousand people waited for him to speak his first
words. His sermon was long, well developed and articulated.
He spoke of his last meeting with Pope Pius: "The Pope was
then ill. When I presumed to ask a directive for my future
ministry, His Holiness with a profound and paternal accent
which I now echo said to me, 'Preserve the deposit,' that is,
of the Apostolic Roman Catholic faith." In this sermon the
new archbishop touched on labor: "May this field which here
surrounds me become truly Christian. It will be my care to
cooperate so that instead of a field of battle, labor will become
a terrain of sincere and peaceful human encounter. . . .
Wherever there is suffering or injustice or legitimate aspira
tion for social improvement there will be the frank and solid
defense of a pastor and a father."

There were words from Pope Pius XII for him and his
people on this day: "On him We invoke from God, under the
auspices of the great father of the Ambrosian Church, the
spirit of his admirable predecessor, Charles Borromeo. Like
San Carlo, who was given to the Lombard metropolis by a
Pope who considered him a fruitful collaborator, so too may
the new pastor . . . give to his flock what the Shepherd of
shepherds and the souls entrusted to him expect from his ac
tions and from his life. May he be the glory of his children;
may his children be his crown!"

The archbishop celebrated his first Mass in the Milan
cathedral in the Ambrosian rite, and then, through ranks of

"AND SO I CAME TO MILAN" 93

torch-bearing youths, he rode to the archiepiscopal palace
while the hymn Christus vincit, Christus regnat rang out in
the gelid air.

The words spoken by the archbishop in his cathedral had
been words expressing awareness and a spirit of conciliation
and love. It remained to see what the new archbishop of Mi
lan would do.

Archbishop Montini was a man with a plan. His instinct
and training rebelled against whatever temptation presented
itself to get caught up in a flurry of activity in which service
would be counterfeited by mere episcopal busyness. He in
tended to base his activity on a true appreciation of conditions
in the archdiocese, not the conventional stereotyped perspec
tive but one reflecting his people in their lives and in their
needs. Mere words would not do but neither would action
devoid of informed direction. "Our ordinary error which the
Lord will forgive us because we have little time, little re
sources and few talents, but which objectively is an error is
empiricism, the doing of something for the sake of doing
something. Those are wrong who say, "Let's get busy on the
apostolate, 9 almost as if the apostles worked haphazardly. The
art of the apostolate is that of the fisherman; it is the art of
adapting means to particular ends. For this reason it is neces
sary to be eminently experimental. . . ."

Not all of his experiments would work but he would be
endlessly creative in shaping them. If his archdiocese was in
dustrial, then his mission was to workers and employees; if
the city of Milan was a center of cultural creativity then the
intellectuals, so many of them estranged "too modern for
the clericals, too Catholic for the secularists" must be
reached; if his people were without homes and schools and
social services and churches, then these must be provided. If,
in common with the other new Europeans born of the war,

94 APOSTLE FOR OUR TIME

their materialistic dream was transcending their commitment to
God, then they must be taught. New ways, new words, bold
ness were needed; the gospel must be preached to twentieth-
century man in twentieth-century ways; 4 and it was not the
twentieth-century way of Archbishop Montini to wait in his
cathedral for his people to find him.

He was to write: "It is the priest who must make the move,
not the people. ... It is useless for him to ring his bell;
nobody will listen to it. Instead it is for him to hear the sirens
sounding from the factories, those temples of technical
achievement where the modern world lives and breathes. It is
for tie priest to make of himself a missionary if he would have
Christianity abide and become a new living leaven of civiliza
tion." And again: "If the pastor begins to move, if he goes
out and seeks, if he calls, if he suggests then he has a chance
of succeeding."

His first significant public appearance and statement were
made three days after he had taken possession of his cathe
dral. Although suffering from a cold he had caught on the day
of his arrival, he had been out of his residence already, visiting
hospitals, casually dropping by the apartment of two elderly
women who, bedridden, had written him of their regret at
not being able to welcome him. But it was in Sesto San Gio
vanni, the steel city of northern Italy, called "Little Stalin-

4 "The Church faces the same tasks that nations and states and the
Western world in general have to face the problem of man, how he
is to be housed and fed and how he can support himself. We need so
cial and economic regeneration. And then man must be made aware of
his true nature in other words we need intellectual and religious re
generation. These are problems for the world and they are also prob
lems for the world Church far more so, for instance, than the question
of liturgical reforms. If these problems are solved without us, or to our
disadvantage, then the whole of Europe will be lost to the Church, even
if every altar faces the people and Gregorian chant is the rule of every
parish." Alfred Delp, The Prison Meditations, op. cit.

"AND so i CAME TO MILAN" 95

grad" because of its formidable Communist apparatus, that
he chose to identify himself and his mission with the workers
of Lombardy.

"I begin here," he said, "my colloquy with the people of
Milan. And since I do not wish that there ever be secrets be
tween me and my children, I confess that in this moment I
am realizing a dream which I have cherished for many years
to speak to real workers. I hope that my ministry here and
elsewhere will give me the grace to resolve the equivocation
that some may wish to bring between the Church and the
working class. More than once it has been said that I would
be the archbishop of the workers, but until this moment I
have never replied to this affirmation. Well, here today I want
to dissolve my reserve . . ." Then, turning to bless the cor
nerstone of a new community building for women and chil
dren, he said, "And now, with prayer, we place the first stone
of what is to be a new Sesto San Giovanni, a new Milan may
they be Christian!"

The significance of Archbishop Montini's desire to be
known above all as the "archbishop of the workers" lay not in
its romantic or political implications, 5 but rather in his deep
awareness of the truth of words spoken by a predecessor in the
see of Milan. Achille Ratti had said: "The greatest scandal of
the nineteenth century is that the Church should have lost
the working class." Montini shared with Ratti the conviction
that the loss was part of a larger failing: the Church's es
trangement from the times. Recoiling from the shock of the
Reformation, wounded and defensive, the Church had tended
to seek its temporal shelter under the protection of the estab
lished European monarchies. Itself a holder of large temporal

5 It was generally believed that it was Montini who had persuaded
Pope Pius XTT to swing the Church's active support behind the postwar
liberals of the Christian Democratic parties in Europe with their con
crete programs for Europe's social reform.

96 APOSTLE FOR OUR TIME

possessions in Italy, the Papacy of the nineteenth century was
inclined to defend the established political orders at a time
when they were doomed to collapse, and to look upon the
secular democracies which replaced them as suspect and hos
tile. They were, in fact, largely indifferent to the Church, and
the estrangement hurt most deeply those whom the Church
and government should have cooperated in assisting.

In 1955, the Communists in Italy still boasted "a Commu
nist cell for every church spire." That the Communists had not
taken lightly the appointment of Montini to Milan was seen in
the almost simultaneous assignment to Lombardy, as party
director, of the number two man of the Communist Party in
Italy, Pietro (the Cask) Secchia. Once described as the "per
fect Bolshevik/' the tough, gold-toothed, fifty-two-year-old
Secchia, who had spent twelve years in Fascist jails, left the
central Secretariat of the Communist headquarters on the
"Street of the Dark Shops" in Rome to tighten the discipline
and draw the battle lines against the sensitive, ascetic monsi-
gnor from the Vatican, the type of intellectual whom Secchia
most despised.

Secchia was a formidable opponent, burly, fearless, com
mitted; he had directed the drive which raised membership
in the Italian Communist Party from 400,000 to more than
2,000,000. But Montini in his person and in his office was
now the leader of over 3,000,000, many of them trying to live
two faiths; his job was to persuade them that "Christianity will
have the power to raise the people up anew, to bring about
the return of justice, to elevate the working class." Such efforts,
he would tell them, had been made by others, but they were
based on economic motives or on hatred.

Earlier he had said: "Whoever has faith in the power of
Christian charity has already within him the sound basis for
social responsibility. . . . Charity can give birth to a mod
ern world. If it has not yet appeared it is because we have not

"AND so i CAME TO MILAN" 97

yet applied the eternal law of the gospel. . . ." "One of the
greatest evils of our time is precisely this: that Christians are
not Christian and that the mystery of newness and continuity
communicated to them in the baptism of resurrection is not
lived by them. In its place are compromise, inconsistency, lack
of logic and infidelity. These are the miserable survivals of
a vocation that should have embraced perfection, sanctity and
Christian fullness."

Montini's appeal was to the gospel of Christ, Secchia's to
the gospel of Lenin. A few days after Montini spoke at Sesto
San Giovanni, Secchia made his first public speech. It was
full of toughness and emotion. "Here in Milan," he told work
ers in a rubber factory, "Socialism was born and the fight for
liberation began [he was referring to the 1945 partisan up
rising which he had helped to organize]. . . . Here at Milan,
therefore, must originate a great new example of unity and
force . . . this is not the hour of resignation or laziness. . . .
No fear, therefore! No facile hopes!" He knew his opponent;
the lines were drawn, and over the next few years Montini's
appeal and action were matched and contrasted and fought.
There was to be no slackening of the Church's efforts, directed
not so much at fighting Communism as making the gospel a
living, dynamic force in men's lives.

Archbishop Montini sought to convert rather than to com
bat the Communists. In a pastoral letter written in 1956, he
said: "May the imprudent and the unhappy who march be
hind the banner of Marxism know that there is Someone
who loves them still, strongly, immensely, divinely. May they
know that those who pursue in this world the mission of
Christ crucified think of them, follow them, love them and
await them in His name."

On January 8, 1957, The New York Times carried a fea
ture article by its Rome correspondent, Arnaldo Cortesi. Un
der the headline "Pope's Ex-Aide Defeats Milan Red Chief,"

98 APOSTLE FOR OUR TIME

with the arresting subtitle "Pope's ex-aide credited with win
ning over workers in key industrial region," the article re
ported that the archbishop had won the first round. In shop
steward elections in Lombard factories anticommunists won
control for the first time in many plants and made great in
roads in others. 6 Secchia was removed and relegated to a
minor post in the Communist Party in Rome.

How had Montini done it? Americans, with no oppressed
working class and with a traditional if lukewarm respect for
religion, may have difficulty in understanding the gulf which
still in the early 50's separated the "haves" from the "have-
nots" in Europe not only economically but politically, socially
and religiously as well. The appeal of the Communists was to
class war; Montinf s appeal was to the dignity of all men, of
all labor, stressing the spirituality which creative and manual
labor share. He sought to give them a vision and a hope of
what the world could be like through the translation of Chris
tian social principles into reality. He knew that a materially
insecure proletariat is a plaything for any party that can pro
vide bread or even promise it. Primum vivere, deinde evan-
gelizare this he knew was the idea behind the great social
encyclicals. He spoke of peace to the workers, for themselves
and their families; and, since they were men of good will,
they listened. But much of this they had heard before; what
made the difference?

Montini refused to see the world in which his people lived
simply as the enemy, one to be fought and scorned and
avoided. He had no illusions: "Modern labor is insensible to
the voice of religion." He had none of the hostility of the priest

6 The noncommunists gained control in the Fiat works, the Officine
Mecchaniche brush and tractor plants, the Falck steel mills, and the
Pirelli rubber factory, involving 60,000 workers. In 92 small factories
noncommunists increased their union voting power from 8,701 to
13,803. The communists shrank from 21,463 to 17,893.

"AND so i CAME TO MILAN" 99

who is content to reject or damn all that interests the world.
He wanted to remove every ambiguity affecting the relation
ship of the workers to the Church and answer the suspicion
or accusation that the Church and big business are allies. He
knew what was in their minds that they had come to be
lieve in his words "that religion distracts them . . . from
their true social and economic interests, that religion lulls and
deludes them . . . fees them in a juridic and social system
in which others live in abundance, in security, in pleasure and
in privilege, while they, the workers live in hardship and sub
jection. . . . Hence class struggle, workers and employers
locked in battle, both affected by eighteenth-century Enlight
enment concepts of personal and class self-sufficiency without
need for God or obligation to others. And when the Church
sought to speak, the rich accused it of too much favoritism to
the poor, the poor of favoring the rich. The rich dismiss the
gospels for not giving sufficient importance to economic val
ues, the poor dismiss them for maintaining that the poor are
blessed."

To these objections, Archbishop Montini replied: "The
drawing together of the world of labor and of religion can
come about only on a spiritual level. . . . Also in this area
of life great attention must be paid to two decisive and myste
rious factors: human liberty and the intervention of divine
grace. . . . The law of God ties us to itself, not to the past,
and it obligates us to new ventures which we would wish
were even better than those of the past. Out of its own per
fection there arises from the law that hunger and thirst for
justice that every Christian should feel. . . . Thus the prob
lem of the equilibrium between the present state of things and
that one that will emerge is brought into focus. Before this
problem all good Catholics and those who bear the responsi
bility of pastors must be equally alert, neither to surrender to
the mania for new ideas that which should be defended and

100 APOSTLE FOR OUR TIME

conserved, nor to halt the progress of what is lawful and
beneficial."

He spoke to them in their language about their interests:
"We hear today that the world of labor is divided. Many battle
against us; many march in other organizations. Nevertheless,
they share many of your desires, your sacrifices, your aspira
tions. . . . You must have the boldness of those who possess
the whole truth. Do not be afraid you are playing the losing
cards. You are love, the future, success, victory. They are
automatons. They crush their adversaries; if they won we
would all be crushed. . . . But our victory will not damage
others. . . . However, we do not want so much to win as to
convince; we wish for the others to share our joy, our life, our
liberty, our well-being, our future. We wish for them to be at
peace with us. And we will pray for them and tell them,
'Brother, come with me if you have lost your way.' We do not
want a selfish class struggle. Christ is with us all."

He spoke these words and similar ones, not in throne rooms,
in ecclesiastical settings of baroque splendor, but in the grime
and noise and sweat of factories. The Communists answered
him with a bombing of his residence at two in the morning on
January 5, 1956, when two pounds of dynamite were thrown
through a window, shattering all the windows of the building,
and a part of the walls. Archbishop Montini, still at his desk
at that late hour, went on working "The gesture of a mad
man" was his only comment.

The futile, exasperated attack spoke tellingly of the inroads
the archbishop had made in two years. It had not been easy.
He went to find the worker in his steel mill, his factory, his
shop, his store; he went down into mines, into the fields. The
dusty black Alfa Romeo was always on the road. The work
ers were not accustomed to see priests, let alone archbishops,
walking ramps, climbing ladders, peering into furnaces, ask
ing them about their work. Some responded with hostility,

"AND so i CAME TO MILAN" 101

with booing; he continued to smile and move among them.
One man held back because there was grease on his hand;
Montini seized and held it as he asked Viirn about his family.
His thoughtfulness was instinctive. To some miners in Con-
doglia he remembered to send an accordion to cheer them in
their isolation.

On his first Christmas in Milan the archbishop had chosen
to say Mass, not in the splendor of his cathedral, but in a wood
and tin shanty at Porto di Mare. He brought the mayor of
Milan with him to show him that the "economic miracle" of
Milan had stopped short of Porto di Mare. There was no
electricity for him that night, but bonfires burned in the dis
trict in his honor.

The Communists sought to organize the opposition to him,
to refuse "him access to the assembly lines and shops where he
seemed to spend a good part of his day. In one factory, man
agement, too, disturbed by his outspokenness, tried to censor
his talk before he delivered it. It came to be that when a visitor
who called to see Mm was told that the archbishop was out,
the question came back: "What factory is he visiting today?"
Wherever he went he carried a portable Mass kit in a brief
case, 7 and he did not hesitate to celebrate Mass in factories and
shops for men who had not been to church for twenty or thirty
years. The democratic feeling and social mobility characteris
tic of the United States gives the American priest the oppor
tunity of knowing the poor, the middle class, and the rich;
his European peer is not so fortunate. Often drawn from a
single social group, isolated from his people in terms of his
torical judgments no longer viable, he tends to live apart
from them, to become on some levels incomprehensible to
them, and since he is isolated he may be somewhat ignorant
of the problems they confront in their daily living. The arch-

7 The irreverent among the Milanese called him, not without affec
tion, "the board chairman of Jesus Christ."

102 APOSTLE FOR OUR TIME

bishop was showing the way to his traditionally conservative
priests, and the people were responding slowly but with in
creasing affection and admiration. 8

Archbishop Montini had never forgotten the rows of
worker flats as he had seen them the first day he rode into
Milan, dreary warrens of deadening sameness. He knew that
modern assembly line techniques tended to deaden all new
ness, all joy in men who felt nothing of themselves enriching
their work or being enriched by it. It was necessary to restore
to them a concept of the holiness of the work they did, to give
a Christian purpose to their lives. "You are the first-born sons
of the world of work because you give your brothers the tools
with which they will work. No work is accomplished except
with materials that have passed through your hands. . . .
Does the man seeking to produce a particular form or func
tion know that he has before him, almost springing forth from
his hands, neither a simple mass of material nor an idol . . .
but a mirror? Yes, a mirror made by him from a ray of di
vine perfection. Does he know that when he works he is pray
ing?" And again: "Work is great but it is not an end in itself;
if it remained an end in itself, it would be a yoke, slavery
and chastisement."

In a pastoral letter he said: "I should like to see the workers
given every assistance social, professional, religious. I should
like them to realize not only the wrong done them by forcing
on them a materialistic view of life, but that our own spiritual
view of life has far more respect for them as persons and
recognizes in them the boundless treasure of a soul that thinks

8 In 1960, as cardinal, he went to Assist to give a conference on the
Papacy. Some workers came from Prato and were met by a priest who
warned them that the theme would be beyond them. "We haven't come
for that," they replied. "He (Cardinal Montini) is someone who really
has our interests at heart we only want to kiss his hand and then off
we go!"

"AND so i CAME TO MILAN" 103

and prays and believes. I should like to see technical schools
helping them to realize that there can be a vocation, a re
demptive value, a religious dignity in human work. I should
like their days of rest to be sacred and inviolable. I should
like their public holidays to become marked with flowers and
song and thought and prayer, and to be truly occasions for
recreation of the spirit. I should like to see prayer once again
linked with work, sustaining it, ennobling it, sanctifying it.
The working people are on their way toward such a spiritual
outlook and the Church of Christ looks forward to its attain
ment."

"I feel myself to be your friend, I understand so many of
your thoughts," he said to the workmen of the Pirelli factory.
"I also understand that you look at me with a silent question
in your hearts. Now I have nothing to give you; I am empty-
handed. But I know that precisely because you are workers,
you seek for something which lies beyond your labor, beyond
your salaries, beyond the material. You seek a little of the true
life, a little happiness. And from this point of view I have im
mense treasures to give you: hope, the sense of human dignity,
immense horizons of light. You have souls, and I have treas
ures with which to feed them."

Management did not escape his attention: "The wealthier
classes should recognize the respect of the Church for private
property in its essential forms, its constant, vigilant, often
stern but always right and fatherly warnings on the moral and
social dangers of selfish wealth, on the necessity of a more
just distribution of economic goods, on the beauty of a disin
terested and general contribution to the elevation of the work
ing classes. The social doctrine of the Church has never de
nied the functions of private enterprise, provided this does
not damage human dignity and the legitimate aspirations of
those who take part in the productive process."

He was forthright. "The workers were not the first to

104 APOSTLE FOR OUR TIME

abandon religion," lie told the workers of Sesto San Giovanni,
"but the industrialists and economists of the last century,
who dreamed of founding progress, civilization and peace
without God and without Christ. Let us not say that religion
is the opium of the people and that it contrives to extinguish
their drive and hopes of rising in the world; on the contrary,
religion is the light, the glory and the strength of such aspira
tions."

He was candid in pointing out that much of the social and
political tension afflicting Italy lay outside the province of the
Church and depended on the state of human relations between
employers and employees. But Christian teachings had to be
dusted off, refurbished and preached day in and day out, so
that the protagonists in the drama might act out their roles in
truth, and with a script which was ageless in its call to morality
and justice. The adaptation was to be worked out between
employer and employees in mutual respect and awareness of
their Christian vocation.

His directness, his identification with the workers, his ob
vious affection for them, his sharply articulated social mes
sages, his tireless pursuit of his people was in vivid contrast
to the traditional picture of a prelate presiding grandly and
somewhat remotely over a vast archdiocese. Archbishop Mon-
tini saw his work in Milan as part of a pattern, a mode of
modern Church action which could fit other dioceses with
equal ease. The archdiocese of Milan was a world in micro
cosm, urban and agricultural, with class divisions and social
problems, embracing the believing, the indifferent, and the
hostile, a Church in a twentieth-century world, until now
geared in many aspects of its apostolate to eighteenth and
nineteenth-century means. A re-formation of the Church's
activities in areas of social progress, a commitment to the
best of the world's values and title employment of the most

"AND so i CAME TO MILAN" 105

modern techniques of communication were part of Montini's
contribution to the life of the Milan archdiocese.

But was all this the proper sphere of religion? "An objec
tion that one often hears made today," the archbishop said,
"is directed by our secular and materialistic age against the
Christian who seeks the kingdom of heaven; it is the legiti
macy of claim and capacity of this same Christian to seek the
kingdom of the earth which is contested. It may be asked if
hope for things eternal should exclude the hope for temporal
well-being. Are the two hopes incompatible? Did not the
Master say that no man can serve two masters? It is a delicate
question, which shapes the torment of our age: on the one
side are those who would choose a wholly spiritual solution,
challenging the Christian's right to concern himself with tem
poral things, demanding that he live a life of Utopian angel-
ism with certain Manichean overtones; on the other side are
those who would have the Christian gather up the benefits of
religion with those of the profane world, somewhat as we see
done in the Old Testament . . . The supreme precept for the
Christian is love, together with concern for the concrete and
human needs of his time, but he must also flee the totalitarian
spirit of those who have no other hope than that founded on
the things of this world."

This is the age of labels. In his impact on the life of Milan,
and indeed of all Italy, in his daring innovations and undis
guised words and actions there was nothing of the tradition
alist about Montini except his witness, day in and day out, to
the gospel. He could not be called a conservative; therefore
he must be a progressive, a liberal even a "leftist." In an
Italy which stiU finds it difficult to believe that any action of
the Church in the social sphere is divorced from political in
tention, it was said that in his political thinking Montini was
left of center, how far to the left depending on the convic-

106 APOSTLE FOR OUR TIME

tions of the speaker. Shortly after being raised to the cardinal-
ate, when he was in Concesio to inaugurate and bless a new
hall attached to the Church of Sant' Antonio, he was enthusi
astically hailed by someone with the shout: "Long live the
priest of the Left!" The cardinal was obviously surprised and
not pleasantly. Later, speaking to the parish priest, Don Luigi
Bosio, he referred to the shouted greeting of the parishioner:
"But what is this business about, 'a priest of the Left?' Priest
of the workers, yes, but not of the Left."

Archbishop Montini was prompt in reorganizing the dioc
esan structure in order to give direction and continuity to the
impetus his words were creating. He revitalized the Ambro-
sian Social Institute, giving it the task of establishing schools
of social formation (they now number twenty) with first two-
year and then three-year courses of intensive study and practi
cal application. He founded the bulletin Relazlone Sociale, en
trusting it to a group of university students and giving them
total autonomy as to its form and matter. His priests were not
forgotten. "We must all become competent [in the field of
social action]," he said. "Even as we know how to explain,
for example, the doctrine of the sacraments and of prayer, so
too we should be able to explain this new chapter which has
come to be inserted in Christian teaching. It is not enough to
practice the charity of almsgiving and of prayer; it is neces
sary to become involved in this 'social charity.' "

To both his priests and his people he insisted on the im
portance of correct liturgical observance. "There are still
those," he said, "who consider the liturgical renewal as an
optional matter, or as one of the numerous devotional cur
rents to which a person may adhere or not as he chooses." He
went on to remark that sadly enough the mentality still exists
"which thinks that the liturgical movement is a troublesome
attempt at reformation, of doubtful orthodoxy; or a petrified,

"AND so i CAME TO MILAN" 107

external ritualism which has to do merely with rubrics; or an
archaeological fad, formalistic and 'arty*; or else a product of
the cloister ill adapted to the people of our world; or finally,
a preconceived opposition to piety and popular devotions."
And by both word and example he vigorously combatted these
ideas.

He also pointed out that the Catholic Church is a mission
ary Church and that the vitality of parishes and dioceses should
be channeled into missionary activity. Again with the arch
bishop pointing the way, a mission staffed by priests and sis
ters from Milan and supported by Milanese funds was founded
at Kariba in Southern Rhodesia and a second at Chirundu,
also in Rhodesia.

In order to study and coordinate the activity of his see,
the archbishop founded the office "Pastorale Sociale" in his
chancery under the direction of Father Cesare Pagani. Its pur
pose was realized in guiding and encouraging the various
Catholic organizations of workers as well as offering guidance
and counsel at times when strikes convulsed the labor world
of Milan, For immigrant workers there was the diocesan cen
ter for immigrants, to offer spiritual assistance and to cooper
ate with the city of Milan in integrating them into the working
life of the city. Seven out of ten of these immigrants came not
from the south but from the rural dioceses of Lombardy (Pa-
via, Cremona, Mantua) and from the Veneto; the archbishop
was especially desirous of obtaining priests from these regions
to be with them. Another of his activities was to establish an
association for aid to persons released from jail. In 1955, a
statistical bureau was established to tabulate and card index
the parishes of the archdiocese.

On his arrival in Milan, Archbishop Montini knew that
the influence of the powerful Communist-controlled General
Confederation of Workers, with its three million members in
Italy, must be neutralized. Italian Catholics had formed ACLI,

108 APOSTLE FOR OUR TIME

the Association of Catholic Italian Workers, and with his en
couragement this association became particularly vigorous in
the province of Milan, with nearly 50,000 members out of a
national membership of over a million, which now plays a
leading role in the noncommunist Free Federation of Labor.
Nearly a quarter of the Milanese members take educational
courses in the modern five-story city headquarters, one of
fourteen provincial centers, and the Lombard ACLI operates
five rest homes for workers in the mountains and at the seaside.

For his clergy the archbishop founded a school of social
formation. It numbers today a hundred priests among its stu
dents, and is attached to the Toniolo Social Institute of the
Catholic University of Milan, through which it issues a de
gree after two years of study and the presentation of a thesis.
A summer school at La Mendola, summer seat of the univer
sity, holds social seminars for the young. A new review, Dio-
cesi di Milano, was added to the diocesan daily, L'ltalia. The
cultural life of the city was served by the founding of the
Academy of San Carlo which later Pope John XXIII from his
sickbed was to praise with a message saying that it was the
realization of a dream long fostered by him. In all these activi
ties Archbishop Montini's method could thus be described:
challenge by word, arouse by example, consolidate by action.

In the last year of the war, four big Allied bombings had
destroyed a third of Milan, but with almost Teutonic speed
and efficiency it had all been rebuilt. Giant apartment build
ings had sprouted to care for the dispossessed and for the
thousands who streamed northward from the impoverished
and depressed south. Archbishop Montini's predecessor, Car
dinal Schuster, had founded the Domus Ambrosiana to deal
with the problem of those thousands too poor to find homes
other than in hovels which they constructed themselves from
their scavenging of rubbish heaps. Through this organiza
tion, Archbishop Montini had an entire village constructed at

"AND so i CAME TO MILAN" 109

Rovagnasco, southeast of Milan, where more than three thou
sand people were given modern apartments with at least four
rooms.

The organization known as Caritas Ambrosiana distributed
the charity of the archdiocese, and the archbishop's "Office of
Charity" was established to provide free medical and legal ad
vice for his people. For the children of the underprivileged
there were summer colonies in the mountains and by the sea;
they were cared for in ten houses. He refused to allow the char
ity of the archdiocese, of the Church, to become deperson
alized, bureaucratic. Each year at Christmas he went to the
giant Monte di Pieta, a kind of official pawnshop, and re
deemed the objects left there during the year by people in
need; they were his Christmas presents to them. And always
there were his visits unofficial, unannounced to the or
phanages, to the sick, to those without homes, and to the
poorest of his poor, living in their shanties. "For the poor," he
said, "we must have a special reverence, a particular solici
tude. They are the mirror of Christ, indeed almost His living
sacrament. They are both the inspiration and the object of our
practice of charity. They are our brothers whose needs . . .
impose on us an obligation. They become an annoyance to
us if we flee them, a joy if we care for them. . . . They are
our companions on our journey."

In 1955, Milan was without churches for over 300,000 of
her population. Thousands of people were arriving each year,
drawn by the prosperity and higher wages of the Milan area,
and the archbishop felt responsible for each one of them. The
Osservatore Romano called this need "his predominant pas
toral anxiety." "We must call to your attention," he said to the
people of his archdiocese, "the great and urgent problem of
new churches for the city of Milan and for the new districts
which are growing everywhere." It cannot be allowed, he told
them, that people should take root in a city without a church

110 APOSTLE FOR OUR TIME

where their spirits could be fed. Hundreds of thousands, he
said, lacked religious assistance; if something were not done
immediately and positively the moral and civic tradition of
the Italian people was threatened with deformation and de
cay.

He was the first to show the way, donating what little he
had of worth: his most precious pectoral cross, and a ring "of
a certain value," as he said in a letter accompanying it. The
late Enrico Mattel, something of a political gray eminence in
Italy but a devoted member of the Milan archdiocese, was
named to head the committee for the new churches. Various
church groups and associations of workers, industrialists, shop
keepers and craftsmen took over the financing of the individual
churches built beyond the city's ancient Spanish walls, with
the Italian government subsidizing one-fifth of the cost.

Often the archbishop would go incognito to the outer
reaches of the city to see for himself what was needed, to
study the suggestions for solution, and to see the people as
they really lived. The plan he formulated for Milan and the
other cities of the archdiocese involved the building of new
parishes in new areas, also subdividing those grown too large;
according to local circumstances and needs. He insisted that
the parishes encompass a sense of community and that people
feel themselves members of a spiritual family. The churches
must therefore be adapted not only to a perfect expression of
liturgical worship, but insofar as possible be centers of a
Christian community, each gathered around its pastor.

During his eight years in Milan, Archbishop Montini
blessed and consecrated seventy-two churches, and on the eve
of his departure for the conclave after the death of Pope John
XXin, another nineteen were under construction; in addition
thirty-two chapels were built. "A church must be more than a
house of prayer," he said. "It must have a children's home, a

"AND so i CAME TO MILAN" 111

sports field, a recreation center, a cinema, a library, a place
where neighbors can discuss community problems." A church
which serves as a model of the archbishop's desire to make
each parish the heart of neighborhood life is that of Saint Ag
nes, located in an area of the city where immigrants from the
south and other low-paid workers live. In addition to the
church, the parish contains a school for 800 children, an ap
prentice training center, a vocational school for 300 young
workers. There is a dormitory and a dining room for 150
boarders, an athletic club, a cinema, a dispensary and an am
bulance service for accident victims in the neighborhood.

But the most interesting feature of the archbishop's plan to
provide services to his people and to break down their spirit
ual isolation, was the building of eight central chapels in the
blocks of cooperative flats which flank the city, and his urging
of architects to include chapels in their plans. The tenants
were to pay each month for the maintenance of the chapel and
other expenses involved in having a chapel in the building. In
some buildings and clusters of buildings there are a hundred
families, in others close to a thousand, and the archbishop re
alized it would be easier for the priest to come to the people
than to persuade them to go to the church. When he conceived
this partial solution, the archbishop commented on "a new
and profane mentality . . . where many no longer pray,
where Christian doctrine is not taught and the sacraments are
not administered. It is a problem of public welfare."

His response to the problem became the blueprint of activ
ity for the Italian Peninsula. Speaking of the explosion of
buildings "conceived and activated," he pointed out drily,
"on an anti-economic plan," he said: 4C No other type of build
ing has, as do these, a popular, collective, truly social origin,
and no other is more open to the people, to all the people, of
our new suburbs. These buildings are not therefore only dec-

112 APOSTLE FOR OUR TIME

orative monuments in the perspective, often oppressive and
monotonous, of today's urban living: they are truly houses of
the people, for their consolation, for their peace, for their
faith and for their growth in goodness."

The archbishop's "concern for the concrete and human
needs" of his people had expressed itself in material ways:
first, in what he had called "social charity"; secondly, in the
building of churches. Their "growth in goodness" had always
been the central motive. It would now become the object of a
massive frontal attack for which the cardinal had been long
preparing.

FELICI

Pope Paul VI

ANSA

Giuditta AlgMsi Montini
mother of Pope Paul

Giorgio Montini
Pope Paul's father

House in which Pope Paul was born

Giovanni Battista Montini in the
arms of his grandmother

The three Montini children
Giovanni Battista in center

Young Montini, 1916, with two friends

about to leave jor the front
Photograph taken at the Institute Cesar e Arid

ANSA

Father Montini
at the time of his ordination

ANSA

Monsignor Mont mi
with university student, 1942

ANSA

Monsignor Montini

at his desk in the Vatican

Secretariat of State

TJW

The Archbishop of Milan kisses the ground
of his new archdiocese

UP I

Archbishop Montini with Pope Pius XII in 1956

WIDE WORLD

Cardinal Montini visits a coal mine
at Collio Val Trompia

Cardinal Montinl and President Eisenhower
meet at Notre Dame University, 1960

DAUGHTERS OF ST. PAUL

Cardinals Montini and Cushing
in press room of Daughters of St. Paul, Boston

Cardinal Montlni and Pope John XX11I
shortly before the Pope's death

Cardinal Montini

arriving in Rome to visit

the dying Pope

WIDE WORLD

Cardinals Montini and Spellman during the Conclave

WIDE WORLD

Eugene Cardinal Tisserant, Dean of the Sacred College,
voices homage of the Cardinals to newly-elected Pope

Pope Paul VI greets Cardinal Rugambwa of Tanganyika
Archbishop Enrico Dante, papal master of ceremonies, in background

Pope Paul embraces a crippled child at Church of
SS. Ambrose and Charles, June 29, 1963

"WIDE WORLD

6. Mission to Milan

"For you and in your serv
ice I am a bishop; but with
you lama Christian. Bishop
is the title of a charge as
sumed; Christian is the name
of a grace received. A dan
gerous title, a salutary name.
Wearied in a charge which
is personal to us, we repose
in a benefit which is com
mon to us all."

Scant Augustine

In the early days of November, 1957, posters by the hundreds
of thousands suddenly appeared on every viewable surface in
Milan, five years in preparation, revealing better than any-
to the 24th of November, a thousand voices will speak to you
of God." It was the announcement of the Great Mission of
Milan, five years in preparation, revealing better than any
other of Archbishop MontinTs actions his powers of organi
zation and the vision he had of his own mission.

113

114 APOSTLE FOR OUR TIME

All that had gone before the exhausting travel, the un
flagging witness in person and in word, the slow building up
of confidence and expectation in his people, the social reor
ganization of the diocese, the construction of churches and
schools all of it was in vain unless his people, each in his
own life, possessed a personal relationship to God. One and a
half million Milanese, almost all at least nominally Catholic,
but many still morally and spiritually uprooted by the war of
a decade before, distracted by their material preoccupations,
disturbed by the claims of Communism, resentful still of real
or imagined clerical injustices and indifference of the past, 1
with a religious sense suffering from progressive attenuation
these were his people. Having sought to provide for their
physical well-being by massive programs of building and of
charity, he sought to equal his activity in those spheres and
even surpass it in a monumental spiritual solicitation of the
city of Ambrose and of Charles.

The idea of the Mission was first conceived at a meeting of
the council of pastors of the city, and presented to the arch
bishop in April of 1955. From the beginning it was deter
mined to limit the Mission to the city parishes, since concen-

1 "A church that makes demands in the name of a peremptory God
no longer carries weight in a world of changing values. The new gen
eration is separated from the clear conclusions of our traditional theol
ogy by a great mountain of boredom and disillusion thrown up by past
experience. We have destroyed man's confidence in us by the way we
live. We cannot expect two thousand years of history to be an unmixed
blessing and recommendation history can be a handicap too. But re
cently the man turning to the Church for enlightenment has all too
often found only a tired man to receive him a man who then had
the dishonesty to hide his fatigue under pious words and fervent ges
tures. At some future date the honest historian will have some bitter
things to say about the contribution made by the churches to the crea
tion of the mass mind, of collectivism, dictatorship and so on." Alfred
Delp, Prison Meditations, op. cit.

MISSION TO MILAN 115

tration of effort and total awareness of it by the community
were felt to be important psychological factors in inducing
people, first out of curiosity and then from devotion, to attend.
Said the archbishop: "Milan is good, intelligent and generous,
open to spiritual progress; I think it would be hard to find an
other city with as open a face and heart as Milan."

The theme of the Mission would be a fundamental, easily
grasped cornerstone concept, basic but forgotten by a world
grown poor in spiritual insight: that God is our Creator and
our Father; God is Providence; God became incarnate and
entered humbly into the mainstream of man's history to save
man; He dwells with us still in His Church. "The scope, the
immediate target at which we aim, is a rebirth of the sense of
religion in the consciences of the people," said the archbishop.
"It will be a message preached to all the people without dis
tinction, but it will be directed above all to those who, al
though baptized, have lost the sense of mystery and of involve
ment with God in His Church the estranged."

Archbishop Montini personally directed the mounting of
the Mission from the first preparatory meetings. Four commis
sions were established: one for the press and publicity, one for
finance, one for preaching (each preacher was given a direc
tive with the theme developed in seven meditations and seven
moral instructions prepared by the faculty of the major semi
nary of the archdiocese and presented in modern crisp terms)
and one for organization. Each parish had its own committee;
courses in theology for lay people were made available. The
archbishop would settle for nothing less than saturation of the
city, and he drove the committees, leading, suggesting, calling
them to meetings, writing memoranda in his neat script. No
modern means adaptable for preaching the gospel were ig
nored; no area of human life and endeavor overlooked.

There were words of caution. In June of 1957, speaking to
the future preachers of the Mission, the archbishop said: "We

116 APOSTLE FOR OUR TIME

will seek to be most respectful also toward those who profess
atheism. We will employ no sarcasm; there will be no setting
of one group against the other." The archbishop also warned
the preachers that there were to be no overtones of politics in
their preaching. But there was fear already abroad that the
Mission was to be revolutionary. Many of the factories refused
permission for the preachers to speak to their employees.
From the other side, the Communist daily of Milan, noting the
growing interest and excitement of the city as the day of the
Mission approached, stated: "The preaching will set forth to
the poor a vision of their heavenly country so that the rich will
not be disturbed in the possession of their heaven on earth. In
addition to discrimination between the rich and the poor,
there is now added the distinction between the good poor who
are Catholics, and the bad poor who are not. This preaching
does not defend the daily bread of men, but the wealth of
those of whom Christ said that it is easier for a camel to pass
through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter
heaven. Doesn't this show that the fight can't always be made
on the side of the big industrialists, even if they are the ones
who some time ago besought the Pope to make Montini a
cardinal?"

Finally the day of this "extraordinary event," this "pro
phetic moment" came on November 4. 1,288 preachers were
mobilized, among them 2 cardinals, 24 archbishops and bish
ops, 600 diocesan priests and 597 belonging to various re
ligious orders, and 65 seminarians. From Bologna, accom
panying their cardinal, Giacomo Lercaro, came the twenty
"flying friars" and with them their trucks equipped with al
tars, confessionals and loudspeakers. Led by Montini, preach
ing, exhorting, ranging everywhere in the city, they reached
out in the first week to thirty-one hospitals, clinics and homes,
wherever there were sick and elderly. "Go forth and speak,"
said the archbishop to the preachers. "Your lips are opened.

MISSION TO MILAN 117

Preach the gospel to every living creature . . . open the
churches! Open houses and courtyards, schools and barracks.
. . . Open every doorway and, above all, open every heart
to God!"

The second week of the Mission was for the women, the
third for the men, but all three weeks found the preachers go
ing into factories, schools, cinemas, preaching on street cor
ners, wherever the people were. "Abandon yourselves to the
Mission with faith," the archbishop pleaded. To the youth of
the city he said, "Before all others, may you come the most
original and sincere understanding of what we are trying to
do can be yours because it is youth which is the bearer of
ideas. Come!" There were special programs for special voca
tions for artists, lawyers, ballerinas, bartenders, bus-drivers,
policemen, professors, radio and television workers, social
workers, soldiers, students, taxi-drivers. Cardinal Siri of
Genoa preached to the industrialists, Cardinal Lercaro to the
workers and intellectuals. The Vatican Radio broadcast Mon-
tinf s sermons every night; the Osservatore Romano ran daily
reports on the Mission's programs; and the Pope promised a
message for the Mission's close.

For three weeks Milan was a city under siege, and the arch
bishop was the field commander of the troops. In and out of
department stores, into banks, the stock exchange, the inevita
ble factories, visiting thirty churches a day, he exhorted and
pleaded: "Come to our Mission and hear us. What are we
talking about? The usual things? Yes, but do you really know
them? The same old story? Yes, but better say, the eternal
story. Useless matters? No, useful as bread and as air itself."
And always there was the special pleading to the fallen away:
**We are determined to place those estranged from us in the
first position of our activity and our prayer. ... If there is a
voice which can reach you, those of you who have left the
Church, the first will be one which asks pardon of you. Yes,

118 APOSTLE FOR OUR TIME

we of you. . . . When we see one who has fallen away there
is much remorse. Why is this brother estranged from us?
Because he has not been sufficiently loved." There was nothing
in Montini's manner or words of what Merton calls "baroque
glamoring of the mysteries of faith," no dramatic banalities,
no false glitter of new apologetic techniques.

Of such massive effort the question was asked: what are the
results? The Mission, for all of its publicity, for all of its prep
aration and agony of activity, was a seed, the word of God
falling quietly into hearts. Its effects could be measured in a
variety of ways, none especially revelatory, but its need, the
insights it provided, the huge human dimensions of the effort,
witnessed to the burden laid on the shoulders of all whose re
sponsibility it is to preach the gospel. To call it a "display of
fireworks, dazzling but short lived," 2 is to miss the point of its
challenge to men's consciences, a challenge which is resolved
interiorly and without publicity.

"With regard to the ordination of priests, Holy Father, no
care whatever is taken." Thus did the cardinalitial committee
on reform report to Pope Paul m eight years before the Coun
cil of Trent. "The most ignorant men," they said, "and sprung
from the dregs of society, and themselves depraved, mere
youths, are everywhere admitted to Holy Orders." As Philip
Hughes has pointed out in his Church in Crisis, there is here
revealed one of the great mysteries of medieval Catholicism,
not that there were 'bad priests, but that the Church never
faced up to the training and educating of the rank and file of
parish clergy. It was a failure which the Council of Trent
dealt with vigorously, but in Europe especially it helped feed
an attitude of disdain and outright opposition to the diocesan
clergy which has persisted in various forms to this day, and
which in turn, joining other influences, has in some countries

2 Tanneguy Quenetain in Realties, May 1962, p. 50.

MISSION TO MILAN 119

served to make of the parish priest a somewhat defensive,
isolated figure, limited in influence and access to his flock, a
situation which would be incomprehensible in an American
parish.

Archbishop Montini had written: "The modern world has
looked at the priest with eyes inflamed with hostile sarcasm
and blinded by a utilitarian approach. The heir of the long-
dead Middle Ages, the ally of selfish conservatism, the high
priest of a silenced litany, the stranger in life: this is the
priest. The clergy ... has felt the repelling aversion of so
ciety in the midst of the new needs of the century. The clergy
started its self-examination. . . ."

The archbishop loved priests as he loved his own priest
hood. As spiritual leader of the Milan archdiocese, he was as
sisted by over two thousand priests; Milan is one of the few
dioceses in Western Europe where spiritual vitality is evi
denced by sufficient vocations. 3 He looked upon his priests as
collaborators and sought from the beginning to establish a
natural ease in his relations with them, abhorring the imper
sonal and legalistic attitude which makes a relationship be
tween priest and bishop rather one between priest and ecclesi
astical authority. His was a spirit of brotherhood, a scorning of
the merely juridical.

Every year on Holy Thursday a letter was issued by the
archbishop to his priests in order that he might, as Christ
with his apostles, spend the day in a form of union with them.
Each Thursday morning was reserved for visits from his
priests; no appointment was necessary and they would leave
his office with a hearty "Grazie, carfssimo" ringing in their
ears, warmed by contact, renewed by his encouragement and
understanding. The priest, he told them, must be an artist, a
skilled worker, the indispensable physician, expert in the sub-

3 Recruitment in Italy is a serious problem. In 1875, there were
150,000 priests for 26 million people; in 1963, 83,000 for 60 million.

120 APOSTLE FOR OUR TIME

tie and profound phenomena of the spirit, a man of learning, a
man who can talk, a man of taste, of tact, of sensibility, of
finesse and of force.

He was not only the superior but the teacher of his priests,
and the seminaries in which they were trained were his special
concern. The major seminary at Venegono, in the foothills of
the Alps near Lake Como, built in the monumental Milanese
style, was a model of its kind. In Italy, the cultural currents of
the nation are in the main areligious and anticlerical. Semi
nary students, moreover, are often deprived of a vital cultural
climate during their formation, which isolates them further
from the life of their country. The major seminary of Milan,
with a library of 190,000 volumes, under Montini subscribed
to over 200 foreign and Italian publications. The four-year
course in theology leads to a pontifical degree, and the three-
year course preceding it in philosophy, literature, languages,
science and mathematics obliges the students to take the state
examinations each year, assuring them of training on a par
with other professions. The theology students take a two-year
course in sociology and an additional one in religious soci
ology. Visiting specialists lecture on psychology, psychiatry,
labor conditions, the films, etc. There is a one-week course
for all priests on current problems, soon expected to be
lengthened to a one-month residence at the seminary for peri
odic mental retooling. The diocese receives a high proportion
of delayed vocations, workers among them, with about ten
each year coming directly from the university and others from
technical schools.

At the seminary of pastoral theology, established by Car
dinal Schuster at the request of Pius XII in 1952, young priests
take courses in religious sociology, catechetics, preaching and
popular apologetics. There are lay professors who teach spe
cial subjects; the classes are open and informal, with lectures
always followed by discussion. On weekends the priests

MISSION TO MILAN 121

go back to their parishes for pastoral work. All of the dioceses
which are suffragan to Milan were invited by Montini to use
the facilities of this highly specialized and thoroughly modern
seminary.

The perspective on the formation of priests in the Milan
archdiocese under Montini tended, without it being a con
scious purpose, to dissipate much of the anticlericalism of the
Italians. It has been pointed out that where there is anticleri
calism there must first be clericalism: "This factor implies
that those who make ecclesiastical decisions often tend to see
the problems, tasks, risks and achievements of the Christian
life solely from the perspective of the priest as an ecclesiastical
official. It results in denying to God's creation its proper
ontological value. This is what Pere Congar has called the
inability to see the values involved in the secular as secular.
This tendency is increased by the false extension of the mo
nastic outlook . . . which sees the secular only as the object
of ascetic exercises. . . . Clericalism . . . combines with
formalism and authoritarianism to impose its own view upon
the laity, who, trained under clerical influence, are passive, al
though often demurring, in the face of such attitudes." 4

Nietzsche wrote of priests "to darken the sky, to extinguish
the sun, to make joy suspect and hope worthless, to lame the
diligent hand these are things which they have always
known excellently how to do." Christ called them the salt of
the earth, and yet Bernanos calls hatred of the priest one of
the most profound of human emotions and also one of the
least understood. "There is no doubt," he says in Monsieur
Ouine, "that it is as old as the human race itself." Montini's
charge to his seminarians and priests was a positive one: to
witness in the world while remaining men not of the world a
sensitive charge. The priest who, in order to protect his priest-
4 Thomas F. O'Dea, American Catholic Dilemma (New York:
Sheed & Ward, 1958), p. 159.

122 APOSTLE FOR OUR TIME

hood, would see the world simply as an enemy, as a contradic
tion of all he stands for, would have little effect on it; he would
generate repugnance and hostility instead of love. 'The priest
who merely rejects or damns all that interests the world,
whose attitude varies from hostility to indifference will, in
turn, be rejected by the world, and yet the world expects
more of the priest than that he should show some understand
ing of it and be ready to meet it; it rejects those priests who
can give it only what is human; it expects from them that other
thing, for even his enemies see in the priest a higher power." 5

"A true, a good, a human, a saintly priesthood," Arch
bishop Montini said, "would save the world. The mission of
the spirit cannot be contested. Even atheism has its own agita
tors, ideally devoted to its cause. . , . The capacity to ex
press the ineffable truths that surround us, to approach with
out profanation the mystery that envelops the universe, to
give a meaning to material things, an interior language to the
spirit and a resounding voice to man's labor, to his sorrow, to
Ms love this capacity is nothing but prayer, a prayer that
must be true as light, a prayer that like light is poetry and re
ality as well. All this is priesthood. And this capacity is still
alive in the heart of the twentieth century."

The training received in the seminaries of the Milan arch
diocese gave the men educated there insights into men and
their situation which made it increasingly possible for them to
identify with their progressive archbishop, and the change in
mood and fervor in Milan was observed and marveled at by
the Milanese themselves. 6

5 Josef Sellmain, The Priest in the World (London: Burns, Gates,
1954), p. 219.

6 A recent study by Joseph H. Fichter, S.J., "Anticlericalism in
American Catholic Culture" (The Critic, Feb.-March 1963, p. 15)
makes the interesting point: "Where both priests and people are liberal
and progressive, the practice of the faith is high. Where the clergy are

MISSION TO MILAN 123

During his eight years in Milan, Archbishop Montini ad
dressed eight pastoral letters to the faithful of his archdiocese,
the first issued in 1956; its theme, Jesus Christ. There followed:
The Religious Sense, Liturgical Education, The Meaning of
Easter, The Christian Family, The Moral Sense, The Council
(Vatican n) , and his final letter, The Christian and Temporal
Welfare. They are distinguished not only by erudition, by re
search and knowledge to which the numerous footnotes alone
attest, but by the grasp the archbishop reveals of the problems
and anxieties of his people, many living divided lives in a
divided world. There is a vigorous affirmation of the perennial
efficacy of the Christian gospel, tempered by sympathetic com
prehension of the world as it is; an attempt to effect a fusion
in his people's lives of their Christian faith and the good which
is in the world. In these letters the archbishop sees the world,
despite its perils, as the stage on which the drama of man's sal
vation is mounted, and thus one which in its way is holy and full
of mystery. A vigorous and complete faith expressed through
vitality of worship is the answer held out to those who seek for
peace and purposiveness in the century of anxiety.

In addition to the pastoral letters there were the pastoral
visitations made to every parish in the archdiocese. The arch
bishop was intensely aware that it is in and through the parish
that the people are instructed and sacramentalized, and that

traditionalists and the people are progressive the practice of the faith is
low. Where both clergy and people are conservative, religious practices
are middling. . . . The most important conclusion ... is the fact
that the liberal laity has a tendency to be pro-clergy, while the con
servative laity tends to be anti-clergy. On every item that could be used
in our study as an index of lay attitudes toward the clergy, the liberal
laymen are more favorable to the priests than are conservative laymen.
. . . The kinds of lay people who are constantly cited as being restless
and disturbed about the position of the laity these are the best friends
the priests and Church have."

124 APOSTLE FOR OUR TIME

they in turn enrich society by the fervor and vigor of their
Christian lives. He sought, therefore, to assure that every par
ish was well administered by the clergy, and that the people
were served in all their needs. In his eight years as archbishop,
he was able to make a thorough visitation of 649 parishes out
of a total of 822, an extraordinary and exhausting accomplish
ment against the background of his other obligations and ac
tivities. The visit to each parish was also the occasion for the
administration of the sacrament of Confirmation, an oppor
tunity to meet the people, to talk to the children and ask them
questions about their faith. To one little boy who told him, in
answer to his question, that God made us to know, love and
serve Him, the archbishop said: "Very good indeed! You
know more than a philosopher."

The archbishop's attitude toward Catholic education was
revealed in an address delivered in 1958 in Milan at the inter
regional meeting of the Italian Federation of Church Schools.
After greeting those present and encouraging them to do all
in their power to perfect their pedagogical methods, he said
in part: "We must remember above all else that the best de
fense of our schools is their excellence. If the schools are
sound and good, if they provide direction as well as education,
if they give satisfaction to parents and to society, they are well
defended, and to this defense ecclesiastical authority will give
its approval and support. . . . We might be tempted to think
that after so much effort and the construction of so many
buildings, our schools have reached a final standard, and that
we could say we have done everything in our power, that we
have reached the peak of efficiency; consequently, that there is
nothing more to be done. The reply to this is that, on the
contrary, we must believe in the progressive improvement of
our schools, not in a spirit of dissatisfaction with the schools
of the past but because the improvement of our schools is
part of a broader transformation in the life of the people.

MISSION TO MILAN 125

. . . The culture that is permeating even the least educated
classes has stirred up consciences, opened up horizons,
changed customs, created a new mentality, so that if our
schools wish to keep abreast of the times, they must be willing
to change.

"Other countries have done much to improve their schools
. . ." he continued. "We have far to go. The first point is this:
we must put an end to poorly conducted schools which strug
gle for existence, their aim not sound pedagogy but the keep
ing alive of a community, or providing for the maintenance of
other institutions of the Catholic world. Our schools in the
hands of responsible and experienced religious congregations
or ecclesiastical authorities must not be mediocre; they must
strive for perfection in every detail. Our schools must know
how to really educate, how to form strong souls, form, the con
sciences of those for whom the Christian way of life is not a
veneer and who lead a true interior life, who demonstrate the
manner in which we must live today in order to give witness
to Christ and to serve society by loving our neighbor.

"Our schools are attended by children whose parents some
times undo what the school does; we must not overlook this
problem. ... I believe there should be a little more disci
pline, more insistence on study, more submission on the part
of pupils to authority. I take the liberty of suggesting that re
lations between teacher and pupil be more personal. To be
successful, education must be the result of a dialogue and of
the meeting of one soul with another. We must do everything
possible to provide, especially for our colleges, spiritual direc
tors who are truly learned, truly reasonable, and able to instill
dynamic and strong principles into the minds of the students.
... A school which stresses only scholarship imparts in
struction but leaves souls dissatisfied and indifferent. . . .

"Having said this, we hope that our schools will be trans
formed, improved, perfected, not in a spirit of rivalry but in a

126 APOSTLE FOR OUR TIME

spirit of collaboration with other schools, including public or
State schools. . . . These are my sentiments regarding the
service you are rendering the Church, and I am not only ask
ing you for greater sacrifices and great efforts, but wish to ex
press my hope for your greater success and your greater re
wards,"

Archbishop Montini's affection for youth continued un-
diminished during his years in Milan. An indication of his in
terest was the founding in 1957 of the Overseas College at
tached to the university, especially for Catholic students from
underdeveloped countries. Indians, Africans, South Ameri
cans, Syrians and Indonesians were among those granted the
opportunity of a free education. The archbishop's interest was
again personal, not merely administrative. Each year it was his
custom to invite the students to his home for dinner on the
feast of the Epiphany. He chose the day, he told them, as be
ing the feast significant of the universality of the Church, and
he said, "it could not be passed better than in the company of
representatives of the peoples of the world."

He knew of the students 5 nostalgia for home, and told them
that as their father he wanted to be with them and if possible
diminish somewhat their loneliness, at least for a day. Of each
he would ask his name and country, and each was surprised
at the archbishop's knowledge of their country, large or small
the world of the Vatican had been an informative one! He
spoke to them in Italian, in French, in English or in Spanish
and laughed with them if he made a mistake. He gave each a
book; the first year, two large volumes on Saint Paul, and in
successive years books on Milan and other subjects. He posed
uncomplainingly for snapshots, and it was his custom to give
each foreign student cards of blessing signed for his family
and for his bishop.

MISSION TO MILAN 127

On October 9, 1958, the Pope of Peace, Pius XH, died,
wracked with illness and exhausted by years. Archbishop
Montini flew to Rome to pray at his bier. The College of Car
dinals which met to elect a successor to the dead Pope was a
reduced one; there had been no consistory since 1953, and
only 53 gathered in the Sistine Chapel to elect the one who
would follow a Pontiff who had reigned for eighteen years.
The archbishop of Milan, which is traditionally a see headed
by a cardinal, was not among them. He had been an arch
bishop for almost five years, easily the best known of Italy's
prelates, his words and actions observed and quoted in the
world press, mentioned as a possible successor to the man he
had served for so many years but he was not a cardinal and
it is from the College of Cardinals that the Popes are elected.
For four hundred years they have been Italian; for the most
part, leaders of the large Italian sees such as Florence, Pa
lermo, Naples, Turin, Bologna and Venice. The conclave was
brief; 7 the choice fell to the short, rotund patriarch of Venice,
the benign, unknown seventy-eight-year Angelo Roncalli.
And the most famous and short-lived reign in modern papal
history began.

The new Pope was not long in calling a secret consistory to
replenish the depleted College which had elected him. On De
cember 15, 1958, twenty-three prelates were named by him to
receive the cardinal's hat the first name on the list was that
of the archbishop of Milan. This time he would not refuse be
cause, unlike the offer made in 1953, this was also a gesture of
affection toward the archdiocese which he led. Milan exploded
with pride and joy. It was no secret that the Milanese had,
since Montini's appointment to be their archbishop, waited
with increasingly ill-concealed impatience for Pius XII to
recognize his one-time closest collaborator and their city. But

7 It is said that Archbishop Montini received at least one vote in the
conclave.

128 APOSTLE FOR OUR TIME

Pius died without naming his "beloved son" to a seat in the
senate of the Church. John XXEtt corrected the oversight
with a graciousness and purposiveness which was not lost on
those who weigh the winds of the Vatican.

As apostolic delegate in Bulgaria and Turkey, later as nun
cio in Paris, John XXm had often reported to Montini in the
Secretariat of State. In the absence of a Cardinal Secretary of
State, the then Sostituto and later Pro-Secretary was, together
with Tardini, a superior of Roncalli's, and the affection and
esteem which characterized their infrequent meetings as arch
bishop of Milan and patriarch of Venice dated from those
earlier days. 8 It had been thought that the new Pope would
call Montini from Milan to be his Secretary of State, but it was
the other half of the Montini-Tardini combination who was
named. Montini was to stay in his pivotal position in Lom-
bardy, working and preaching and traveling in ways which
would have been severely limited had he been back in the
Curia.

Cardinal Montini was formally elevated to the cardinalate
by Pope John XXm at a public consistory in Saint Peter's
Basilica on December 18, 1958, the first in the long list of
new cardinals which included his former colleague in the
Secretariat of State, Monsignor Domenico Tardini, and the
apostolic delegate to the United States, Archbishop Amleto
Cicognani. Among the thirteen Italian and ten non-Italian
cardinals elevated at this time, men from eight nations were
represented; two were from the United States Archbishop
Richard Gushing of Boston and Archbishop John O'Hara of
Philadelphia. Cardinals Antonio Barbieri of Uruguay and

8 An interesting incident is related in a French paper, describing
Monsignor Roncallfs preparations, in 1944, for a flight back to Rome
from Ankara in an old army plane. In answering the line on the ques
tionnaire: "In case of accident, please notify " he wrote, not the

name of a relative, but the words: "Monsignor Montini, Vatican."

MISSION TO MILAN 129

Jose Garibi y Rivera of Mexico were the first ever to be ap
pointed from their countries. Pope John had described them
all as having "in pontifical missions, at the head of dioceses or
in the Roman Curia, spent themselves actively, zealously and
prudently, and thus greatly contributed to the progress of the
Christian religion." There were those among them who be
cause of their own activities or the growing importance of the
sees they governed had become prominent in recent times,
and several of these were distinguished by their youth. Bishop
Julius Doepner of Berlin (later of Munich) was at 45 the
youngest cardinal; Bishop Franz Konig of Vienna, was only 53.
Before returning to Milan, Cardinal Montini took posses
sion of his titular church in Rome SS. Sylvester and Martin
on the Esquiline Hill a church under the direction of the
Carmelites and built in eighteenth-century style. There had
been a church on the spot dedicated to the two saints ever
since the time of Pope Sergius n (844-847), and even prior to
this there was one on the site dedicated to Saint Martin of
Tours in the time of Pope Symmachus (498-514). Charles
Borromeo had SS. Sylvester and Martin as his titular church;
it had also been the titular church of Cardinal Achilla Ratti
and of Cardinal Udefonso Schuster. Cardinal Montini now
truly belonged to Milan.

7. Portrait of a Cardinal

The new cardinal's pace continued unabated. His daily rou
tine was an exhausting one. By six-thirty every morning he
was up and on his way to chapel, through his private study
where two photographs his mother's and his father's faced
his desk together with three small pictures in Byzantine style.
His Mass was served by his secretary, Don Macchi, and he
in turn served the secretary's Mass. He finished matins, lauds,
and prime of his daily office before breakfast, which he ate
as he scanned all of the Milanese newspapers. The cardinal
had a standing order at one of the newsstands near his resi
dence for any extraordinary editions to be brought to him im
mediately. On days when he had no pastoral visits planned, he
received his vicar general promptly at nine-thirty, followed by
the other audiences of the day. These would continue until
one or two in the afternoon. 1

1 "I could not ask of him (Ambrose) what I wished as I wished, for
I was kept from any face to face conversation with him by the throng
of men with their own troubles, whose infirmities he served. The very
little time he was not with these he was refreshing either his body with
necessary food or his mind with reading. . . . No one was forbidden
to approach him. . . ." The Confessions of St. Augustin. Tr. by F. J.
Sheed (New York: Sheed& Ward, 1943), pp. 107-8.

130

PORTRAIT OF A CARDINAL 131

The impression made by the cardinal on his visitors was
memorable. At sixty-one the abrasive effects of his Vatican
service and five years in Milan were visible. He showed the
quiet patience and deep-etched tolerance of humanity and its
importunities to be found in men who have given exhaustively
of themselves and are in consequence devoid of any human
posturing or pretense. For years he had lived the life of an
other man, and no matter how lovingly and willingly he had
served, the diminution of his own will and desires, thousands
of times confected, had given "him a discipline and dignity of
impressive dimensions.

His gentleness was apparent. His hands, long and thin and
curiously white, the veins high and bluely visible, rested deli
cately on the black of his cassock or on the desk as he listened
to his visitor; they did not, in a kind of episcopal self-con
sciousness, play with the pectoral cross. His eyes, full of re
serve and yet alive, meditatively studied the visitor as they
chatted. For most Italians it is the hands that provide nuance
to the words. In the cardinal it was the eyes bright, gray-
green, changing color with his mood. His voice was low, with
a gently grating undertone, perfectly modulated.

His person could be called confusing. He had always been
slim, but without angularity. There was an economy about his
person, words and gestures which seemed a human articula
tion of Mies van der Rohe's architectural principle: <e Less is
more." His smile was not served by the straightness of his lips;
it seemed somewhat wintry, but there were always the eyes to
reveal the warmth and light of the man.

After dinner, his main meal of the day, he would take a
short nap. 2 He would finish his breviary in the chapel of his
residence and promptly at four-thirty he was at his desk again.

2 Later, after his election, he caused consternation at the Vatican
court by saying that he had lost the Roman habit of siesta while in
Milan.

132 APOSTLE FOR OUR TIME

He preferred to write longhand, although on a table nearby
was the white typewriter which had belonged to Pius XII.
Supper was light, and was followed by a viewing of the news
of the day on television. The rosary was recited together with
the priests of his household, the cardinal preferring to say it
with them as he walked up and down in the library or in the
corridor lined with books.

At his desk in the library, Cardinal Montini then continued
to work far into the night. Occasionally he would relax before
the television set if a good comedy was being shown; his taste
in music centered on Beethoven, Chopin and Mozart. But
usually in his hours of relaxation he preferred to read. If he
could be said to have any hobbies they were reading and
traveling. Books were a passion with him, 3 and his residence
was a veritable arsenal of them. Every month the director of
the Saint Paul Bookshop would receive a list of the latest
books desired by the cardinal. "How many books there are!"
he said one day when visiting the bookstore. "One would need
a long life and much time to read all that one would want";
he said it almost wistfully. His reading was far ranging. Years
earlier he had translated Maritain's Three Reformers into
Italian, and he retained his admiration for the gentle French
man whom he had come to know personally when the latter
was French ambassador to the Vatican in the immediate post
war years. Thomas Mann, Camus, Bernanos, Congar, De
Lubac, Charles Journet, Louis Bouyer, Danielou these were
his favorites. Jean Guitton of the French Academy had been
long accustomed to sending Montini his books as they ap
peared. When Guitton sent him The Church and the Gospel,
the cardinal wrote thanking him and said he had stayed up all
night reading it.

He criticized writers who say that they need "to have ex-

s He had brought 90 cases of books with him to Milan, with many
American treatises on sociology and economics among them.

PORTRAIT OF A CARDINAL 133

perience of evil," and to a congress of Italian authors lie said:
"The temptation for knowledge of evil has a strong attraction.
There are those who say that it is necessary to have experience
of evil to write about good. This is not true. Above all things,
keep yourself pure and do not be afraid to put great theses in
your writings." His taste in art was conservative: "Artists," he
said, "seem to have abandoned the idea of producing works
which are intelligible," and critics "use language that requires
a special knowledge in order to understand the meaning.
. . . We, the audience, make pathetic efforts to understand
at least something. We believed that the kingdom of art was
beatitude, whereas today it is pain and confusion."

His usual hour for retiring was two in the morning. Four or
five hours of sleep were enough for him, but his spareness of
face and figure was due in large part to the rigor of the de
manding life which he had lived ever since his ordination. The
harsh Milan winter caused him much trouble with colds and
influenza, but apart from these "annoyances," as he called
them, his pace was that of a man many years his junior. It
was now to quicken.

In June of 1960 the cardinal arrived in New York for his
second visit to the United States in nine years; it was to be a
brief stay of seven days. He had accepted the invitation of
Notre Dame University to be the recipient, together with
President Eisenhower, Dr. Tom Dooley and others, of an hon
orary degree at the annual commencement. The United States
is not yet accustomed to European prelates of Montini's stat
ure arriving for routine reasons, and the usual speculations
were rife. The "real reason," it was adduced, lay in the need to
reassure the American Church that a recent editorial in Os-
servatore Romano affirming the Church's "right and duty" to
instruct the faithful on how to vote did not apply to this coun
try since Marxism was not an issue. However, since editorials
do not shape the thinking or action of the American Church in

134 APOSTLE FOR OUR TIME

such delicate areas, and since the cardinal loved to travel, his
presence here could be sought and found simply in his desire
to see more of a country for which he had on many occasions
expressed his admiration and to which he had been specially
invited on this occasion by the president of a great university.

After celebrating an outdoor pontifical Mass for the gradu
ates of Notre Dame and their guests on June 5th, Cardinal
Montini spoke briefly and informally. "The university world
is one of research and is, therefore, humble and attentive in
the face of truth," he said. "The university world is one which
teaches and, therefore, it serves and spreads the truth." Noting
that it was Pentecost Sunday and that the message of Pentecost
is the message of truth, the cardinal continued: "How fitting it
would be on this day to study this fundamental aspect of our
religion, and to clarify for ourselves the concept of the system
of truth which Christianity creates in the world. Saint Augus
tine, freshly converted by Saint Ambrose, asked as his first
desire to eliminate from himself the worst infirmity of the
mind, the lack of confidence in arriving at the truth." And he
told them that "the university must understand that the divine
design of truth is for us a vocation, a blessing, a duty."

Later in the day, at the commencement exercises, the future
Pope and the President of the United States 4 received their
honorary doctor in law degrees from Notre Dame's president.
The citation accompanying that of the cardinal saluted him
as "a Prince of the Church who has brought the Christian
vision to bear, with extraordinary practical success, on the
harsh political and social realities of our time. Through his

4 At tbis meeting with President Eisenhower, the cardinal offered
him a statuette of an angel breaking chains. In writing later to thank
hin^ the President said: "Dear Cardinal Montini, before leaving for
the Far East I wish to thank you for the expressive statuette which you
gave me at Notre Dame last Sunday. It can be a symbol of what I hope
to realize on this trip and in my life. . . .**

PORTRAIT OF A CARDINAL 135

long and brilliant career in the Vatican Secretariat of State,
fulfilling even its highest duties, he came to know those reali
ties well throughout the world, and he directed his great talent
and energy to the intellectuals and the workers to renew
among them powerfully the moral and spiritual leadership of
the Church. . . ." The citation also noted that, "When Pope
Pius XII named him Archbishop of Milan, the industrial cen
ter of Italy and a stronghold of Communism, he pledged
himself to be 'the Archbishop of the workingman,' a pledge
which he has fulfilled with inexhaustible apostolic vigor to the
strengthening of the Christian world."

New York, Chicago, Boston, Philadelphia, and Washing
ton were included in the cardinal's itinerary on this visit. He
had arrived in New York, where he was met by Cardinal
Spellman and the apostolic delegate to the United States,
Archbishop Egidio Vagnozzi. On his trip to American cities
he was accompanied by Frank Folsom, chairman of the exec
utive board of the board of directors of the Radio Corporation
of America. Boston gave him, in the words of Time magazine,
cc banners and hi-fied hymns," and while there he took part
with Cardinal Gushing in a public ceremony at the Don Ori-
one home for aged Italians. In Washington he was entertained
at a dinner given in his honor by the apostolic delegate.

From the United States the cardinal continued on to Sao
Paolo and Rio de Janeiro in Brazil. The President of Brazil,
Juscelino Kubitschek hailed him as "one of the major figures
of our time." The cardinal visited the favelas of Rio, and talked
to government and church officials about conditions in this
country and the explosive continent of South America. His
memory of this visit was to be a long one.

From July 19 to August 10, 1962, the cardinal was again
away from Milan, this time in Africa. His trip was brief,
bringing him to Rhodesia, where he visited the two missions
sponsored by his archdiocese, to South Africa, to Nigeria and

136 APOSTLE FOR OUR TIME

to Ghana. He was the first cardinal from Europe to visit
Africa and Ms trip gave him a perspective on the reality of
Africa's problems and of its progress as its countries sought
through their multiple political expressions to take their place
in the world community of nations. It was the Church, strug
gling and vital, which he had come to see, and his visits were
largely to missions, churches, seminaries, convents. The
names of the towns and cities were like poetry to him Kar-
iba, Chirundu, Salisbury in Rhodesia; Johannesburg and
Pretoria in South Africa; Lagos, Ibadan, Enugu in Nigeria;
Accra and Tena in Ghana. Less poetic were the abject condi
tions resulting from discrimination which he found in certain
of the countries and the poverty and illiteracy which, happily,
he found everywhere being challenged. Monsignor Macchi,
his secretary, remembers driving through Nigeria on the way
to Ibadan and passing signs which read: "One God alone is a
majority/' "The greatest King is God," "Thank God today,"
"God is my way." And the cardinal would prod him: "Write
it down! Write it down!" Everything was new everything
told a story.

The cardinal told his people on his return: "It was for me
an extraordinary experience. Perhaps because it concerned
the first visit of a European cardinal to their continent, per
haps for other motives, the reception was magnificent. I do not
speak of the Italians at Kariba and of the numerous whites
whom I met during the trip, but of the native populations:
Christians of deep faith, demonstrated on many occasions.
We visited many mission stations in South Africa and West
Central Africa and were most favorably impressed. Indeed,
we must say that the edification received from the religious
spirit demonstrated by the Catholic communities we visited
did not spare us some pain as we contrasted their fervor with
that of our own people, who, while devout and faithful, have
lost something of that intensity of faith, that totality of pres-

PORTRAIT OF A CARDINAL 137

ence, that grace of manner, that beauty of song, that spon
taneity of devotion which ... we admired in the celebration
of the sacred ceremonies, in the holy Masses and Commun
ions of the flourishing African churches. We saw how the faith
there is lived seriously, being the very center of life. We saw
how ardent and dignified is the expression of faith, worship,
prayer, devotion among these new Christians. We saw how
the youth especially throng to the missionary churches. We
heard the singing, full voiced and moving, of the entire
community, and we witnessed the celebration in Latin of our
festive Masses."

No other trip of his life had impressed Cardinal Montini as
had this last one to Africa. He had visited the "locations" in
Johannesburg and Pretoria, ridden in a canoe down the Niger
with the sound of drums sending word of his coming ahead;
he had heard the beauty of the Gregorian chant sung by Afri
cans in their dirt-floor churches; he had seen vistas of natural
beauty which overwhelmed him but above all he had seen
people in love with their faith, and he was profoundly influ
enced by it. On his return he went immediately to Pope John's
summer residence at Castelgandolfo to make a two-hour re
port.

Cardinal Montini was never allowed to be simply the arch
bishop of Milan. His words and actions for years had been
public coin throughout the world. Many who hailed him as a
liberal demanded that his every word and action fall resound
ingly into a category of highly elastic outline. This they re
fused to do. Conservatives tended to be critical and yet on
certain positions he was found in their ranks. Without want
ing to be, he had become a symbol, and symbols are ex
pected to be univocal; they do not allow of the alternation of
attitude and action which through the years confused the sym
bol-makers. He defied categorization. He did so because he

138 APOSTLE FOR OUR TIME

was the man he was, a dispassionate seeker after truth, and
such a man is often of necessity ambivalent where the truth is
concerned. Such ambivalence would find a natural repug
nance in the doctrinaire, conservative or liberal. The doctri
naire liberal, for example, will embrace an idea as an idea,
and tend to ignore the context of its implementation. The ex
istential liberal, however, will subject it to scrutiny in the
same context, and this latter will be affected by multiple in
fluences.

Cardinal Montini had not been consecrated that he might
become a symbol; he had been consecrated to be a pastor of
souls. This gave a dimension to his actions in Milan which,
while doing no violence to the naturally progressive inclina
tion of his thought, provoked charges of inconsistency and
indecisiveness. Pastoral responsibility involved the translating
of ideas into actions not all of them successful and the
context of translation modified at times his known positions.
Thus the charge of inconsistency. A sensitive, complex
thinker, he sought in translation to make the expression in
action the right and complete one, since it was to affect his
people. This demanded reflection, sometimes postponement,
and always, time. Hence the charge of indecisiveness.

The cardinaFs concern with social problems led some to as
sume too readily that he was leftist politically. His identifica
tion with the workers caused some disaffection among the in
tellectuals, especially since he preached openly his belief that
the story of Europe's large-scale apostasy was primarily a
tragedy of the intellectuals those citizens of the eighteenth
century who sought to create a self-sufficient society of their
own and to reject God's revelation, their "wisdom" sifting
down through the middle classes to the proletariat and pre
paring the ground for the Socialist and Marxist faiths. Yet
he was an intellectual himself; the historical or philosophical
error was his only target.

PORTRAIT OF A CARDINAL 139

Politically the cardinal's sympathies seemed to be some
what left of center; yet he could, in I960, warn against a
flanking movement to the left of the Christian Democratic
Party: a proposed alliance with Nenni's Socialists. He made
the warning "with regret," and "considering the present state
of affairs" it was the context of the times, the danger of a
materialistic overwhelming of the principles of the party or
of its left wing which concerned him. "We will not fail to give
you other instructions should the circumstances change," he
told his priests. 5 So too with the priest-worker movement
with which his name had been associated in Rome in its be
ginning years. The idea was considered valid and was en
couraged by Trim in the late 40's when the more conservative
of the Curia urged caution or refusal of permission for the ex
periment. Yet years later in Milan he would voice his regrets
and express caution with regard to such experiments through
which spiritual considerations ran the danger of being en
gulfed by temporal demands. Again the context must be con
sidered. His speech in Rome, shortly before the opening of
the Ecumenical Council, in which he "baptized" the Italian
Risorgimento, which led to the creation of an Italian State
independent of the Church, was called "flamingly liberal"
and "stoutly anti-conservative." Rather, again it was an ob
jective evaluation of a situation stripped of nostalgic attach
ment and outmoded theology.

No one was more devoted to the concept of the freedom of
the press. But in the context of his responsibilities as arch-

5 When, in February 1962, an "eminent lay person" of the Milan
archdiocese anonymously deprecated the "new suffering" caused the
Church by the affiance of the Center left-wing with the Socialists in
forming a government, the archdiocesan daily, U Italia, sharply rebuked
the critic, first for his anonymity and secondly for presuming to make
his own reaction seem to be that of the Church which apparently it
was not.

140 APOSTLE FOR OUR TIME

bishop he became involved, in 1962, in a case which caused
much comment. A bimonthly Milanese newspaper Adesso,
founded by Father Primo Mazzolari, received a "private
warning" from the Holy Office which asked it "to modify
the spirit and orientation of the paper which blends so many
professions of the Christian Faith with questionable ideas and
attitudes." Cardinal Montini, in transmitting the monitum,
added that since the paper had maintained the same attitude
of ill-considered criticism of the hierarchy and regarding the
authority of the laity, he himself felt obliged to agree, though
with regret, with the reasons for such a warning. In addition
he asked that the paper cease collaboration with two French
reviews Esprit and Temoignage Chretien. In replying to the
cardinal, the director of the paper explained that the purpose
of the paper was to discuss problems among an adult laity
using "those gifts of God, intelligence and liberty."

Adesso decided to suspend publication with its issue of
September 15, 1962, stating: "The paper cannot disavow the
ideals of its origins and its sense of responsibility by an act of
rebellion; 6 nor, on the other hand could it accept an uncon
ditional obedience which would alter the reason for its exist
ence as an interlocutor, and would have reduced it to an organ
of the Curia, like so many others, whether armed or not with
an imprimatur." The words of Cardinal Newman to W. G. Ward
are fitting here: "There have always been differences of
opinion in the Church and there always will be, and Chris
tians would cease to have a spiritual and intellectual life at all
if such disputes did not occur; for they are members of the

ft "Things which are really useful end by getting done under God's
will at the appointed time, and not at any other. If one seeks to do what
is right in itself at the wrong time, one may become a heretic or a
schismatic. . . . Inward brooding over insults is not patience, but
memory with a glance at the future is prudence." Cardinal Newman,
quoted by Sellmain, op. cit., p. 216.

PORTRAIT OF A CARDINAL 141

Church Militant. No human power can prevent them nor, if it
attempted to do so, would it achieve anything but a wilderness
which it could rechristen a 'peaceful landscape'! And when I
reflect on the fact that no man, however hard he tried, could
prevent these things, I do not feel any particular anxiety or
disquiet about them. Man cannot do it and God does not de
sire it"

Again in 1962, Cardinal Montini drew world-wide atten
tion to himself by his action in sending a telegram to the
Spanish head of State asking clemency for a young student,
Jorge Gonill Vails, and workers condemned, as the cardinal
thought, to death by a Spanish court for an act of terrorism.
His telegram to Generalissimo Franco read: "In name of
Milanese Catholic students and my own, I ask your Excellency
to show clemency students and workers condemned so that
human lives may be saved and it made clear public order in
Catholic country can be defended by methods differing from
those which prevail in countries without faith and Christian
tradition." The Spanish government replied coolly, indicating
that the cardinal had been misinformed, that the offenders had
been sentenced not to death but to prison. A spokesman for
the Spanish Foreign Office said the procedure followed by the
cardinal was "quite unusual in diplomacy." But this many-
faceted man had not acted this time as a diplomat he had
reacted as a priest, a pastor, a lover of youth and of workers.
The diplomat was eclipsed and the man shone through.

On the 25th of January, 1959, Pope John XXffl went to
the Roman Basilica of Saint Paul Outside the Walls to com
memorate the feast of the conversion of Saint Paul and to
celebrate a Mass for Christian unity. Following it, in the
quiet of the monastery adjoining the basilica, the Pope an
nounced to the eighteen cardinals of the Roman Curia present
his intention of holding a Council of the Universal Church,

142 APOSTLE FOR OUR TIME

"to proclaim the truth, bring Christians closer to the faith,
and contribute at the same time to peace and prosperity on
earth." He painted for them a picture of a world in convul
sion, a world of divided allegiances, of confused morality, a
world seeking its destiny in fear and suspicion a house di
vided against itself. The Church should, for only the twenty-
first time in its two-thousand-year history, hold a Council and
in and through it confront the world of its people and of its
century. Then, very simply, he said to the cardinals: "I would
like to have your advice." They sat silent before him. Not a
word was spoken.

The Pope was later to call their silence "devout and im
pressive." Yet he was disappointed by the lack of response:
'Humanly We could have expected that the cardinals, after
hearing Our allocution, might have crowded around to ex
press approval and good wishes." That they had not, deeply
wounded the Pope, but it did not swerve him from his in
tention, which he had first expressed to his Secretary of State,
Cardinal Tardini. It was the result, not of a carefully reasoned
programme for his pontificate, but rather of a spontaneous
idea 7 which came to him while talking one day to Tardini
about the state of the world and the need of the Church to
revitalize its witness. "A Council!" he had exclaimed
and thus was born the most significant event of modern
Christian history.

If the reaction of certain of the Roman cardinals and of
segments of the Curia was cautious and restrained, that of the
cardinal archbishop of Milan was not. "An historic event of
immense grandeur," he wrote when the projected Council
was announced, ". . . an event important for peace, for truth,
for the spirit; important today for tomorrow, important for

7 "... an inspiration felt in the humility of Our Heart as a sudden,
unexpected direct touch." (John XXIII, Letter of April 24, 1959 to the
Venetian clergy.)

PORTRAIT OF A CARDINAL 143

the people and for human hearts; important for the whole
Church, and for all humanity." The Osservatore Romano had
buried the announcement of the Pope's call to council in the
following day's edition, between two items of far less relevance,
and the important Civilta Cattolica, a Jesuit bimonthly with
semi-official Vatican status, made no mention of the Council
until four months later, on May 2. But between its announce
ment and its convening, Cardinal Montini delivered three
major addresses on the Council, and his Lenten pastoral for
1962, Pensiamo al Concilio (Let Us Look at the Council),
was the most significant of Italian episcopal statements on the
subject.

The cardinal cleary was not to be among the "prophets of
doom" who were uncomprehending of the Pope's desire to
renew the Church. 8 Of the Council, the cardinal said in
1960: "All feel themselves to be on the eve of an extraordi
nary event . . . We who have the faith sense obscurely but
strongly that such an event has a connection with the mysteri
ous and universal designs of God for the destiny of man, and
that it has a particular relationship with the individual con
science of each one of us. ... Something of the prophetic
is abroad in our time . . ." The cardinal went on to say that
the manner in which the Council had been conceived was

8 In Ms address at the solemn opening of Vatican Council n, Oc
tober 11, 1962, Pope John said: "In the daily exercise of Our pastoral
office we sometimes have to listen, much to Our regret, to voices of
persons who, although burning with zeal, are not endowed with too
much discretion or measure. In these modern tunes they can see noth
ing but prevarication and ruin. They say that our era in comparison
with past eras is getting worse, and they behave as though they had
learned nothing from history, which is nonetheless the teacher of Me.
They behave as though at the time of former Councils everything was
a full triumph for the Christian idea and for proper religious liberty.
We feel We must disagree with these prophets of doom who are always
forecasting disaster, as though the end of the world were at hand."

144 APOSTLE FOR OUR TIME

something of a surprise, especially for one who had some
knowledge of how pontifical acts are conceived; most of
them, he said, are born in the departments and offices of the
Roman Curia, sometimes exclusively in the minds of those
who immediately serve the head of the Church. 9 "But this
announcement . . . has its origin in the unique and highly
personal will of the Supreme Pontiff. He had no collaborator,
no counselor. No one used pressure, no one promised results.
And we are not here confronted by a despotic will . . . but
rather by one which is naturally inclined to pastoral benevo
lence, which seeks the good in others and for others, and
which promotes it with spontaneous dedication. . . . With
out recourse to the theory of a charismatically preternatural
impulse, we can safely say . . . that he knew and felt him
self to exercise, with the prophetic virtue of his office, that
supreme power to which the assistance of the Holy Spirit is
promised, as guarantee, by Christ."

Cardinal Montini pointed out that there had been from
time to time talk of another Council, "but no one dared to
give such a possibility any real hope of foreseeable and con
crete realization." He indicated that such thinking in part had
its origin in a misinterpretation of what the definition of
papal infallibility in the First Vatican Council had effected in
the Church, namely the mistaken idea that the Bishop of
Rome had absorbed and annulled the universal functions of
the body of bishops. 10 The solemn dogmatic definition of the
Assumption by Pius XII, preceding which he had consulted

9 Cf. Xavier Rynne, Letters from Vatican City (New York: Farrar,
Straus & Co., 1963), p. 25.

10 The doctrine of the collegiality of the bishops was given little rec
ognition by the preparatory theological commission in its schema on
the Church prepared in 1961-62 under the chairmanship of Cardinal
Ottaviani during the first session of the Council. Cardinal Montinfs
sharpest intervention criticized the failure.

PORTRAIT OF A CARDINAL 145

the bishops of the world singly but not the entire body of
bishops in collegiate assembly, seemed to lend some credence
to such a distortion. But, the cardinal said, "The forecast
that the epoch of Councils had come to an end was laid to
rest by the spontaneous initiative of the Pope." The Council
is, he continued, a solemn reunion of all the bishops of the
world, one in which they participate by divine right. The
authority of the Pope, convoking and confirming, is necessary
for the Council to be truly ecumenical. But no matter what
its importance to the Church, no Council is a permanent
institution such as a parliament; it is not a synthesis of the
whole Church; it does not transform the Church into a
corporation represented and directed by a sovereign assembly
to which the Pope himself is subject. "The Council is an epi
sode in the life of the Church, a particular moment that calls
forth the supreme authority of the Church; but it does not
create that authority, it exercises it."

The cardinal quickly synthesized the Councils through the
ages. Of Trent he said, "The Council of Reform . . . saved
the dogma and the discipline of the Church but signalized the
fatal separation of whole Christian peoples now designated
by the sad name of Protestant." The Vatican Council de
fined the doctrine of the infallibility of the Pope but Montini
approvingly quoted the statement of "eminent theologians"
that "the problem of the reconciliation of the divine rights of
the episcopacy with the divine rights of the Pope unhappily
has not yet been thoroughly discussed. A well balanced
theology of the Church demands above all that this question
be posed. . . . Will this be the work of the Second Vatican
Council? It is a secret hidden in the future." To these words
the cardinal added: 'Terhaps this secret will be disclosed in
this much desired Vatican Council for which we are prepar
ing. . . ." As the date of the Council approached, the car
dinal stated: "We are thus at the threshold of the new Ecu-

146 APOSTLE FOR OUR TIME

menical Council, and we are naturally tempted to predict
what it will be like. It is difficult to say. . . . Important
events are transpiring around us; we must be vigilant, we
must seek to understand the designs of God, the movement of
history, the inspirations of the Spirit, the hour of responsi
bility,"

In his addresses and pastoral letters, the cardinal returned
more than once in those pre-Council days of great expecta
tions with a quiet word of warning against overexpectation
and too great a personalizing of the Council. "Each one of us
has some imaginative concept of himself as a reformer of the
Church, and naturally each hopes that the time has come for
the realization of his dream. If the Council corresponds to
the plans of God, it is difficult, no matter how fine our own
plans, to see how it will respond to our exact desires." And
again: "It is necessary to avoid fostering capricious desires
which are arbitrary and strictly personal. It is not necessary
that the Council correspond to our particular viewpoint; we
ought rather enter into the general perspectives of the Coun
cil. To believe that the Council will be able to repair human
fragility and immediately bring about perfection in the
Church and in the world is an ingenuous dream. To hope
that it will remedy the many inconvenient practices and also
the many theoretical imperfections in Catholic life which
each one meets with in Ms own experience as a member or
observer ... is to hope too much. . . . We must guard
against thinking that the Council will decree radical and
bewildering reforms in the present structure of the Church,
such changes as to alter its appearance in time and to make it
a wholly new institution. . . . The present juridical structure
of the Church certainly has need of some renovation, but
the Church cannot be substantially changed; [the present
structure] is not the result of infidelity to the genuine mind
of Christ ... it is rather the result of an historical experi-

PORTRAIT OF A CARDINAL 147

ence promoted by a rigorous intention of coherence and of
fidelity to the spirit of the divine Founder. . . .

"The Council . . . will give revised programs on the dis
cipline and on the worship of the Church; it will give direc
tives and precepts in many sectors needful of correction, of
bringing up to date, and of development. . . . The Council
will not be measured purely by its good results juridically and
ritually considered. It must be a moment of the ineffable pres
ence of the loving and merciful action of God in His Church."

The cardinal did not hesitate to confront boldly the notion
and the possibility of reform within the Church, and the need
for it, a possibility and a need which many were denying in
the "spotless Bride of Christ." "Reform has been through the
centuries the renewing ferment of Catholic tradition." The
cardinal pointed out that the Church can be seen under two
aspects, divine and human, with the latter calling for periodic
renewal. t6 Reform, therefore, is a perennial effort in the
Church, which tends to bring the divine idea close to reality,
and to put the human reality in touch with the divine." "The
characteristic of this Council," the cardinal continued, "while
aiming expressly at some notable reforms, derives from a
desire to call forth the good rather than to flee from evil.
Thanis to divine mercy, there are not in the Church today,
errors, scandals, deviations, abuses. . . . Today the Church,
always by the grace of God and the merit of so many good
and holy Christians, is rather in a state of suffering and of
weakness than in a state of scandal and decadence. The con
dition and aspect of the Church shows it as more wounded
than sinning, more needful than unfaithful. . . . The Coun
cil will be, therefore, a Council of positive reforms, rather than
of punitive ones; one of exhortation rather than of anath
emas."

"The Church . . . intends through the forthcoming Coun
cil to come in contact with the world. This is a great act of

148 APOSTLE FOR OUR TIME

charity. The Church will not think only of herself; the Church
will thinlc of all humanity. To this end she will seek to be
sister and mother to men; she will seek to be poor, simple,
humble and lovable in her language and manner . . . she
will seek to make herself understood, and to give to the men
of today the opportunity to hear her and to herself the oppor
tunity to speak to men with ease in the language of today."

Referring to Christians separated from the unity of the
Catholic Church, the cardinal said of the Council: "It will
very probably not be able to solve this question. Perhaps we
have not yet merited such a miracle. But the Ecumenical
Council can prepare for this hoped for solution. Under this
aspect it will be a Council of preparation, a Council of desire."

The cardinal, by his speeches and in his pastoral letters,
sought to give the historical setting and the theological basis
for the Council, in order that the generations who had lived
their lives in a "council-less" period might know its signif
icance by first understanding its context. His warning against
vain and ephemeral hope seemed to be conditioned not by
his personal lack of high expectations from the reforming
Council, but rather by his wish to create a climate of objec
tive, sober and prayerful appraisal. His words were addressed
for the most part to the laity, and to them he held out hopes
of a vigorous restatement and implementation from the Coun
cil of their high vocation in and to the Church. The words
with regard to separated Christians, which occur again and
again in his pre-Council addresses, are words of affection
and sensitive appreciation of their role in witnessing to Christ.
At the same time he expresses the caution of one who knows
the dimensions of the gulf separating Christian bodies and
who will not allow his enthusiasm to mislead and defeat the
very cause he would advance.

In all his pre-Council speeches and writings, Cardinal
Montinf s affection for the great Pope who had called the

PORTRAIT OF A CARDINAL 149

Council is marked, Ms sense of the Pope's prophetic destiny
profound; "A great hope is kindled in the Church. Blessed
is he who has made this light of hope shine forth!" The hun
ger of the world for the words and prayers of the Council
was not unknown to the cardinal; repeatedly in his life in
Milan he had witnessed to the need of the Church to speak in
twentieth-century terms to a twentieth-century world grown
indifferent to a Church which appeared in a way to be a
magnificent anachronism. In Council the cardinal would
show no patience toward those who sought to thwart this
move into the century of the bomb, the century of anxiety,
the century of everyman.

The cardinal's public role in the Council was to be a muted
one. 11 He was named to the Central Commission, principal
organ of preparation for the Council and to the technico-
administrative commission as well as to the new and sensitive
Secretariat of Extraordinary Affairs. He was one of a group
of seven cardinals, four Italian, one American, one Western
European, and one Central European, 12 commissioned to ex-

11 It is reported that Cardinal Montini helped compose Pope John
XXm's remarkable opening address to the Council on October 11,
1962.

In the context of the cardinal's minor public contribution to the
Council session, an article by the Abbe Rene Laurentin in Le Figaro
(June 22-25) contains an interesting aside. The Abbe reports asking
the cardinal's theologian during the first session, <5 Why doesn't your
cardinal say more? We expect so much of him." The Abbe says he was
later informed (not by the theologian in question) that the cardinal had
been advised by John XXIEI to remain in the background during the
first session. The Abbe adds: "La dernier e vue a long terme du Pape
qui vient de nous quitter a ete d*ecarter les obstacles sur les voies dif-
ficiles qu'il savait devoir etre ceUes de T election de son successeur"

12 The Italians were Cardinals Cicognani, Shi, Confalioneri; the
American, Cardinal Meyer of Chicago; the Western European, Car
dinal Suenens of Malines-Brussels; the Central European, Cardinal
Doepfner of Munich.

150 APOSTLE FOR OUR TIME

amine new questions raised or submitted by the Fathers of
the Council, apart from those already presented and inte
grated in the various schema. It was noted that the average
age of the cardinals composing this Secretariat was a rela
tively young sixty-six, and that the presence of Montini,
Meyer, Doepfner and Suenens gave it a majority of progres
sive complexion.

Cardinal Montini went often to Rome in the days before
the opening of the Council, flying in one hour from Milan
and returning the same day when possible. During the days
that he was in Rome for the Council he alone of all the
Fathers of the Council was the guest of Pope John in the
Vatican. An apartment in the Archpriesf s Palace was placed
at his disposal and it was he whose prerogative it was, as the
first cardinal named by Pope John, to celebrate on Novem
ber 4, in the presence of the whole Council, the Mass for the
fourth anniversary of the Pope's coronation. He offered the
Mass in the Ambrosian rite of Milan, rarely if ever used be
fore in the Basilica of Saint Peter. November 4th was also
the feast of Saint Charles Borromeo, a predecessor in the
see of Milan, who had vigorously reformed the Church of
Milan after the Council of Trent. In Ms sermon that day the
Pope recalled Borromeo's role at the Tridentine Council in
pacifying the disputing Fathers and his intervention which
brought it to a successful close. No such role had yet been
cast at this Council, although the differences which would
give vigorous life to its sessions were already evident. 13

Cardinal Montini spoke briefly in the opening days of the
Council on the schema of the liturgy, and his voice was not

13 Jean Guitton sees the two tendencies, Progressive/ Conservative,
in the Council not as opposite but as parallel columns which end in a
magnificent Gothic arch. The Council cannot be conceived as a battle
field; the ''triumph** of one tendency over the other he sees as incon
ceivable and meaningless.

PORTRAIT OF A CARDINAL 151

to be heard publicly again until December 5, when the schema
on the Church was debated. The archbishop of Malines-
Brussels, Cardinal Suenens, had spoken the previous day,
criticizing the schema as presented to the Council, asking its
revision and requesting a consideration of the Church in dia
logue not only with itself but with the world, and a confronta
tion of the questions which the latter dialogue would raise. On
December 5th, the cardinal of Milan rose to speak and he
gave wholehearted support to Cardinal Suenens* suggestion.
The Church, he said, is nothing by itself; the Church is
Christ Himself, using us as His instruments to bring salva
tion to mankind. He called on the Fathers of the Council to
restate the "mind and will of Christ" by defining the collegial-
ity of the episcopate and by giving a truly ecumenical per
spective to the Church. The less we insist on the rights of the
Church, he said, the more chance we have of being heard.
Thus, because of its intransigent and incomplete character,
he urged that the schema on the Church be completely re
vised.

His intervention, the more dramatic for its singularity, was
made against the background of his letter published in the Mi
lan diocesan daily, L' Italia. In it he criticized the members of
the Council who refused to follow its ecumenical and aggiorna-
mento character, but more strikingly he blamed the Council's
failure to make greater progress on those members of Curia
who had prevented cooperation between the various commis
sions during the preparatory phase. 14

The cardinal's position before and during the Council was
one of enthusiastic endorsement of the idea of the Council,
of the Pope's insistence that it be a Council in dialogue with
the world, that it be one which would open windows in the
Church. Each week while the Council was in session he
wrote a letter to the people of his archdiocese to keep them in-

14 Rynne, op. tit., p. 227.

152 APOSTLE FOR OUR TIME

formed of the Council's progress. His pastoral concern was
that they be involved through him who spoke in their name.
He told them of the Council's slowness, of its uncertainty at
times; of the excessive number of speakers who slowed its
pace (necessary, he added, in an assembly of free men freely
speaking) . He was critical of some of the phases of its organ
ization but enthusiastic about the climate of freedom which it
was daily creating. 15

That he "himself was not so much to the forefront of the
Council's public shapers and speakers as his personal and
pastoral reputation would seem to warrant was less an indica
tion of his reluctance to be committed than it was of a desire
to allow men of similar thinking but of less international
reputation to come forth and speak in other than Italian
voices. His concern that the Church appear and actually be
international was rewarded by the emergence of Dutch, Bel
gian, French, German, and American prelates as movers of
the Church's majority will that aggiornamento be the corner
stone of the Council's deliberations. When it was necessary to
speak, the Cardinal spoke; for the rest he was content to be
a Father of the Council together with the other largely anony
mous 2,600 bishops.

The first session closed on December 8. Pope John, whose
health had given reason for serious preoccupation, was present
to close the session and to send the bishops back to their
dioceses with the exhortation to continue the Council's work
before the convening of the second session on September 8,
1963. He also issued a directive which established a new
coordinating commission to guide the Council's working com
missions during its recess. Its function was to reduce the 70
schemata of the first session to 17, insuring their brevity and
irenic tone. Headed by the Cardinal Secretary of State it was
to continue through the second session and effect a speeding

15 Letter of November 4.

PORTRAIT OF A CARDINAL 153

up and more efficient handling of the work of the Council.
The establishment of the steering committee was seen as an
implementation of Cardinal MontinFs desire, expressed long
before the Council convened, for procedures on a more effi
cient basis. He had said of the material proposed for Council
consideration: "It is a question of an immense body of mate
rial, excellent but heterogeneous and unequal, which would
have evoked a courageous reduction and classification if one
authority, one that was not merely extrinsic and disciplinary,
had dominated the logical and organic preparation of these
magnificent volumes [of schemata! and if one central archi
tectural idea had polarized this considerable work."

The commissions of the Council would have nine months
of hard work before them. Cardinal Montini was to be a part
of that silent and hidden work as in Milan he prepared for
the Christmas which would be his last as archbishop of that
historic see.

8. Sede Vacante

The death of a Pope has always provided a moment of drama
in history. From the death of Peter on an upended cross,
through the long series of Popes who were saints and Popes
who were not, the world has watched down the centuries with
varying attitudes of detachment and involvement as pontifi
cates drew to an end and the men who made them prepared
to meet the God whose servants they had been.

Most of the twenty-two Popes who into the fourteenth cen
tury bore the name of John reigned briefly and unspectacu-
larly. The man who, in 1958, at the age of seventy-eight suc
ceeded to the papal throne as John XXIII, the patriarch of
Venice, Angelo Roncalli, seemed destined therefore by name
and by years to a pontificate which would be short and deco
rous, unmarked by innovation, strong leadership or impact on
the world. But by a goodness which quickly became legend
ary, by a boldness which affronted the few and delighted the
many, he threw open his arms to all men and revolutionized a
Church grown remote from the world it was meant to savor.
He was a man in a hurry, impatient of anathemas, of cant and
gloom, with a mind and spirit as young as his body was old,

154

SEDE VACANTE 155

and the world, with unprecedented affection, wished for him
long length of days as, at the age of eighty-two, he opened the
Second Vatican Council, a symbol of the Second Spring which
Ms pontificate had become to the Church.

In November of 1962, during the Council session, the Pope
fell ill. He rallied and was able, seemingly with his customary
vigor, to close the first session on December 8th. But there
were signs that all was not well as the Pope entered 1963.
Audiences were canceled and it was apparent everything was
being done to conserve his strength. Increasingly he made
reference to "sister death." On May 21st it was announced
that President Kennedy had changed his plans for a 1964 visit
to the Pope and would arrive in June. On May 22nd a general
audience was canceled, and the Vatican, cautious while the
world speculated, announced that the Pope was to take nine
days of complete rest before Pentecost

Then on May 26th came word of the Pope's serious illness,
a malignancy, and the world's vigil began. Informed by Ms
Secretary of State of the prayers being said for him, the Pope,
according to the Osservatore Romano, replied: "As the whole
world prays for the sick Pope, it is quite natural that an inten
tion be given to this supplication; if God desires the sacrifice
of the Pope's life, may it serve to bring down copious favors
on the Ecumenical Council, on the holy Church, and on hu
manity which aspires to peace. If, on the other hand, it pleases
God to prolong the Pontiff's service, may this bring a sanctifi-
cation of the soul of the Pope, and of all those who work with
him and suffer for the expansion of the Kingdom of Our
Lord. . . ." Sounding more his own were the words he had
spoken on his eighty-first birthday: "Any day is a good day
to be born and a good day to die. I always think of that other
shore and submit to the will of the Lord, whether he decides
to keep me here or call me to Him." To his doctor he said:

156 APOSTLE FOR OUR TIME

*T)o not worry too much about me, because my bags are
packed and I am ready to leave, in fact very ready."

On Friday, May 31st, hope was abandoned for the Pope,
whose strong heart continued to beat against the assault of
his infection. He remained lucid, although in a state of ex
treme weakness. At one juncture he said: "On the point of
leaving you I wish to thank the College of Cardinals; I am as
a victim on the altar, a victim for the Church, for the Council
and for peace." That night the Pope entered upon the agony
which was to convulse his body for four days. He lapsed in
and out of comas, wracked with a pain no sedative could kill.
"My Jesus," he called out during one lucid interval, "free me
now, I cannot endure it. Take me with you."

Thousands waited through the day and night in Saint Pe
ter's square, while millions throughout the world watched and
prayed with them. The Pope who had hailed the Council he
had convened as a "New Pentecost" for the Church, lived
through Pentecost Sunday and into Monday, the 3rd of June.
At 7:45, as a Mass celebrated for him on the steps of St. Pe
ter's basilica ended, the Holy Father, invoking the Blessed
Virgin with the words, "Mater mea . . ." my mother died.
He had been Pope for less than five years, the shortest reign in
modern history since the twenty-month pontificate of Pius VHI,
from 1828 to 1830.

When word reached Cardinal Montini in Milan, on May
31st, that the Pope's life was despaired of, he made plans to
leave immediately for Rome the Pope had asked for him.
The plane on which he traveled that night was, by coincidence,
the same carrying the three brothers and sister of the Holy
Father, flying for the first time, to the bedside of their brother.
Together they all drove from Rome's Fiumicino Airport to the
Vatican. The cardinal spent only a brief time with Pope John
who, during one of his rare moments of consciousness, recog-

SEDE VACANTE 157

nized and spoke to him affectionately, his right hand grasping
the cardinal's. It was the last time they were to meet.

Cardinal Montini returned to Milan on Saturday night,
June 1st, in time to celebrate a midnight Mass for the dying
Pope in the presence of 20,000 in the rainswept Vigorelli
stadium. He spoke to the silent, prayerful crowd of how the
Pope's word of peace had gone around the world as never
before, and he stressed the need of an accurate understanding
of the word: "Peace is not something which just happens; it
is created, constructed." And he added, "We wish to make our
own the Pope's great message, to make it an inspiration and
program for our life."

On the next day, Pentecost Sunday, the cardinal, preaching
in his cathedral said: "Blessed is the Pope who has given to us
and to the world the evangelical example of the Good Shep
herd. . . . Blessed is this Pope who has shown us that good
ness is not weakness or slackness, not an equivocal irenism,
that it entails no renunciation of the great rights of truth or
duties of authority, but is rather the master virtue of him who
represents Christ on earth. Blessed is the Pope who has made
us see again that the authority of the Church is not an ambi
tion to dominate, not aloofness from the community of the
faithful, not a remote and custom-ridden paternalism. Blessed
is this Pope who has enabled us to enjoy an hour of father
hood and spiritual companionship who has taught the world
that humanity has need of nothing so much as love."

As he weighed the unprecedented outpouring of grief which
convulsed the world on the day of the Pope's death, the car
dinal reflected on the reason for a sorrow which the death of
no Pope in his memory had generated. "Why do they mourn
his death everywhere in the world? What marvel of spiritual
convergence produces this thing without precedent in history?
Everyone of us has felt the attraction of that personality, has

158 APOSTLE FOR OUR TIME

grasped that the sympathy that enveloped him was not a de
lusion nor a fashionable whim; it was a secret revealing it
self a mystery which absorbed us, the mystery of two words
which, united in magic power, dazzled our eyes the words,
truth and charity." Others in the Church were to voice more
conventional and qualified tributes, but the cardinal's had
nothing of the facile or automatic about it, and his words were
to speed around a world stunned by the loss of such a man as
John and fearful for a future without him.

With the death of Pope John, the centuries-old machinery
of the interregnum began to function. Ten minutes after the
death of the Pope, the 84-year-old Cardinal Camerlengo of
the Church, bishop of Palestrina and prefect of the Congre
gation of the Sacraments, Benedetto Aloisi Masella, bearing
the staff of office, had taken possession of the pontifical palace.
Entering the room where tie Pope's body lay, the cardinal
bent close to the face of the Pontiff in a formal "recognition"
of death which is twelve centuries old. He then pronounced
the traditional formula: "The Pope is truly dead." He took
custody of the gold Fisherman's Ring used by the Pope in
signing documents and of his personal seal. 1 He ordered the
death knell to be sounded from the great bells of Saint Peter's,
and the Pope's body removed to an adjoining room, there to
lie in state. Later the papal apartments would be locked and
sealed. From that moment on until the election of the new
Pope, the provisory government of the Church rested in the
hands of the College of Cardinals whose authority was repre
sented by Cardinal Masella.

1 Later it was broken and the pieces buried with Pope John's body.
The Camerlengo's delegate, Monsignor Sargolini, was entrusted with
the obligation of obtaining all seals from the Apostolic Datary and
Apostolic Chancery,

SEDE VACANTE 159

The office of Cardinal Camerlengo, while much reduced in
power through the centuries is still today, during the sede va-
cante, the highest authority in the Church. All other high Vati
can officials lose their offices the Cardinal Secretary of State,
for example. Cardinal Masella had come to the office by way
of election by the cardinals resident in Rome when Pius XII
died in 1958. Pope Pius had allowed this office also to remain
vacant during the latter years of his pontificate, and the hasty
election of Cardinal Masella by his peers following the death
of Pius had been confirmed by John upon his accession. While
his government of the Church during the interregnum is lim
ited to affairs of ordinary administration, the Camerlengo may,
in cases of grave urgency, having consulted the College of Car
dinals and acting in its name, take decisions of great impor
tance. He signs the administrative acts of the Church and
represents the Vatican in its relations with the outside world.
Cardinal Masella was assisted in his office by the heads of the
three orders of cardinals: Eugene Cardinal Tisserant, repre
senting the cardinal bishops; Santiago Luis Cardinal Copello,
representing the cardinal priests; and Alfredo Cardinal Ottavi-
ani representing the cardinal deacons. 2 Their chief business
was to organize the Conclave and insure its secrecy.

2 Cardinal bishops are the bishops of the sees near Rome. However,
they are occupied with the affairs of the Curia, the central adminis
trative arm of the Church, entrusting to others the ordinary jurisdiction
and administration of these suburban sees.

Cardinal deacons also devote full time to Vatican administrative
posts. This order was formerly made up of priests, not bishops, but
Pope John XXEI ruled in 1962 that all cardinals would thenceforth
be given episcopal consecration. Cardinal deacons hold titular bishop
rics, mostly of sees that have disappeared but whose memory is pre
served in name.

Most numerous are the Cardinal priests cardinals who rule sees
removed from Rome. They are assigned titular pastorates of Roman
churches but do not operate as pastors there.

160 APOSTLE FOR OUR TIME

It was Cardinal Masella's decision, in accord with the
wishes of Pope John, that his funeral be private; that the body
of the Pope not lie in state in the Sistine Chapel but be borne
from the apostolic palace through Saint Peter's square into
the basilica, there to rest for two days before being buried in
a provisory tomb in Saint Peter's while a permanent tomb,
also according to his wish, was prepared near his cathedral of
Saint John Lateran. On the day after his death the body of
Pope John, dressed in white alb, golden mitre, crimson and
gold gloves, chasuble, buskins and slippers, was carried on a
litter through a silent crowd of 50,000 jammed into Saint
Peter's square, to the mournful cadences of the De Profundis.
Inside the basilica the body rested on a high catafalque before
the main altar, crowned by the great Bernini baldacchino,
while twenty-one candles burned around the bier on almost
the exact spot from which Pope John had addressed the Coun
cil nine months previously.

For two days the people came to pay their last respects.
More than one million passed through the doors of Saint Pe
ter's for a last glimpse of the man who had been always, as
Domenach had said, supremely a Pope of tradition. The grief
of the world was genuine and profound. In the United States
an unprecedented tribute welled up across the country. In
Cuba, Fidel Castro proclaimed a three-day period of mourn
ing; the United Nations lowered its flag to half-mast in his
honor; and the archbishop of Canterbury, for the first time
since the Reformation, did the same with his personal em
blem. Nikita Khrushchev hailed the Pope as one who had
'Von the respect of peace-loving peoples" and the Chinese
Government sneered that all that remained now for the Rus
sian premier to do was have his people baptized. But for the
most part it was a loss which transcended all political and
religious differences and found the world confessing its poorer
state in the loss of one so good.

SEDE VACANTE 161

He had been, Cardinal Montini said, "an incomparable
Pope." But now he was dead and the Church's nine days of
mourning for him, the novendiali, began in Rome, while car
dinals across the world prepared to go to Rome for the con
clave which would elect his successor. The final three days of
the novendiali are the most solemn, with the Masses cele
brated each day by a different cardinal. The five absolutions
are given by the celebrant and four assisting cardinals at the
high-raised catafalque, ablaze with ninety-six candles, topped
by a tri-regnum crown, twenty-five feet above the floor.

The final Mass of mourning was said on the morning of
June 17th in the presence of seventy-five cardinals, members
of European royal families, the diplomatic corps, and the rep
resentatives of eighty-four governments sent as special dele
gations. Present from the United States was the vice president,
Lyndon B. Johnson, with a three-member party. Two Russian
Orthodox churchmen, Bishop Vladimir Kotliarov and Arch-
priest Vitaly Borovoy, were the first of their Church to attend
the funeral of a Pope since the great Schism of 1054. Follow
ing the mass and benedictions given by Cardinal Tisserant,
clad in sumptuous embroidered vestments of gold and black
velvet, and Cardinals Spellman, Wyszynski, Giobbe, and Lie-
nart, the final word of eulogy was spoken by Monsignor
Giuseppe Del Ton, Secretary of Latin Letters. In a Latin
which was classically elegant, he spoke of the Pope's good
ness and humility, and of the "almost incredible" number of
great enterprises he had achieved during his brief reign. "He
truly was the master of peace, the announcer of peace, the
angel of peace."

For the first time in the two weeks since the Pope's death,
Cardinal Montini was in Rome and present for this final mass
of obsequy. Although the cardinals already an Rome, their
number increasing daily, had been meeting each day in gen
eral congregation to decide the affairs of the Church, Car-

162 APOSTLE FOR OUR TIME

dinal Montini had remained in Milan, intent upon Ms work
there. On Friday, June 7th, he had preached in his cathedral,
and had spoken out strongly for a continuation of Pope John's
program by his successor in the Papacy. He said, "John has
shown us some paths which it will be wise to follow. Can we
turn away from these paths so masterfully traced? It seems to
me we cannot." He returned to a theme which he had stressed
in his pre-Council discourses, and which he had defended
vigorously in one of his public appearances before the Coun
cil: the role of bishops in the government of the Church. He
called for spiritual and practical conditions to insure the har
monious collaboration of the episcopate in that sphere.

It was a theme which he had developed at length and pub
licly before without drawing invidious attention, but in the
nervous days of the interregnum, with the world abuzz with
rumor and speculation as to Pope John's successor, the words
were seized upon by a press more imprudent than informed
as a declaration of candidature by the cardinal. The New York
Herald Tribune headlined the story: "Montini Felt to Offer
Self as Next Pope." The article, by Sanche de Gramont, regu
lar Vatican correspondent of the paper, said: "The Cardinal's
words were interpreted in Vatican circles as a pledge that if
he is elected Pope by the Sacred College at the conclave start
ing June 19, he will pursue the chief aims of Pope John."
Also: "Vatican officials said that Cardinal Montini, a cautious
man who spoke only twice during the Council, was appar
ently stating his position now with unexpected candor in prep
aration for the conclave."

Such imputations, suggesting a kind of electoral manifesto
by the cardinal, were clearly unjustified and impudent in the
light of his many earlier affirmations of the need of the Coun
cil to clarify a confusion regarding the role of the bishops
in the Church resulting from the definition of the dogma of
papal infallibility by the First Vatican Council in 1870. In his

SEDE VACANTE 163

pastoral letter for 1962, he had said: "The treatise on the na
ture and function of the episcopacy in harmony with the Ro
man Papacy is one which could result in a new and harmoni
ous affirmation of the unity, not only juridical but living, of
the Church around the chair of Saint Peter, and give a start,
without any vindicative intention, to a greater and more or
ganic internationalization of the central government of the
Church." There was no reversal here of positions previously
held, no affirmations of new positions impetuously taken.

The cardinal's last days in Milan had been marked by the
same calm ordering of his schedule which characterized his
regular program. His personal appointment book was full of
notations in his own hand: June 19: consecration of the
church, Cure of Ars; June 22: general assembly of the com
mittee for new churches; June 28: ordination of priests in the
Cathedral. The evening before his departure for Rome, Mon-
signor Milani, vice-president of the committee for new
churches, conferred with the cardinal who that day had signed
a decree of erection of a new parish. "There are seven more
decrees to be signed, Your Eminence. What should we do if
you do not return?" "No, no," the cardinal replied, "when I
return from the conclave we'll come back to this." To Don
Virginio Rovera, advocate general of his curia, who pressed
the cardinal for a document he wanted before his departure
for Rome, Cardinal Montini replied: Periculum non est in
mora" there is no danger in delay. And two days previously
at the seminary, in speaking to some priests, he said: "Perhaps
the time is ripe for a non-Italian Pope."

Before leaving for Rome, he traveled one more time to
Bovezzo to visit his brother Francesco, ailing with a heart
condition, and to spend a few hours with him and with his
family in a setting of warmth and of intimacy which only a
brother or sister's family can give to a priest. His brother
Ludovico was also present. His departure from Milan was,

164 APOSTLE FOR OUR TIME

characteristically, by plane, and as he entered the craft with
his secretary, Monsignor Macchi, 3 he turned, and with a wave
and a blessing, bade good-by to the city which had first wel
comed him eight years earlier.

He arrived at the Rome airport late in the day, and drove
immediately to Castelgandolfo where he was the guest of Dr.
Emilio Bonomelli, director of the papal villa. The next morn
ing he moved to the novitiate of the Sisters of the Child Mary
in Via della Camilluccia, Rome. He had slept poorly at Castel
gandolfo, and on the morning of the last Mass of repose for
Pope John, as he sat in Saint Peter's, splendid in his mourning
robes of purple wool, his face looked strained and somewhat
severe. The eyes of many among the few thousand present
were drawn often to the thin, erect figure of the cardinal, for
already Rome was alive with rumor and speculation. Pope
John was dead, this was the day of final farewell, and tie
report was abroad that in his diary the Holy Father had re
vealed his hope that the College of Cardinals would choose
the brilliant archbishop of Milan as his successor. During
John's lifetime, his lips, like those of the cardinals, had been
sealed against discussing or influencing the choice of his suc
cessor, but now the signs of his predilection were recalled. It
remained to be seen how the senate of the Church would re
act.

The press of the world, in reflecting on the reign of Pope
John and in speculating on the role of his successor, articu
lated the gratitude the world felt to John and the hopes it

3 Monsignor Macchi, who would remain as private secretary to
Pope Paul, became secretary to the then Archbishop Montini shortly
after his appointment to the Lombard see, in 1954. Father Macchi
was at the time professor in the seminary of Saint Peter, Martyr, hav
ing been ordained in 1946, and having received his doctorate at the
Catholic University of Milan, with a thesis entitled Bernanos and the
Problem of Evil. He joined the archbishop in Rome and accompanied
him on his entrance into Milan.

SEDE VACANTE 165

nourished regarding the man who would follow TITTTJ in the
Papacy. There was agreement that the Church under John
had come to realize that the Church and the world have the
same frontiers. The question posed was: Would there be an
expansion of this concept or would there be a gradual and
imperceptible contraction? The Polish Communist Review
Argumenty inquired, "Has the pontificate of John XXm been
a moment of caprice in history or is it something lasting in the
policy of the Church?" The New York Herald Tribune, in its
editorial for June 5, 1963, said: "It remains to be seen what
the attitude of the new Pope will be in what direction he will
throw the great weight of his office. If that should be toward
the goals for which John XXm strove, even on his deathbed,
the result might well be the unleashing of the most powerful
spiritual forces which have moved this world in many cen
turies. For when the accretions of centuries of polemics over
the differing approaches to Christianity are stripped away,
fundamental unities emerge; when the differences among
Christian churches diminish, their great world mission be
comes clearer, its influence stronger. The spirit [of the Coun
cil] itself cannot die. Its workings may be checked, or they
may be accelerated by the choice made by the College of
Cardinals. . . . That is why the Conclave will be watched,
as seldom before in recent history. For the world will be wait
ing to know if the legacy of John XXm is to be perfected in
the months to come."

"The Pope," said the New York Times, "seemed to have
caught at the flood one of those 'tides in the affairs of men.' It
will surely flow onward to make our tormented age a little
less divided." Walter Lippman spoke of the "miracle of Pope
John": "The modernizing movement [begun by Pope John]
can perhaps be arrested but it cannot for long be turned back.
For what Pope John began will have very big consequences,
and the history of our world will be different because he lived."

166 APOSTLE FOR OUR TIME

Barbara Ward in the London Observer (June 9, 1963)
asked pointedly: Can the influence of Pope John endure? The
answer, she indicated, was not an easy one. "At least a part
of his astonishing impact on his fellowmen sprang from some
thing potentially evanescent the irresistible attraction of his
personality." "All who came to him," she said ". . . left him
with a sense of having encountered a profound paternal af
fection which was theirs not for this or for that distinction or
achievement but simply because in each of them he saw a
child of God. . . . Paternal affection is the precise opposite
of superficial sentiment. It is rooted, it is reliable and resistant,
it lies beyond all play of circumstance. . . . But now the man
who projected this image of fatherhood in the single human
family is dead. Will the work which sprang from his moving
dedication to unity survive his loss? His greatest effort of spir
itual reconciliation lay ... in the calling of the Ecumenical
Council. . . . Yet the Council is now, by the fact of his
death, automatically disbanded with its labours no more than
begun. One cannot doubt that it will be recalled by his suc
cessor. But will the earlier lan survive?"

Miss Ward spoke of the question mark hanging over Pope
John's work of secular reconciliation. His policy of detente
with Communism was, she said, no mere tactical desire to
work out a modus vivendi: "John XXH[ avoided all over-
simple distinctions between a wholly virtuous West and a
monstrous conspiracy on the other side." And she added
words which seemed almost as much a description of the
cardinal archbishop of Milan as of Pope John: "He grew up
in one of the first Italian dioceses to react seriously to the chal
lenge of modern industrialism. His whole thinking was influ
enced by the liberal tendency in French social Catholicism.
He could see that man can lose his way, not only by the false
doctrines of Communism but equally by the West's besetting

SEDE VACANTE 167

temptation that of seeking a Veil-being based exclusively on
the comforts of life.' "

"There is no denying that the Pope's approach aroused
profound misgivings in some Catholic ecclesiastical and politi
cal circles/ 3 she continued. "Conservative Italians accused
him of making Communism respectable and thereby adding
a million votes to the Communists in Italy's recent general
elections (April 18, 1963). Right-wing Germans stonily at
tacked him for 'selling out' German interest to the Poles and
Russians. A few American leaders clearly preferred the old
black and white simplicities of the cold war. Mr Khrushchev's
condolences and flags at half-mast in Havana hardly reas
sured them."

Miss Ward ended by pointing out that there might possibly
be in the conclave and the politique resulting from it, a coun
ter-attack in favor of more cautious policies in the political
area. "But/ 5 she concluded, "one can be far more confident
over the work of religious conciliation. The Vatican Council
may not have completed much work but it demonstrated
clearly the extent and vitality of the Church's modernising
tendencies. The Bishops, assembled from the ends of the
earth, took a more liberal view of their opportunities than the
Rome-bound Curia. They were not only encouraged by the
Pope. They were encouraged by one another. Thus he helped
to articulate and dramatise the growing readiness for more
liberal policies. But he did not create it, and it will therefore
survive him."

No pontificate wins the complete approval of all in a church
as diverse and catholic in its thinking and emphasis as it is in
its diffusion throughout the world. The lines of difference had
been most clearly seen because most sharply drawn in the
first session of Vatican Council n, with its world-wide repre
sentation of bishops from every continent and land. In sub-

168 APOSTLE FOR OUR TIME

scription to one faith in its entirety and integrity the Church
was one in Council. In its willingness to examine the state
ment of that faith, to open windows, to build bridges, to bring
the Church "up to date," there was division along the conven
tionally expressed conservative/progressive lines. The progres
sive thinking of the Council, in line with the exhortation of
Pope John to "open windows" had predominated in the first
session, and a sharp distinction between the majority thinking
of the Council and that of the Curia became apparent. It was
to be highlighted again by an extraordinary oration delivered
in Saint Peter's basilica a bare forty-eight hours after the final
Mass celebrated for the soul of Pope John.

On the morning of the day of conclave, Wednesday, June
19, eighty cardinals, still in their robes of mourning, made
their solemn entrance into Saint Peter's for the celebration of
the Mass of the Holy Spirit, invoking divine guidance on the
voting which they would begin the next day. Only two of
their total number were missing: the 89-year-old and seriously
in cardinal archbishop of Quito, Ecuador, Carlos Maria de La
Torre, and the cardinal primate of Hungary, the 71 -year-old
archbishop of Esztergom, Josef Mindszenty, living in sanc
tuary since the Hungarian uprising of 1956 in the American
embassy in Budapest. The cardinals, through their Dean,
Eugene Tisserant, had akeady sent Cardinal Mindszenty a
telegram in Latin which read: "According to the norms of
the Constitution, 'Vacantis apostolicae sedis,' I have the
honor to inform you that the conclave of cardinals for the elec
tion of the Supreme Pontiff in succession to the deeply loved
John XXin of venerable memory, will take place in the Vati
can Apostolic Palace on the 19th of June of this year at five
P.M. The Sacred College of Cardinals in these days feels it
self profoundly united to you in fraternal memory and in
fervent prayer to the Holy Spirit."

The Mass of the Holy Spirit reminds the cardinals in the

SEDE VACANTE 169

words of its gospel that "the Paraclete, the Holy Spirit whom
the Father will send in my Name, he will teach you all things
and bring to your mind whatsoever I have said to you." And
the petition of the Mass, contained in its Collect asks: "O
God, Who on this day didst instruct the hearts of the faithful
by the light of the Holy Spirit, grant us, by the same Spirit, to
relish what is right and ever to rejoice in His consolation . . ."

When the Mass was finished, the cardinals sat on their ban
quettes and awaited a discourse which turned out to be one of
singular outline. They composed the senate of the Church,
they alone would enter the conclave, one of the number pres
ent would emerge as Supreme Pontiff and now they awaited
a prelate of the Roman Curia, the Secretary of Briefs to
Princes, to deliver the traditional allocution, "De eligendo
Pontifice" On choosing a Pontiff. This privilege is one of the
rare ones which outlives the death of the Pope, since with his
death all major offices cease to be held, and Monsignor Amleto
Tondini, Secretary of Briefs to Princes under John XXin,
was, in effect, no longer Secretary. For all the sonority of his
title, the Secretary is an interpreter, a translator, an executor,
and it is more for the elegance of his Latin than the high dig
nity of his office that he is chosen to address the cardinals
on this significant day. Although there have been previous ex
ceptions in history, the oration is usually a generic exhortation
to the cardinals to remember the responsibility which is theirs
before their conscience, the Church and the world, and a
laudatory recollection of the deceased Pope.

Monsignor Tondini's praise of Pope John was cautious and
generic: "the good Pope," "the Pontiff of charity and of
peace." He spoke of the "heavy" inheritance left to his success-
sor, and outlined, more than once, a pessimistic picture of the
contemporary world which, it appeared to some of his listen
ers, seemed to counterpoise, as illuminated and prudent, the
pessimism of the speaker against the incautious and childlike

170 APOSTLE FOR OUR TIME

optimism of him who as Pontiff had embraced the world of
his century. Pope John had given much importance to natural
values in establishing dialogue with the world: the orator in
sisted on the importance of the supernatural order and said
that the successor of Pope John "ought to endeavor, with
total effort, to reestablish the supernatural virtues in the life
of Christians." He should guide the bark of Peter to the ad
vantage of all, but especially of Catholics. For the speaker,
"the days in which we live are days when the relations [be
tween peoples] are based not on a moral order but depend
on a politique of suspicion and of fear" in which "the air of
true peace is not breathed." Governments do what they can,
but often with damage to the souls of men "because they con
sider him [man] a machine from which to draw temporal ad
vantages for himself and principally for the State." Only the
Pope can resolve international problems "placing himself
above any suspicion of partiality."

As for the Council, surely it would be continued. "The
Catholics of every continent pray that the great undertaking
will be carried through to fulfillment. But it will be for the
Pope, whom you, eminent Fathers, will choose from your
midst, to establish the suitable time for its renewal. And to
him especially will it belong to determine and judge if the ques
tions, the studies and particularly the spiritual dispositions
have yet attained that maturity which will bring about the
results awaited by the soundest part of humanity: that is to
say, the light of sure direction in the midst of the dominant
confusion of ideas, and an auspice of sure peace in the midst
of mutual distrust and the antagonisms of people."

It seemed to many present like a bristling speech; it had
little of the pacific spirit of John. "It was a manifesto of the
most reactionary current of the Curia and attempted to trace
a new program for the Pope," said one commentator. The
speaker seemed unaware of the irresistible thrust of human-

SEDE VACANTE 171

ity toward truth and salvation, to which end the Church exists
that it might evangelize, bless and consecrate such a yearning.
Pope John had not set it in motion but he had recognized
it, accepted it and blessed it with a special insight and patience,
with a rare sense of the times and the men of the times. It
seemed unlikely that the words of Monsignor Tondini would
reverse this movement of the Church and the boldness of a
charismatic insight which had given her new life under Pope
John. The Rome correspondent of the London Tablet com
mented drily, "Whatever may be said of the sermons preached
at them, Masses of the Holy Ghost are clearly good things to
have." *

Now it was the College of Cardinals alone, the senate of
the Church, which would decide the question of succession.
With eighty present in Rome, gathered from thirty-one na
tions, their entrance into conclave at five o'clock on Wednes
day afternoon would make the conclave the largest since the
election of the Pope became the exclusive prerogative of the
cardinals in the twelfth century. Through them the opinions
and hopes, the particular problems and the contrasting per
spectives of the Church diffused throughout the world would
enter the Sistine Chapel and be resolved. The symbol of their
reconciled differences and of their converging wills would rise
from their midst, and as Pope sit enthroned under the Last
Judgment of Michelangelo to receive the prostration of their
persons and the acceptance of their fealty. The Church would
have a Pope and her life, constrained and suspended without
a head, would resume again.

Pope John XXTTT was elected in 1958 by a diminished col
lege of 53 cardinals, dwindled under Pius XIE from its tradi
tional 70, established by Sixtus V. The new Pope shortly an
nounced that he was raising the limit from 70 to 75, but that
he would not, however, be bound by this figure, and would

4 June 29, 1963, p. 703.

172 APOSTLE FOR OUR TIME

shortly issue norms regarding the number in the College.
These were never presented, but in successive consistories
Pope John raised the number to 79, 85, 86 and 87. In all he
created 52 cardinals. The largest number, 23, was created on
December 15, 1958. In 1959, 8 were created, followed in
1960 by 7, in 1961 by 4 and in 1962 by 10. 5

The electors of his successor for the first time in history
would all be bishops. In the long history of the College many
had been elevated to the cardinalate as laymen and had thus
remained through their lifetime, eligible for the Papacy, as is
indeed any baptized male Catholic, but since 1378, when Ur
ban VI was elected, not chosen. 6 But until the time of John
XXm those constituting the order of "cardinal deacons" were
still priests. 7 On April 15, 1962, Pope John had issued a
motu proprio ("Cum gravissima") which ordained that in the
future every new cardinal not already a bishop would immedi
ately receive episcopal consecration. And four days later, on
Holy Thursday, he personally consecrated the twelve cardinals

5 Pope John loved to give allegorical significance to their number.
The first 23 corresponded to the 23 Popes, himself included, who had
chosen the name John. The next 8 symbolized the number of the
beatitudes, the following 7 the number of infused virtues, three
theological and four cardinal, and the four symbolized the four-sided
wheel of Ezechiel. The last 10 created by John received no symbolical
meaning.

6 The last layman to be named a cardinal was Giacomo Antonelli,
secretary of state to Pius IX until he died in 1876. He considered it
"outrageous" that the American John McCloskey, archbishop of New
York, be raised to the cardinalate hi 1875, his opposition being not to
McCloskey but to the idea that the Church universal had anything to
learn from the presence in the College of Cardinals of a representa
tive of the Church in North America. Cf. E. E. Y. Hales, The Catholic
Church in the Modern World (New York: Doubleday & Co., Image
Books, 1961), p. 150.

7 Cardinal Alfredo Ottaviani, prefect of the Holy Office, was a priest
and remained so until his consecration as bishop by John XXIII.

SEDE VACANTE 173

of the college who were still priests in his cathedral of Saint
John Lateran.

Pope John had also contributed to the internationalization
of the College. Until the conclave which elected Pius XII, the
Italian cardinals had for centuries been in absolute majority.
In the early nineteenth century, Napoleon had sought by
threats, and in vain, to insure the presence in the College of at
least 30 French cardinals, and in 1846 there were only 8 non-
Italians, but their number had increased to 25 by 1878. At
the death of Benedict XV there were still only 29, and by
the time Pope Pius XI died in 1939 their number had dropped
to 26, as opposed to 39 Italians. It was Pius XII who deci
sively increased the number of non-Italians in the Sacred Col
lege, and when he died there were 17 Italian cardinals and
36 non-Italians (the Italian Cardinal Constantini and the
American Cardinal Mooney of Detroit had died before en
tering conclave). The non-Italians counted 19 Europeans,
13 Americans (North and South), 3 Asiatics and 1 Austra
lian.

In the College preparing to elect a successor to John, the
Italian representation had become little more than a third of
the total, 29 as against 52 non-Italians. 46 had been created
by Pope John, 26 had been named by Pope Pius XII, and 8 by
Pius XI. But the number of 52 non-Italians did not tell the
complete story of the broad representation which John had
given to the College. The numerical representation of the
various continents had been further modified. Europe had
seen its number increased from 19 to 27; North America
from 4 to 7; South America from 9 to 12; and Asia had re
ceived its first Japanese and first Philippine cardinals. Africa,
too, had its first African Negro representative in the tall,
striking Cardinal Rugambwa of Tanganyika.

There seemed little possibility, however, that a non-Italian
would be elected. The consensus in the Church was that the

174 APOSTLE FOR OUR TIME

time had not yet arrived, yet the emergence in Vatican Coun
cil n of distinguished non-Italian Europeans indicated that
the time might not be too distant when a four-hundred-and-
forty-year tradition would be reversed. 8

Observers were quick to point out that in bestowing red
hats Pope John had been generous rather than politic, as far
as insuring the success of the program of his pontificate was
concerned. He had named to the cardinalate many whom he
had known through his years of service to the Church, seem
ingly without regard to whether the recipients shared his
outlook or his desire to make the Church more open to the
world. He had staffed the Curia with men in their seventies
and even eighties, contemporaries of himself, many with
broad experience of the world through long years of diplo
matic service abroad, but marked too by what many consid
ered excessive prudence, caution and an undifferentiated de
sire to maintain things as they had always been, startled and
resentful of change. During the Council it had been noted
that of the 36 cardinals who had shown themselves by their in
terventions to belong to the "conservative" wing of the church,
21 had been named by Pope John.

8 215 Popes (including John XXDI) were Italian. France had given
17, Germany 6, Spain 3, England, Portugal, the Netherlands and
Switzerland 1 each. The last non-Italian was the Dutch Adrian VI
(1522-1523).

Cardinal Konig, interviewed after the conclave which elected Paul
VI, said with regard to the possibility that a non-Italian might have
been elected to succeed John XXHI: "Yes, some Italian cardinals told
me before the conclave that they were in favor of a non-Italian being
elected Pope this time. I think the time was not yet ripe. But it may
come about that hi the foreseeable future a non-Italian will be elected
to the Chair of Peter. The cardinal-electors were concerned above
all to find a suitable man: nationality probably played hardly any
part in this. It was a question of trying to find the best man. I think
they succeeded in doing this."

SEDE VACANTE 175

But there was a counterbalancing factor. Pope John's "con
servative" appointments were for the most part less dominant
men than his "progressive" ones. The leaders of the conserva
tives Cardinals Ottaviani, Sir! and Ruffini were creations
of Pius XII. Those more generally conceded to be of a pro
gressive tendency Cardinals Montini, Bea, Konig, Suenens,
Alfrink, Gushing, Landazuri, Ricketts and Ritter had been
elevated by Pope John.

Two further influences, traceable to Pope John's reign,
were considerable factors in giving a particular personality
to the College. The first was that Pope John's pontificate had
made it much more difficult for the cardinals to elect an "in
ward-looking" successor. "If in 1958 an unadventurous Italian
cardinal had been chosen, had taken the name of Pius XH[
and had pursued a policy of keeping the Church to itself, of
guarding the citadel but attempting few forays into the out
side world, no one would have thought very much about it.
It would have seemed a continuation of the natural order of
things. But for such a choice to have been taken in 1963
would have been as an overt repudiation of everything that
Pope John stood for." 9 It was almost certain that the majority
would not be thinking about a change of direction, even
though many would opt for a change of emphasis and pace.

Secondly, Vatican Council IE had given the cardinals an
opportunity to know one another, not merely personally, but
in their thinking and perspective on the Church. Fifty of
them had risen to speak during the first session, and the two
months of almost daily contact made of the Council a kind of
ante-chamber to the conclave they were about to enter* They
would not enter it strangers to one another, and in this lay
one of the greatest hopes of the Church which awaited a new
Pontiff that the voice and spirit not only of John but of the

9 Roy Jenkins, "Inside the Conclave," The Observer, London, July
21, 1963, p. 17.

176 APOSTLE FOR OUR TIME

Church as revealed through its bishops at the Council would
find expression within the Sistine Chapel through the eighty
men who by their votes would shape the Church for years to
come.

Thus it appeared that the central issue at the conclave
would be aperturismo an openness toward new trends in
Catholic thinking, toward ecumenical relations with other
Christians, toward new political approaches to Communism
a continuation, in short, of Pope John's programs. Those
alarmed at the nature and scope of those programs and de
sirous of muting what they considered their excessive theo
logical and political stridency, were considered, in pre-conclave
speculation, to number about 36, and were called the con
servative wing. The progressives, enthusiastic supporters of
Pope John in his confrontation with the world and with other
religious bodies, but individually possessing particular reser
vation especially in the political sphere, were considered to
have some 32 cardinals in their ranks. The remaining 14,
mainly members of the Curia whose thinking was little known,
constituted the moderate group.

The College possessed some towering figures. It was
headed by the Dean, the stern, bearded Orientalist and former
cavalry officer, the 75-year-old member of the French Acad
emy, Cardinal Tisserant. There was the Armenian-born pre
fect of Propaganda, also bearded, Cardinal Agagianian, 67,
who reportedly had received several votes in the 1958 con
clave. The stocky and loquacious Cardinal Urbani, 63, inter
ested in social questions and something of a scholar, former
bishop of Verona, had been appointed by John XXIII to suc
ceed him as patriarch of Venice. Prominent was the 80-year-
old archbishop of Paris, Cardinal Feltin, who on his arrival
in Rome for the conclave had asked prayers for himself and
his fellow cardinals that from their number would come "a

SEDE VACANTE 177

new pastor under whose guidance the work of renewal, of
peace and of unity, already initiated" would be realized.

There was the former apostolic delegate to the United
States and Secretary of State to Pope John, the 80-year-old
Cardinal Cicognani. Cardinal Roberti, 73, was little known
but a brilliant canonist and lifelong curialist. Cardinal Konig
of Vienna, 57, was a suave diplomat and expert in Eastern
religions and emissary of Pope John behind the Iron Curtain.
Cardinal Gushing of Boston, 67, noted for his prodigality in
charity, was a missionary manque for whom Pope John had
felt an intuitive affection. 10 The tall, graceful archbishop of
Bombay, Cardinal Gracias, 62, kept in his chancery the sad
dest file in the world: the number who die of hunger each week
in the area in his charge.

There was Cardinal Bea, German and Jesuit, 82, bent and
smiling, a biblical scholar, confessor to Pope Pius XII and
the right arm of Pope John in his work of union of Christians,
The handsome 75-year-old Cardinal Ruffini of Palermo was
also a biblical scholar, strongly traditionalist, alarmed at new
trends. The archbishop of Warsaw, Cardinal Wyszynski, 61,
archf oe of the Communists in his country had spent five years
in prison. A major figure was the almost blind, personally
charming, dogmatically intransigent prefect of the Holy Office,
Cardinal Ottaviani, 72. The dark and brilliant archbishop of
Genoa, Cardinal Siri, 57, in his funeral oration for Pope John
had said: fiC The moment is not yet at hand to speak of his work,
also because this work has need of the perspective of history
to properly judge it"; his diocesan newspaper, // Nuovo Cit-
tadino, had said: "No pontificate can repeat itself," and also,
that if every pontificate was not new "it would betray its f e-

10 The New York Herald Tribune did not exclude the possibility of
an American succeeding to the papal throne in the person of the arch
bishop of Boston.

178 APOSTLE FOR OUR TIME

cundity and the expectation of incarnation and the demands
for redemption of a world always in the process of becoming."

The 71 -year-old Cardinal Lercaro was the short, gentle
archbishop of Bologna, interested in social reform, with or
phans living in his residence, a liturgist and dramatic foe of
the Communists; he, too, while praising the goodness and
holiness of the deceased Pope had carefully refrained from
saying anything about his pontificate. Cardinal Frings of Co
logne, vigorous at 76, on Ms arrival in Rome had given voice
to the generally known intention of the German cardinals to
elect a successor to Pope John who would follow in his foot
steps. In this the Germans joined with the position which the
French cardinals and those of The Netherlands and of Belgium
were openly maintaining.

Outstanding, too, was the patriarch of Antioch in Syria,
Cardinal Tappouni, 83, who had one time been imprisoned
by fanatic guerillas in the Middle East; the scholarly and pro
gressive Cardinal Suenens of Malines-Brussels, who had dis
tinguished himself at the Council and had been invited by the
United States Committee for the United Nations to explain the
content of the encyclical Pacem in terris before the General
Assembly his name had been on the list of hostages prepared
by the SS in Belgium during the war: Cardinal Alfrink, 62,
the archbishop of Utrecht in The Netherlands, whose pastoral
letter on the Council, translated into Italian, was withdrawn
from the Italian bookstores for unexplained reasons. The dy
namic archbishop of New York, Cardinal Spellman, 74, would
be called one of the "grand electors" of the conclave. And the
intense and dedicated archbishop of Montreal, Cardinal Leger,
59, was one of its leading and progressive figures. 11

11 Cardinal Leger had complained during the pre-Council days
that where he had suggested reforms "no one listened to me. I spoke
in a desert I advanced many bold proposals, but I don't know if they
will ever be approved." He had gone to the Pope and had been con-

SEDE VACANTE 179

It remained for Cardinal Ciriaci, a Roman, now 77, an
astute diplomat, nuncio for years in Portugal, to advance, ac
cording to reports, the most startling suggestion during the
pre-conclave days. He proposed that the cardinals elect a com
mittee from their number to act as a permanent board which
would advise the Pope in areas not strictly spiritual. It pointed
up the disaffection felt by many in the overtures which Pope
John had made to international Communism, and had over
tones of vast complexity and interest.

There was distinction marking each of these men and of
the others who together with them composed the College.
Many were unwell, two almost blind, one (Cardinal Morono)
91 -years-old; divergent in background and age and thinking,
some presiding over the richest cities of the world, others with
personal vows of poverty; some living in palaces, others in re
ligious houses, some ambitious, some proud all bishops with
a purpose, which they would swear to fulfill according to their
lights and with the assistance of the Holy Spirit, to give to the
Church the man whom God would have to choose.

The pre-conclave assaying of papal possibilities swirled
around the names of at least six cardinals. Most often men
tioned was the cardinal archbishop of Milan. Favored by
John, progressive, but a proud traditionalist as well, brilliant,
a pastor and diplomat, a master of organization, only 66, eight
years at the head of the most complex archdiocese in Italy,
a linguist, knowledgeable about Rome and the Curia, widely
traveled, uniquely a man of his time all of his attributes
were exposed, dissected, and reassembled as the mania of
speculation on the eve of conclave reached its climax.

Counterpoised to Cardinal Montini's candidacy as the pro-
soled. The Pope told the cardinal: 'The march of the Church today
is irreversible. The Council will not end." The cardinal had also said:
'The Church has become conciliar; the bishops will meet in Rome
more often."

180 APOSTLE FOR OUH TIME

gressive he was considered to be was that of Cardinal Lercaro,
presented as a moderate-progressive. The kindest of men, his
social thinking in the reign of Pius XII had seemed extreme
to many, but with the advent of John it had appeared in con
trast to be somewhat to the right. His conception of social
work had been criticized as unsophisticated, his personal reac
tions to problems as emotional. Yet he had made an immedi
ate impression on the Council when he had pleaded for a
church "poor in the image of its Master." He had won wide
applause from some for his statement that he would never
shake hands with Premier Khrushchev, and it was maintained
that the conservatives in conclave would swing their votes to
him should their own first and conservative candidate seem to
have no chance of success. That candidate, it was said, was the
handsome young archbishop of Genoa, Cardinal Siri, but it
was felt that his age and his negative attitude toward much of
Pope John's policy would militate against his election. The
early votes which would be cast for Cardinals Suenens and
Konig would represent, it was said, a transalpine warning
that the election of Italians to the Papacy would not continue
forever.

The "compromise" candidates were several: there was the
spry and young-looking secretary of the Consistorial Congre
gation, the 73-year-old Cardinal Confalonieri. For years he
had served as private secretary to Pius XI, and his grasp of
curial life was profound. Others were Cardinal Roberti, the
canonist; Cardinal Marella; the cardinal archbishop of Naples,
Alfonso Castaldo. All were names proposed, extolled, de
fended and speculated about as the hour of conclave ap
proached. The cardinals themselves were mute, their thinking
revealed only by statements or speeches made days or months
earlier, by their attitudes in council, by the administration of
the offices they held. Frustration and expectation held Rome
in iron grip on the Wednesday afternoon when the conclave

SEDE VACANTE 181

would begin. A saying was making the rounds that Thursday
(June 20th) means Montini; Friday belongs to Lercaro; the
fourth day either to Confalonieri, Roberti, Antoniutti or Ma-
rella. The fifth day means either Traglia, Ciriaci, Cicognani or
Siri. On Wednesday, a day of frantic rumor, the report spread
that an agreement on the name of Cardinal Montini had been
reached by Micara, Confalonieri, Urbani, Frings, Lienart,
and Spellman.

There were "prophecies" and sayings, too, to consult when
the matching and the weighing seemed to reach an impasse.
The monk Malachy of Armagh in Ireland was papal legate for
Ireland and died at Clairvaux in Burgundy in 1 148. He visited
Rome twice and from these visits was formed his list of
"prophecies in the form of mottoes" for succeeding Popes.
They cannot be traced in book or manuscript further back
than 1595, and the noted Jesuit Herbert Thurston maintained
that they had been compiled then to help the candidature of
an ambitious cardinal. This leaves intact, however, the mystery
of the striking aptness of many of them. 12 The motto selected
by Malachy for the Pope now to be elected was Flos Florum
Flower of the Flowers. It was quickly pointed out that
both Cardinals Montini and Wyszynski had three lilies in
their armorial bearings, and as quickly that Cardinals Siri
and Roberti also had flowers in their coats-of-arms. The man
ner of interpretation of the prophecies is everything. For ex
ample, Flos Florum could also refer to the Armenian Cardi
nal Agagianian as "the flower of the garden of the East" thus
did Rome amuse itself and protect its divinings against pos
sibility of error. 13 Every man was a seer. It was pointed out

12 Benedict XV, Pope during the First World War was character
ized as Religio Depopulata and John XXTTT, pastoral and the patriarch
of Venice, as Pastor et Nauta Pastor and Sailor.

13 According to Malachy's prophecies the Pope to follow the Flos
Florum will be De medietate lunae from the middle of the moon

182 APOSTLE FOR OUR TIME

also that a tradition at least a hundred years old demanded
that a corpulent Pope be followed by a slim one, a Pope with
an r in his surname by one without. This tradition had been
maintained by every Pope elected since the time of Pius DC.

The man whose name was most mentioned spent the few
free hours of that Wednesday afternoon in typical fashion
he visited a seminary. Cardinal Montini arrived at the Lom
bard Pontifical Seminary, his alma mater, at one-thirty on
Wednesday afternoon and spent more time with the students.
One brave lad, Luigi Serentha, said to him at one point,
"Good-by to Milan, Your Eminence." The cardinal raised his
arms and smiled, as one who was present said, "enigmati
cally." He spoke of the conclave. "It is a mystery," he said,
"there are so many influences which shape the decision, but
more powerful than all is that of the Holy Spirit." He posed
for the inevitable photographs saying, "If you want them as a
sign of your affection, then it is a great consolation to me."
And the last informal poses of the man who will go into his
tory as Paul VI were captured by the cameras of young Lom
bard seminarians.

or it could mean a half-moon (heraldic). Two more Popes will follow:
De labore soils and Gloriae olivae y and finally Peter II; now is the time
of anti-Christ, the final apocalypse, the end of the world.

9. Successor to Peter
Successor to John

"For every high priest taken
from among men, is or
dained for men in the
things that appertain to
God. . . ."

Saint Paul

The procedure of locking cardinals and their attendants in a
building until a Pope has been chosen is, for all of its antiquity
and the solemn procedures which envelop it, something of a
grotesquerie. It had its beginning almost seven hundred years
ago when, on the death of Pope Clement IV in 1268, eighteen
cardinals met in the papal palace at Viterbo, about fifty miles
north of Rome to elect a successor. For two years, nine months
and five days they wrangled while the Church remained with
out a Pope, and the Papal States which he ruled underwent
great suffering.

Finally, the mayor of Viterbo conceived the idea of lock
ing the cardinals in the palace, seeking to isolate them from

183

184 APOSTLE FOR OUR TIME

worldly contacts and distractions which were delaying their
decisions. Even this failed of its effect. It was then that the roof
of the palace was removed, exposing the cardinals to the ele
ments, and when the first rain fell the cardinals quickly agreed
on the name of Teobaldo Viconti di Piacenza, who, on Sep
tember 1, 1271, became Gregory X. It was he, with the mem
ory of those two and a half years in mind, who published the
norms establishing the procedure of conclave, thereby insur
ing secrecy and the absence of outside pressure on the elec
toral college.

This curiosity of history reveals that conclave has not al
ways been the method of election employed in the Church. A
tradition maintains that Saint Peter, before undergoing mar
tyrdom in the year 67, suggested the names of his three as
sistants or coadjutors, Linus, Cletus and Clement, as those
who should follow him in his position of Bishop of Rome and
thereby as the one preeminent in the Church. For a long time
such a procedure was followed, the Pope suggesting his suc
cessor, the name being confirmed by the assembly of bishops,
the opinion and approval of the people being not a small part
of the decision. In the eighth century it was decided that the
election would rest with the clergy of Rome alone and the
Pope be chosen from among the cardinals, although this was
often ignored. Further precise directions were issued by Alex
ander HI (1159-1181), imposing as necessary a two-thirds
majority in order that the election be valid.

Secrecy and isolation continue to be key words in conclaves
to this day, and the conclave to choose a successor to Pope
John was scrupulously prepared. The cardinals, with few ex
ceptions, were allowed one assistant only, and within the
sealed-off area there were another twenty Vatican officials
and some seventy-five attendants and servants. Twelve nuns
were assigned to staff the kitchen. A doctor, a surgeon, two
architects, two barbers and a confessor were included in the

SUCCESSOR TO PETER SUCCESSOR TO JOHN 185

number of conclavists. Cardinals Confalonieri, Browne, and
Traglia were commissioned by the College to determine and
assess the probity, morals and commitment to secrecy of all
conclavists.

Pius XII had sought, following his election, to set aside a
section of the rambling Vatican Palace as an area in which
suitable accommodations for the cardinals could be provided,
and over fifteen apartments were installed, but the increased
number of cardinals with their attendants made these inade
quate, and called for ingenious improvisation. The cells, 1 as
they are called, some of them large rooms used ordinarily for
other purposes, now had simple furniture moved in, their us
ual furnishings, for the most part, undisturbed. The ceremo
nial halberds of the Swiss Guard kept watch over the bed of
one cardinal. Temporary walls were erected to subdivide large
throne rooms, and even the kitchen of the Pope's apartment
contained a bed for a prince of the Church, with a bed in an
adjoining pantry for his secretary.

The feeling of improvisation and of temporary provision
was everywhere, Franciscan simplicity of furnishing contrast
ing with the overwhelming painting and frescoes of some of
the temporary cells. Cardinals Ciriaci, Di Jorio and Testa
supervised their preparation. They were assigned, contrary to
custom, by drawing lots, although those ill or advanced in age
were assigned the more comfortable cells and those closest to
the Sistine Chapel. Cardinal Spellman was fortunate in draw-

1 Gregory X, in 1274, had indicated that the sleeping quarters of
the cardinals should be a communal dormitory. Clement VI, in 1345,
permitted the bed of each cardinal to be separated by a curtain or a
wall. When the conclaves began to be held in convents "cells" were
constructed, at least 30 centimeters apart. It was Leo Xm in the late
nineteenth century who allowed the cardinals each to have his proper
room, although the word cell attaches to them to this day.

186 APOSTLE FOR OUR TIME

ing the sumptuous official apartment of the Cardinal Secretary
of State. Cardinal Gushing was lodged in the reconverted of
fice of an accountant. Cardinal Meyer of Chicago received
the apartment of the chief of the Vatican Library. Cardinal
Mclntyre of Los Angeles drew a Spartan bedroom in the
quarters of the pontifical Noble Guard, and Cardinal Ritter
of St. Louis was assigned a small furnished storeroom.

Within the conclave area, doors were sealed, windows cov
ered, radio and television banned; the only telephones were
for use within the area itself. The whole maze was under the
care of the governor of the conclave, Monsignor Callori di
Vignale, with the marshal of the conclave, Prince Sigismondo
Chigi Albani della Rovere, entrusted with guarding its se
crecy. Contact with the outside world was not entirely severed;
it simply became rigidly controlled. Only two "roundabouts"
allowed this contact once the conclave was sealed. No conver
sation with an outsider was allowed except in the presence of
the custodians of the conclave and in a language understood
by them. No uninspected letter was permitted to leave the con
clave except by the Grand Penitentiary. The introduction of
newspapers carried an ipso facto excommunication. The court
yard of San Damaso was sealed within the conclave area and
provided ample space for exercise outdoors, while the spa
cious frescoed corridors gave the same opportunity indoors.
There was no feeling of constriction nor of crampedness
the area was too expansive for that.

The kitchen where the cardinals' food would be prepared
was a high vaulted room, its fourteenth-century walls recently
uncovered and restored. It contained gleaming stainless-steel
worktables and sinks, and modern gray-enameled refrig
erators. The dining room, the largest room of the Borgia
apartments, was once the armor room of the Borgia family.
Thirty-five feet above the U-shaped table was a fifteenth-
century fresco by II Pinturicchio. The china and silver ap-

SUCCESSOR TO PETER SUCCESSOR TO JOHN 187

pointments of the table were simple. To feed the cardinals
and their entourage tons of food were stored: 1,600 pounds
of pasta, 4,000 pounds of potatoes, 1,500 litres of white and
red wine, 6,000 bottles of mineral water, 3,000 bottles of
beer, 200 pounds of coffee, and three large slabs of Parmesan
cheese were among the provisions. If it was to be a long con
clave, logistically it would be invulnerable.

Shortly before five o'clock on Wednesday afternoon, the
procession of the cardinals and of their attendants to the con
clave began. They approached the Pauline Chapel through
the Ducal Hall, watched in silence by special visitors crowded
behind barricades. The cardinals, still in mourning purple,
moved slowly, their entrances widely spaced, grave in their
remembrance of the charge given them that morning at the
Mass of the Holy Spirit: ". . . to give the Holy Roman and
Catholic Church a pastor both capable and worthy in the
shortest time possible and with the greatest zeal, leaving aside
all worldly considerations and having God alone before their
eyes."

Some walked, bent and aged, leaning heavily on the arms
of their attendants, others strode purposively in the direction
of the chapel. When the cardinal archbishop of Milan ap
peared, solemn, his hands clasped, head lowered, applause
broke out among some of the spectators, and audible whispers
of "the Pope, the Pope!" were heard. The cardinal heard them
too, and raised his head and hands in a gesture of annoyance
and silence. Minutes before he had knelt at the tomb of Pope
John, and it was from there that he had begun his entrance
into conclave.

The cardinals prayed briefly together in the Pauline Chapel,
its walls lined with Michelangelo's awesome "Conversion of
Saint Paul" and "Martyrdom of Peter." Then, led by a master
of ceremonies bearing a glittering cross, they filed into the

188 APOSTLE FOR OUR TIME

Sistine Chapel, a hundred feet away. They made their way to
their places in the chapel while choristers sang the Veni
Creator Spiritus. The chapel glowed softly, alive with light
and movement, displaying the treasures of art which make it
unequaled in the Western world. For some centuries it has
been the private chapel of the Popes, but it is only in the last
hundred years that it has been used as the setting for the papal
elections.

The chapel is divided into two unequal portions by an
elegant Florentine Renaissance screen, providing a kind of
antechapel, and it was here, just inside the door to the left, at
table 39, that Cardinal Montini took his place, flanked on one
side by Cardinal Gracias of India, and on the other by the
patriarch of Venice, Cardinal Urbani. The chapel floor and
the hangings other than the eighty-two purple thrones, with
their collapsible canopies, were covered in green. A purple-
covered desk stood before the altar, the scrutineers' tables
and benches nearby. Behind the altar with its silver candle
sticks hung a tapestry depicting the scene of the first Pentecost.
And behind this, soaring to the ceiling, the "Last Judgment"
of Michelangelo brooded over the assembly.

The hymn and prayer concluded, all those not of the con
clave were ordered to depart, and the constitution governing
the procedure to be followed was read to the cardinals. Each
took an oath to observe the constitution in all its parts, to de
fend the rights of the Church if elected Pope, to keep secret
everything happening in conclave, and neither to receive nor
countenance any veto. The Cardinal Dean addressed them on
the gravity of thek task, the principal officers of the conclave
were sworn in, and then the cardinals retired to their cells,
some in the nearby Borgia apartments, others traveling by
staircase and elevator and along corridors leading to wings of
the palace a city block away.

Now the solemn ceremony of sealing the conclave began.

SUCCESSOR TO PETER SUCCESSOR TO JOHN 189

The bell in the courtyard of San Damaso was rung three
times, the cry, "Extra omnes" all outside rang out, the
lights were switched on throughout the area, a search made
of every corner by the Camerlengo and his assistants, the con
clavists inspected to insure that no unauthorized person re
mained inside. The doors leading to the outside world were
finally locked from the inside by the Cardinal Camerlengo
and from the outside by the marshal of the conclave, Prince
Chigi, dressed in his ceremonial Spanish uniform of black vel
vet and white lace. Over the Bronze Door, leading into the
Vatican palace the flag of his family, bearing the coat-of-arms
in red and blue, proclaimed that in his person was vested the
keeping of the palace during the conclave, a role his family
had received from Pope Clement XI in 1712.

To insure the secrecy of the conclave, the marshal could
call on the papal forces, the Swiss and Palatine Guards, who
are under his command during this time, and in the highly
unlikely possibility of necessity, raise a militia of Roman citi
zens. A notary witnessed to the sealing of the conclave from
outside, and another did the same within the conclave. Cardi
nal Tisserant, in the name of the cardinal bishops, Cardinal
Lienart of the cardinal priests, and Cardinal Ottaviani of the
cardinal deacons, alone remained outside their cells while the
sealing was accomplished. Then they too withdrew and the
silence of the conclave was joined to its secrecy as Wednesday
night closed in.

Thursday morning began with a low Mass celebrated by
the Cardinal Dean and a hymn to the Holy Spirit. The voting
began at nine o'clock, with two sessions scheduled for the
morning and two for the afternoon. The Pope can be elected
in any of three ways. The first is by "inspiration" this is the
unanimous acceptance by the College of a declaration by one
or more cardinals that one of their number is freely and spon
taneously chosen. The second method is by compromise,

190 APOSTLE FOR OUR TIME

which means that the College can delegate its choice to a
committee of three, five or seven. 2 The committee is instructed
by the College as to how many votes will be necessary to elect
the Pope four out of seven, three out of four, etc. The third
method, by election, is the traditional method and the one
used on this occasion by the cardinals in their voting sessions.

Ballots were distributed and all who were not cardinals
were ordered out of the chapel. On each ballot was printed: "I

elect as Sovereign Pontiff, the Lord Cardinal " (The

formula ignores the fact that outsiders, even laymen, may be
nominated.) The procedure is for the cardinal elector to write
the name, in as disguised writing as possible, fold it, take it
between the thumb and first finger of his right hand and in
his turn, according to seniority, carry it to the altar. He
kneels in prayer, and then rising says: "I call the Lord Christ,
who will be my Judge, to witness that I am electing the one
whom in the sight of God I think the most proper to be
elected." He then places his ballot on a paten and tips it into
the silver chalice resting in the center of the altar.

There are four votes taken each day, in two pairs. The
cardinal scrutineers read the ballots aloud, allowing each car
dinal to keep his own score. The cardinal revisors count the
ballots again, and the last of the cardinal scrutineers passes
a needle through the center of each ballot and binds them
with a thread. The burning of the ballots takes place twice a
day, once in the morning, once in the afternoon, for four
scrutinies in all. The cardinal scrutineers bring the ballots
from the altar to the stove, dilapidated rather than ancient,
standing just inside the door of the chapel. With the aid of old
copies of the Osservatore Romano and, if the balloting is in-

2 This procedure would be used most probably in a case of hope
less deadlock when no candidate could receive two-thirds of the votes
(or two-thirds plus one if the number present is not divisible by
three).

SUCCESSOR TO PETER SUCCESSOR TO JOHN 191

conclusive (two-thirds plus one is required), with dampened
straw added, the fire is ignited which destroys the cardinals'
ballots and gives out the black smoke of "no election" to the
crowds waiting in Saint Peter's square. 3 The tally sheets for
each scrutiny are not burned, nor are the notes made by the
cardinals. They are preserved in the Vatican archives to be
opened only on orders of the reigning Pope. Following the
election, it is the Cardinal Camerlengo's charge to draw up a
report on how the voting went at each session, and after the
approval of the senior cardinal bishop, cardinal priest and
cardinal deacon, it too is sealed away in the archives.

In the intervals between the rounds of balloting the cardi
nals were free to leave the chapel and to mingle in the less
cramped area of the conclave as a whole. They were free, too,
to discuss the election, to voice their opinions, express their
choice and if possible, and if they chose, to seek to persuade
those who remained doubtful or as yet unconvinced. They
were summoned back to the election precinct by a bell, and
the procedure of the first balloting was repeated.

The first ballot of the day is traditionally cast in "favorite
son" fashion and is often called "demonstrative voting." It
provides the cardinals with an opportunity to express their
respect for the office or person of certain of the cardinals
without regard to their being serious candidates. An opportu
nity is also afforded to estimate the relative strength of the
principal candidates. 4 The number of possible ballots is limit-

3 To avoid confusion concerning the color of the smoke, elec
tronic signals were installed, marked white and black, to inform Vati
can Radio. During the conclave which elected Pope John XXIH the
Vatican radio mistakenly informed the world one day early that a
Pope had been elected.

4 The Vatican correspondent of the Roman morning newspaper,
II Messagero, reported later that Cardinal Gushing of Boston had
sought in this first balloting to gain the Papacy for an unidentified
cardinal by the method of inspiration. He had, said the newspaper,

192 APOSTLE FOR OUR TIME

less and there is no process of elimination. Candidates may be
put in and taken out at will. If a cardinal is ill and obliged to
remain in his cell, three cardinals are delegated to obtain his
vote. It is received in a box with a small opening at the top,
which has first been shown to all the cardinals to be empty,
then locked, and the key laid on the altar. Should a cardinal
be unable to leave his throne, he pronounces the ritual for
mula in his place and consigns his ballot to the cardinal scru
tineers.

Two rounds of balloting took place on Thursday morning,
Outside in St. Peter's square some 20,000 people waited. At
11:45 A.M. the first puff of smoke appeared. It was whitish,
and pulses quickened, but then it darkened and thickened
and floated away in the clear Roman air. At four o'clock that
afternoon the balloting began again, and at 5:47 the smoke
rose, this time unmistakably black, and the conclave was sent
into its second day.

Friday, the first day of summer, dawned hot and humid in
Rome. The first days of June had been fresh and cool, and
people grumbled about the heat and speculated lazily over
coffee whether the Pope would be elected today. A newspa
per vendor was certain: "They'll elect him today. If there's
a cold war going on inside, this heat will put an end to it." It
was the feast of the Sacred Heart, and in the Roman churches
the Mass of the feast was being offered, and with the added
Collect from the Mass for the Election of a Pope: "We most
humbly entreat Thee, O Lord, that Thy boundless goodness

announced his intention previously, and rose in his place to proclaim:
"My Lords, considering the virtues and qualities of the Lord Cardinal

, I judge him worthy to be elected Supreme Pontiff, and from

this moment I myself choose him as Pope." It was later reported that
the cardinal in question was Cardinal Montini.

SUCCESSOR TO PETER SUCCESSOR TO JOHN 193

may grant as bishop to the most holy Roman Church one who
shall ever be both pleasing to Thee, by his loving zeal in our
regard, and, by his beneficent rule, deeply revered by Thy
people to the glory of Thy name."

In the Vatican palace, shuttered and enclosed in its second
day of conclave, the cardinals attended Mass, again celebrated
by the Dean. Breakfast was a quick affair, and by nine o'clock
the cardinals were in the Sistine Chapel and the balloting be
gan again. 5 It appears that the first vote of the day, the fifth of
the conclave, was the final one. At 11:19 a grayish trickle of
tentatively white smoke emerged from the tube on the roof
of the Sistine Chapel. Suddenly it billowed upward in a huge
and unmistakably white cloud. The Pope had been elected! A
cheer went up from the thousands already in the piazza, and

5 Nothing certain is known of the balloting; the secret of the con
clave prevents such information from being revealed. The accepted spec
ulation maintains that Cardinal Montini showed unexpected strength
on the first ballot, supported strongly by the Americans. Cardinals
Sin and Antoniutti received support as did the cardinal archbishop
of Bologna, Lercaro, but Montini's strength was sufficient to have
carried him, on the fourth ballot of Wednesday's voting, to within a
few votes of election. The first ballot of Friday, concludes this version,
gave him 79 votes.

La Stampa, a respected daily of Turin, in its issue of June 23, re
ferred to the importance some had attached to the visit Cardinal Spell-
man of New York had made to Cardinal Montini on the Tuesday night
before the conclave. It was considered significant, said the newspaper,
because the archbishop of New York was considered a leading ex
ponent of the conservative position ha the Church. The newspaper
continued: ". . . yesterday, in the rejoicing following the election,
Cardinal Spellman let fall a revealing phrase in one of the halls of
the apostolic palace, in the presence of many witnesses. He was walk
ing with his colleague Cardinal Micara, and at one point, in a some
what playful and happy mood, he exclaimed: 'You saw, Your Emi
nence, you saw! We did as you ordered us to do.' " The paper adds
that it was no secret that in pre-conclave days Cardinal Micara was
Cardinal Montini's most avid supporter.

194 APOSTLE FOR OUR TIME

from all over Rome, informed by radio and television, people
started converging on Saint Peter's square.

Inside the Sistine Chapel the scrutiny of the ballots had
ended. The tally was announced to the cardinals; one among
them had a majority. The junior of the cardinal deacons, Car
dinal Albareda, moved slowly to the door of the chapel and
called the principal officers of the conclave to enter as wit
nesses. They waited as the Cardinal Dean of the Sacred Col
lege, Cardinal Tisserant, together with Cardinals Goncalves
Cerejeira and Ottaviani, moved majestically down the chapel,
through the screen, turned to the right and stopped before the
green-covered table with the neat N. 39 on it. Behind it sat
the cardinal archbishop of Milan, immobile, his lips barely
moving in prayer. In Latin the Cardinal Dean asked: "Do you
accept your election as Supreme Pontiff which has been can-
onically carried out?" Cardinal Montini looked at him for
a brief moment, then said: "I accept in the name of the
Lord." "By what name will you be known?" asked the Dean.
"I will be called Paul," came the firm reply. The Dean bowed
to the new Pope, the canopies were lowered over the thrones
of the cardinals and one alone remained enthroned the suc
cessor to John, the successor to Peter.

Accompanied by the cardinal deacons, the Pope went im
mediately to the sacristy adjoining the chapel to put on one
of three white cassocks, together with a white sash, a rochet,
mozzetta, a red stole embroidered in gold, white stockings,
shoes of red velvet with small crosses of gold, and a white
skullcap. He returned to the Sistine Chapel, blessing the car
dinals as he walked to the sedia gestatoria, resting on the foot
pace of the altar, and sat to receive the first reverence of the
cardinals. It was at this point that the ballots were burned
and news of the Pope's election reached the outside. 6 The

6 The conclave had lasted 42 hours: one of the shortest in history.
Pius XII was chosen in less than 24 hours, Pope John XXIII in 3 days.

SUCCESSOR TO PETER SUCCESSOR TO JOHN 195

Fisherman's Ring was placed on the Pope's finger by the
Cardinal Dean, and he rose to go to the balcony of Saint Pe
ter's for his first appearance before the world.

As high noon approached, the sun beat down on the piazza
in front of the basilica, which was filling rapidly. Under their
blue umbrellas the photographers waited, and high on the
colonnades in flimsy wooden booths the television cameras
had been set up to record the scene. Italian soldiers marched
smartly into the piazza and took up positions before the stairs
of the basilica. The Palatine Guard appeared. A band played.
The people chatted, voicing their choices, shielding them
selves against the sun, cameras to the fore. A few minutes af
ter twelve, the glass doors opening onto the central balcony of
Saint Peter's swung wide, and a great roar went up. A red-
bordered white papal tapestry, still bearing the coat-of-arms
of Pope John, was draped over the balustrade, and Cardinal
Ottaviani appeared in the midst of jostling ecclesiastics.

The crowd of 100,000 was still. The voice of the almost
blind cardinal was strong and clear: "Annuntio vobis gau-
dium magnum: habemus Papam" he began. There was a
burst of applause and the crowd tensed, waiting. "Eminentis-
simum ac Reverendissimum Dominum Cardinalem Joannem
Baptistam the Most Eminent and Reverend Lord Cardinal

John Baptist " The crowd exploded; no need to hear the

final name, but it came strongly: 4C Montini, who has taken the
name Paul VI."

The announcement of the name brought a renewed roar.
'It is a program in itself," shouted a priest, beside himself
with excitement. The cheering continued, and suddenly pres
ent on the balcony was the slight, slim figure of the new Pope,
diminished against the perspective of the church. He stood di
rectly under the name of the Borghese Paul V, emblazoned
across the facade. He lifted his arms and hands in a gesture of
greeting and acknowledgment, a slight smile on his lips.

196 APOSTLE FOR OUR TIME

Then in a strong voice, and without tremor, he imparted his
first blessing to the city and to the world. "Blessed be the
name of the Lord," he chanted. "Now and forever," answered
the crowd. "Our help is in the name of the Lord," called the
Pope. "Who has made heaven and earth," came the response.
Then with a majestic sweep and elevation of his arms, he
traced his blessing in the Roman air: "May the blessing of Al
mighty God, Father, Son and Holy Spirit, descend upon you
and remain forever."

Across Rome the bells rang out jubilantly, and across the
world the news spread that Cardinal Montini, long the servi
tor of Popes, had himself become the Servant of the servants
of God. He joined the cardinals for one last meal together,
refusing to preside in the place of honor, choosing to sit in
the position assigned to him when he first entered the con
clave. That afternoon the Pope formally lifted the conclave
enclosure and received once again the "adoration," or more
properly, the expression of respect and fealty, of the cardinals.
Afterward he insisted on having his photograph taken with
all of the cardinals clustered around him, the first such to be
taken following a conclave.

The press of the world greeted the election of Paul VI with
praise. The emphasis throughout was of gratification that one
who had identified himself so intimately with the spirit and
program of Pope John should be his successor. Said the Lon
don Times: "The most significant point in the election of Paul
VI is indeed the fact that the cardinals or the majority of
them chose a Pope who would pursue the innovating work of
John XXDI." The French press unanimously expressed its de
light. "There is no doubt," said Le Monde, "that Paul VI is, of
all those who might have succeeded Pope John XXin, the
one who is closest to his thinking." The press in the Iron Cur
tain countries expressed cautious optimism regarding the pro
gram that the new Pope would foster in promoting world

SUCCESSOR TO PETER SUCCESSOR TO JOHN 197

peace. Said the New York Times: ". . . the cardinals could
not have chosen anyone more clearly calculated to carry on
where Pope John had to leave off . . . ."

President Kennedy sent a message to the new Pope which
wished him "long years of leadership in the cause of peace
and goodwill so nobly advanced by your great predecessor."
The Queen of England, General de Gaulle, Premier Khru
shchev, all sent their felicitations. The Russian premier ex
pressed his best wishes "for success in your activities favorable
to peace and to the peaceful coexistence of peoples."

Many saw in the name he had chosen a presage of his pro
gram. It was a name unused for centuries, as had been the
name chosen by John XXHL The Pauls who had preceded the
new Pope were recalled. Pope Paul I, a brother of Pope
Stephen II, came to the throne in 757, and consolidated the
temporal holdings of the Holy See. Pope Paul n sought to
bring the Russian Orthodox Church back into union with
Rome. Alessandro Farnese, Paul El, was elected in 1534. He
summoned the Council of Trent, founded the congregation of
the Holy Office, issued a condemnation of slavery, and de
fended the rights of the Indians in the newly-discovered
America. Gian Pietro Cardinal Carafa, who succeeded him
in 1555 as Paul IV, had no faith in the reforming success of
the Council of Trent and suspended it, preferring to deal
directly with the problem of heretics. Pope Paul V, elected in
1605, was an intransigent man, more rigid than diplomatic,
more a challenger than a reconciler of men. He nevertheless
sought, as had Paul n, to effect union with the Russian
Orthodox Church.

Many of the problems which confronted his predecessors
bearing the name of Paul efforts at Christian unity, the
problems attendant on holding an ecumenical council f aced
the new Paul. There is little doubt he chose his name because
of his devotion to Saint Paul the Apostle. The zeal and Chris-

198 APOSTLE FOR OUR TIME

tian breadth of Paul had always challenged the new Holy
Father. Said the Osservatore Romano of the choice: "The
Apostle to the Gentiles ... is a symbol of ecumenical unity,
venerated by Catholics, Protestants and Orthodox Christians/'
It was pointed out that it was Saint Paul who had internation
alized the early Church, the great missionary apostle who
sought to become all things to all men that he might win them
to Christ.

At the beginning of June Pope John XXm still lived. On
the last day of June, his successor was crowned. For nine days
already he had been Pope, from the moment he had replied,
"I accept" to the question posed him by the Cardinal Dean in
the Sistine Chapel. They had been days of intense activity,
sustained and pastoral, and now for a few hours the Pope and
the Church paused, while in centuries-old symbol and pag
eantry the choice of the cardinals was declared with public
pomp.

To some, the glittering ceremony of coronation of the Pope
is an incongruity and anachronism, unworthy of the successor
of the simple fisherman and the vicar of the simple Christ. He
is a pastor and pastors do not wear crowns. He is a servant
and the trappings of monarchy are not for servants. But the
ceremony of coronation of the Pope is unique, a declaration of
supreme spiritual significance, historically rooted and grown.
Conceived and developed, as is much of the ceremonial of the
papal court, in imitation of the Christian Roman emperors, it
sought in times past to affirm, not mere equality with them,
but an exaltation of the office of the Pope in order to proclaim
the ascendancy of the spiritual over the merely temporal. As
the Church, her position established, moves further into the
modern world, there is sure to be modification, curtailment,
but it will be gradual, almost imperceptible. It took three hun-

SUCCESSOR TO PETER SUCCESSOR TO JOHN 199

dred years to evolve papal coronations, the work of a hundred
Popes.

Because the great nave of St. Peter's basilica, traditional set
ting for the coronation ceremony, was still filled with the tiers
of seats prepared for the bishops in Council, the Pope decided
that the ceremony should take place in front of Saint Peter's,
with the great gradines of the church serving as the sanctuary,
and the immense curving piazza, enclosed by Bernini's col
umns, as the sweeping nave of the outdoor church. The altar
was set forward on the rim of the steps, with the great throne
placed against the central door of the basilica. Wisely, too, it
was decided to hold the ceremony at 6 P.M., when the shim
mering heat of the Roman June day would have somewhat
abated.

Already much of the piazza was in shadow when the trib
unes, to the left and right of the altar, began to fill with the
diplomatic corps, the Roman nobility, and the special rep
resentatives of ninety-two nations, international organizations,
and churches. The King and Queen of the Belgians were
among the heads of state present, also the Presidents of Italy
and of Ireland. President Kennedy, although already in Italy,
had appointed a distinguished representation. It was headed
by the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court, Earl Warren, and
included Senator Mike Mansfield of Montana, Mr. Charles W.
Englehard, Jr., and Rabbi Louis Finkelstein, chancellor of the
Jewish Theological Seminary, New York. The naming of the
outstanding Jewish scholar was remarked in the United States
as the first time a rabbi had ever served in such capacity, and
was hailed as "a high watermark in Vatican- Jewish relations."

The procession formed in one of the great palace rooms of
the Vatican, and moved slowly down the magnificent Scala
Regia, through the Bronze Door and into the square where
two hundred thousand people waited to hail the Pope. The

200 APOSTLE FOR OUR TIME

crowd was quiet as the procession moved into view, led by the
Swiss Guard in their orange, red and blue; the chamberlains
in their purple; the lay dignitaries in their black; the bussolanti
in their violet cassocks and red capes; followed by the chap-
Iain carrying the tiara. The penitentiaries appeared, dressed in
black, followed by chaplains in violet and red, and then row
upon row of white-mitred and caped patriarchs, archbishops
and bishops, followed by the similarly attired cardinals. Then,
borne aloft on his sedia, the great ostrich feather fans waving
beside him and the canopy above him, came the Pope. A vast
roar greeted him. Shouts of "Long live the Pope!" were
drowned in the cascading applause, as he turned from left to
right, blessing the crowd. Three times in the procession to
the altar and throne the sedia carrying the Pope halted, while
a friar burned a piece of flax, and in a voice which reverber
ated through the piazza called out: "Holy Father, thus passes
the glory of the world."

Once seated on the throne within the temporary sanctuary,
the obedience of the cardinals began, each approaching singly
to kiss his ring and to be embraced. Some he steadied as they
tottered, some lingered for a word, anxiously watched by the
prefect of ceremonies, Archbishop Dante, hovering nearby.

The long, solemn pontifical Mass followed, celebrated at
the altar facing the crowd. The Epistle and Gospel were sung
in Latin and in Greek, to mark the universality of the Church,
and the Gospel reminded the Pope: "Thou art Peter. . . ." At
the end of the Mass one of the most charming of customs dur
ing the long ceremony was fulfilled. The dean of the Vatican
chapter, accompanied by two canons, approached the Holy
Father and gave him a small bag of white silk, decorated in
gold thread, containing twenty-five coins "Pro Missa bene
cantata" for a Mass well sung.

Darkness had settled over the square and floodlights illumi
nated the sanctuary as the Pope took his place on the throne.

SUCCESSOR TO PETER SUCCESSOR TO JOHN 201

The moment of coronation was at hand, and a bearer ap
proached with the tiara, the triple-tiered, beehive shaped
crown, a gift to the Pope from the people of Milan. It glinted
softly in the light as Cardinal Ottaviani, senior deacon of the
College of Cardinals, raised it high above the Pope's head and
slowly lowered it, saying as he did: "Receive this tiara,
adorned with three crowns, and know that you are the father
of princes and kings, guide of the world, and vicar of Jesus
Christ, our Saviour."

The coronation speech of the Holy Father was given in nine
languages. He spoke first in Latin, then in Italian, French,
English, German, Spanish, Portuguese, Polish and Russian. In
Latin he spoke of the solemnity of the spectacle of the corona
tion, his obligation to speak, the weight of his office, the role
of the Church and the frailty of his human nature on whose
slender powers God had seen fit to impose such a task. "We
flee finally to Paul, from whom we have taken our name, so
that we may place ourselves under his auspices and gain his
protection. . . . May he choose to be our heavenly model
and patron through all of the days of our life."

Because French was more widely understood he chose it,
the Pope said, to announce to the world his attitudes toward
the Catholic communities, the separated Churches and the
modern world. "The Church . . . regards as incomparable
wealth," he said, "the variety of languages and rites in which
it carries out its dialogue with heaven. The Eastern commu
nities which continue in their noble and ancient traditions are,
in our eyes, worthy of honor, esteem and confidence ... To
those who, without belonging to the Catholic Church, are
united to Us by the powerful bond of faith and love of Jesus
Christ and marked with the unique seal of baptism one
Lord, one faith, one baptism we address ourselves, doubly
encouraged by an immense desire, the same which has moved
so many among them: to hasten the blessed day which will

202 APOSTLE FOR OUR TIME

see, after so many centuries of deadly separation, the realiza
tion of Christ's prayer on the eve of His death ut sint unum,
that they may be one. . . . No more than he [Pope John
XXTEI] do We nourish illusions about the exigencies of the
problems to be solved and the gravity of the obstacles to be
surmounted. But, faithful to the great Apostle whose name
We have taken, rather are We to practice the truth in love
(Ephesians 4,15). We intend leaning only on Our weapons of
truth and charity, to pursue the dialogue that has been begun
and, as far as We are able, to help the work already under
taken."

As he had so often done in Milan, the Pope referred to the
dialogue of the Church with the modern world. "But beyond
the frontiers of Christianity, the Church is engaged in another
dialogue today, the dialogue with the modern world. On super
ficial examination, the man of today can appear to be more
and more a stranger to all that is religious and spiritual. Con
scious of the progress of science and technology, inebriated
by spectacular successes in domains hitherto unexplored, he
seems to see his own power as divine and to want to do with
out God.

"But behind this grandiose f agade it is easy to discover the
profound voices of this modern world, which is also worked
upon by the Holy Spirit and by grace. It aspires to justice, to a
progress that is not only technical but also human, to a peace
that is not merely the precarious suspension of hostilities
among nations or among social classes, but that would permit
at last an openness and a collaboration among men and peo
ples in an atmosphere of reciprocal confidence."

In the English part of his sermon Pope Paul said: "To our
venerable brothers and beloved children who use the English
language a word of greeting and of blessing in their mother
tongue . . . your language makes a notable contribution to
ward increased understanding and unity among nations and

SUCCESSOR TO PETER SUCCESSOR TO JOHN 203

races. . . . We exhort you, Our children and all English-
speaking men of good will, to strive and pray that this price
less blessing [of peace] may be given and preserved upon
earth, as announced by the Angels when Christ, Our Saviour,
was bom."

The Pope spoke in Spanish and Portuguese before turning
to German, in which he paid tribute to the faith of the people
of Germany, Switzerland and Austria. Then in Polish he said:
"In a special way We salute and bless Our beloved Poland
which has always been faithful, where We stayed for a time,
and which remains always very dear to our heart." And clos
ing in Russian, he said, "Our thoughts are directed to all the
Russian people to whom We send a fatherly blessing with all
Our heart."

Night had fallen when the ceremony of coronation finally
ended. In the glare of the lights, under a sky which lay low
over Rome, the Pope was borne back to his palace. He had
been crowned, and now it was the quiet words and actions of
his pontificate to which the world would look and which
would receive the judgment of history.

10. The Pauline Pontificate

Gregory the Great, according to legend, after his election to
the Papacy, escaped from Rome in a grain basket. For three
days and nights he wandered in forests and caves outside the
city to avoid mounting the throne. In the end he submitted
humbly. Pius XII, more credibly, is said to have cried out ask
ing God's mercy when his election was announced. The initial
reaction of Cardinal Montini has not been recorded, other than
his acceptance, but if one may deduce it from a knowledge of
his temperament, one may suppose that he sustained the voice
of the divine imperative in almost complete quiet.

Like Pius XII, he brought to the papal throne something of
the "sense" of the Papacy. His Vatican years had been served
under Pius XI and Pius XII, and his dialogue with John XXIII
had been exchanged in a close bond of mind and heart. In his
forty years as a priest, he had had an opportunity to see a
gradual change develop in the role of the Vicar of Christ in
the world. Within the term of his own service in diplomacy,
the gradation could be traced from the idea of public monitor-
ship in Pius XI, a role partly inherited, partly thrust upon him
by historical events, and partly the product of his own temper
ament. It grew more dominant with the advance of world

204

THE PAULINE PONTIFICATE 205

Communism in the 30*s and its promotion of the materialism
which posed such strong threats to the Church and to society.
Pius XII, too, had matured as Pope in a context of tangibly
crucial opposition and world convulsion, his challenge not
only the visible enemies of Fascism and Nazism, but the intel
lectual uncertainties and disillusions that followed on the
Second World War. Thus he had conceived his role, in large
part, as that of the teacher of the Catholic world, the clarifier
of its spiritual and social doctrine, the defender of a threatened
Christendom. It was a pontificate in the tradition of the Con-
stantinian era which was to end with his reign.

Since the middle 50's, there had evolved a still more exten
sive and responsive regard for what the Pope thinks and repre
sents in all aspects of human concern. In its confusion and im
balance the world had, to some degree, recognized in the
Papacy a center of stability and proportion. To this was to be
added under John an affection for the man and an apprecia
tion and comprehension of the Church he led, which was
unique in this century.

The Papacy entered the 60's vital and renewed, aware of its
own spiritual preeminence, the volume of its voice, and the
gravitational pull of its sanctifying burdens. Under Pope John
it became more recognizably the bond of unity among all
Christians, and to some degree, among all men. 1 The secular
press had been emphatic in insisting that it was John who gave
the Papacy "an urgent and abiding interest in the minds of
millions of non-Catholics." It is difficult to believe that had
John lived longer his words on any issue of moral significance
would have f alien unheeded. Attack and strong opposition he
might have known, but hardly dismissal. And Paul is the suc-

1 "The Petrine office is understood ... as Christ's own provision of
a final court of arbitration and mediation in the service of unity."
H. Kung, The Council, Reform and Reunion (New York: Sheed &
Ward, 1962), p. 133.

206 APOSTLE FOR OUR TIME

cessor not only of Peter but of John. John's expressed approval
of him, and his own avowal of the duty to follow the path of
John, made the world alert from the beginning of his pontifi
cate to even the least obtrusive manifestations of his official
response to human situations.

Throughout his life there has been every indication that
Pope Paul knows, not only in concept but in wisdom and in
spiritual touch, the nature of the world he has come to mediate.
It is a world of the common man and the common man in a
diversity of races, beliefs, national and cultural backgrounds.
It is a world in which, as Yves Congar has described it, "one
man out of every three lives under Communism, and one
Christian out of every two is not a Catholic." It is a world in
which there still persists a stubborn reluctance to believe in the
individual and corporate power of the common man, a power
which Pope John knew intuitively. Pope Paul by his wide
reading among writers concerned with the plight of modern
man Camus, Mann, Malraux deepened intellectually an
already profoundly human and spiritual insight to which his
pastoral years in Milan gave added dimension.

In the- first months of his reign Pope Paul, even though al
ready evincing an emphasis and language more his own than
John's, seemed to capture the mood and spirit of John's pon
tificate. It should not be forgotten, however, that between
these two Popes, men with a patent affinity for each other,
there exists a polarity which has both separated and united
men as leaders and thinkers from earliest times separated
men as they approach human problems frontally or laterally,
as they accept or refuse to accept the fact of tension; united
men as the world expresses a need for them together, and con
fronts one with the other.

It might not be too extreme to compare Pope Paul's inter
pretation and shaping of the ideas and aspirations of John to
the process of the refraction of light, whereby the many faceted

THE PAULINE PONTIFICATE 207

prism breaks down the ray into its original components, each
thereby gaining a new depth and beauty. John's rare gift of
holy simplicity could be misleading to those who hastily
judged it to be merely an absence of complication. John's long
pastoral life could not have been as fruitful as it was, had his
simplicity been anything but a profound fusion of many
diversified elements and capacities, made one by an integrat
ing bent of mind and by what Paul himself called John's
"goodness," his purity of heart. Upon Paul, however, the
practiced "translator" of the mind and will of the Popes he
served, devolves the duty of analysis, of workmanship, the
careful second stage in aggiornamento, the creative unfolding,
exposing, distinguishing and consolidating of the aspirations
of his predecessor and of the hopes of the Church.

When the history of his pontificate is completely chronicled,
a glance over the initial months will show a comprehensive
sensitivity to the diverse forces currently at work in the world.
From the highly charged equilibrium of amity and power of
the Test Ban Treaty 2 following within a month of his corona
tion to the "great game of friendship" of the World Jamboree
of Boy Scouts at Marathon, Greece, Paul VI almost immedi
ately caused himself to be heard, speaking with a knowledge
and calm immensely reassuring to the Church and to the
world.

2 On July 22 he wired President Kennedy, Premier Khrushchev,
Prime Minister MacMillan and Secretary-General U Thant: "The
signing of the treaty banning nuclear experiments has very intimately
touched Our heart because we see in it a testimony of good will, a
pledge of harmony, and a promise of a more serene future. Welcoming
in Our soul, always solicitous for the welfare of humanity, the echo
of satisfaction and hope which rises from every corner of the world,
We express our felicitations on completion of an act so comforting and
so significant and We pray God that He prepare the way for a new and
true peace hi the world."

208 APOSTLE FOR OUR TIME

In fulfilment of Ms pledge of fidelity "to the great canons of
his [John's] pontificate," Pope Paul in the first hours of his reign
took a significant step. He confirmed as his Secretary of State
Amleto Cardinal Cicognani, who had served Pope John in the
crucial final months of preparation for the Council and during
its first session, and who was at the center of the various deli
cate diplomatic experiments which John had initiated. He was
therefore in a position to provide the continuity and back
ground necessary for the new Pope in the period of his orienta
tion. The Sostituto of the Secretariat, Archbishop Angelo
DelTAcqua, was also confirmed in his office, and thus the
Holy Father assured himself of a knowledgeable and expert
team to bring him quietly to the center of the problems and
challenges facing him.

Other gestures were more homely. To his former diocese of
Milan, already jubilantly celebrating three days of holiday in
honor of its former archbishop, he sent one of his first tele
grams. There were words of gratitude and a special expression
of "affection for so many of the poor, the suffering, the aged,
the children, waiting for a word of comfort and encourage
ment." He remembered his brothers, too: "To you, my dearest
Ludovico and Francesco, and to your families, in the holy
memory of our dear dead parents, who taught us faith in
Christ and love of the Church, the first of the apostolic bless
ings from your always most affectionate brother, today by
divine disposition, Paul VI."

At ten o'clock in the evening of the day of his election, the
Pope phoned his former vicar general in Milan, Archbishop
Schiavini. He disposed of some matters with him and then
asked that one of his secretaries in Milan, Don Luigi Sala, be
called to the phone. "Today is the feast of San Luigi Gonzaga,"
lie said to the overwhelmed young priest, "and I wanted to
give you my fondest wishes for your feastday." Then it was the
turn of the superior of the sisters who maintain the residence

THE PAULINE PONTIFICATE 209

in Milan. "I have so many things in my head (per la testa)
that I cannot speak," he said to her. "But I bless you all."

The light in his office burned late into the night as with his
secretary he dealt with the big and small changes in his life.
Appointments were made for the fitting of cassocks and shoes
and hats, the full regalia of a Pope. They would come after his
appearance in the Sistine Chapel the next morning. The bag
gage left at Castelgandolfo must be fetched, the Pope wanted
his desk from his library in Milan, his books must be for
warded immediately. The message which he was to address to
the world the next day was drafted and corrected, and shortly
after one-thirty in the morning the lights went out in the
Pope's office, and he slept the few hours which remained
until five o'clock, when he arose for his first full day as
Supreme Pontiff.

Within twenty-four hours of his election, Pope Paul again
entered the Sistine Chapel, there, in the presence of the Col
lege of Cardinals, through television and by radio, to deliver
his first message to the world. The scene was visually over
whelming, and there was a festive, almost jubilant air about
the cardinals as they arrived for the ceremony. The Pope sat
enthroned before the tapestry of the Pentecostal scene, looking
almost fragile in the high gold mitre and sumptuous cope
which enveloped him. The third and final obedience of the
cardinals preceded the Pope's speech, and each approached in
order of seniority, his scarlet cappa magna fully extended, to
kneel and be embraced by the smiling, courteous Holy Father.

Monday would be the feast of Saint John the Baptist, after
whom he had been named, and Cardinal Tisserant, in his
charming and fluent Italian, presented the "auguri" of the car
dinals, closing with the words: "We are ready, we cardinals
who reside in Rome and those of us spread throughout the
world, to obey and to collaborate in the plans of Your Holi
ness with a dedication which knows no limits." The Pope was

210 APOSTLE FOR OUR TIME

visibly touched. He seemed for a moment to lose his compo
sure, and when he spoke it was slowly, spontaneously, in Ital
ian. "I feel," he began, "to the point of suffering, my own
limitations." He paused. Then he continued: "I have experi
ence, my Lord Cardinals, of the immense and dramatic prob
lems which confront the Church and the world, and I feel the
need of that trust and support which you can offer."

The Pope's first message to the world was delivered in
Latin. He spoke firmly, strongly. He first paid tribute to his
predecessors, "who left Us a spiritual, sacred and glorious
heritage." He remembered Pope Pius XI under whom he had
begun his Vatican service forty years earlier, ". . . with his
indominitable spiritual strength"; Pius XII, whom he had
served through the years of war and in the postwar period, and
who ". . . illuminated the Church with the light of a teaching
full of knowledge."

But it was to Pope John XXIII that he referred in his most
affectionate and moving words: "But in a very particular way
we love to remember, with mindful and moving piety, the
figure of the late John XXIII, who in the brief but very intense
period of his ministry, was able to bring near to him the hearts
of men, even those distant, with his unceasing solicitude, with
his sincere and concrete goodness for the humble, with the
clearly pastoral character of his actions, qualities to which the
particularly enchanting and human gift of his great heart was
added. The enlightenment exercised on souls was a steady
progress, clearer and clearer, and an ardent flame, up to the
final personal sacrifice, suffered with that spiritual strength
that moved the world by uniting mankind around his bed of
pain and by making them a single heart and a single spirit in
a united outpouring of great respect, veneration and prayer."

And then he spoke the words which many waited to hear:
"The preeminent part of our pontificate will be occupied by
the continuation of the Ecumenical Council Vatican II, on

THE PAULINE PONTIFICATE 211

which the eyes of all men of goodwill are focused. This will be
the principal labor on which We intend to expend all the ener
gies that the Lord has given us so that the Catholic Church,
shining over the world like a sign to all nations afar off (Isaiah
v,26), can attract all men to itself with the majesty of its
organization, with the youthfulness of its spirit, with the re
newal of its structure, with the multiplicity of its strength."

Pope John XXm had set as the third intention of his pon
tificate, following the holding of the Roman synod and the
convening of the Ecumenical Council, the long-awaited re
form of tiie Code of Canon Law which regulates the intra-
community life of the Church. It had been proposed first by
Pius XII, and now Pope Paul spoke of it: "In this light will
take place work for the revision of the Code of Canon Law,
the furthering 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, in truth and free
dom and in respect of reciprocal duties and rights."

Those who were watching for the Pope's "liberal" utter
ances were not disappointed, as he spoke more specifically on
social problems: "The certain order of love for others, a test
of love for God, demands of all men a more equal solution of
social problems, demands aid and care for underdeveloped
countries in which the living standard is often not worthy of
human dignity all require a voluntary study on a universal
scale for the improvement of the conditions of life.

"The new epoch that the conquests of space have opened to
man land will be singularly blessed by the Lord if men know
truly how to recognize each other as brothers rather than com
petitors, and build a world order in holy fear of God, in re
spect for His laws, in the sweet light of charity and mutual
collaboration.

"Our work, with the aid of God, will also be to undertake
every effort for the conservation of the great good of peace

212 APOSTLE FOR OUR TIME

among peoples a peace that 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 for active con
cord, inspired by the true well-being of mankind, in unaffected
love."

There was a word for "the brothers and children in those
regions where the Church is impeded from using its rights."
He sent his blessing to them, that they might "feel themselves
near to us. They have been called to share more closely in the
cross of Christ which, we are sure, will be followed by the
radiant dawn of resurrection."

With a universality of concept and vision, and in the height
ened tone to be expected of the Supreme Pontiff, the Pope in
this first address had succeeded in striking a note of immedi
acy, and had spoken to the world of the world's most urgent
concerns. All of the issues over which men are at present
divided and fiercely united were not only touched upon; they
were placed in their proper relevance in a Christian scheme
and seen in the light of eternal values, And this enlightenment
was achieved with a combination of warmth and conciseness
which men intent on more restricted ends might envy.

His official charges with the world and with assemblies of
men momentarily complete on this first day, Pope Paul charac
teristically turned to concern for individual men. In Milan, on
the day after he had taken possession of his cathedral, he had
gone to visit the sick, and the day after his election to the
Papacy was to be no different. Shortly after three in the after
noon, the Pope descended into the grottoes under Saint Peter's,
to pray at the tomb of Pope John. He knelt for a long time, his
head bowed, his hands clasped. He prayed, too, at the tombs
of Pius XI and Pius XII, and then, leaving the basilica, went

THE PAULINE PONTIFICATE 213

to the Hospice of Santa Marta nearby, to greet the aged and
ailing Archbishop Angelo Rotta, former nuncio in Hungary
and close friend of Pope John. There was a visit also to Arch
bishop Josyf Slipyi, primate of the Ukraine who, following his
release from eighteen years of detention in Siberia, had been
living in the Vatican. He lay ill, and the Pope spent a few
moments with the frail little man who had suffered so much
for his faith.

The Pope's next visit was to take him outside of Vatican
City, to the Spanish College, where the cardinal archbishop of
Toledo, the heavy-set, progressive Enrique Pla y Deniel, was
sick with influenza. 3 The black papal Mercedes, carrying the
Pope and Monsignor Macchi, moved through streets filled with
startled and cheering people, obviously pleased to see the Pope
so soon among them. At the College, the Pope spent a short
time with the cardinal, and then greeted the students and the
other cardinals resident in the College during their sojourn in
Rome. His first visit outside the Vatican was hailed as a mark
of the Pope's esteem for Spain, 4 and the proud nation received
the visit as a compliment, but it was also the simple gesture of
a man who throughout his life had had a special affection for

3 Later in the summer (August 11) the New York Times printed a
short article on Cardinal DenieFs "pastoral exhortation" to the Catho
lics of Toledo, underlining Pope Paul's concern with labor problems,
and his pastoral mission in Milan, carried out "in such a way as the
modern world demands." The account mentioned the likelihood of
Cardinal Deniel's presiding over a meeting of the Spanish hierarchy
possibly to discuss, among other things, a draft bill "emancipating"
Spain's 30,000 Protestants.

4 In honor of the coronation of Pope Paul, the Spanish govern
ment issued a decree of amnesty on July 1, which applied to all sen
tences involving loss of liberty and to all crimes and offences which
come under the penal code, the special penal laws, and military legis
lation. In addition, all persons who on the day the decree was issued,
had served twenty years of effective imprisonment were set free.

214 APOSTLE FOR OUR TIME

the sick, and whose first visit into the city of which he was
bishop, as it had been in Milan, was to one who was ill.

The whirlwind activity of the Pope in his first week seemed
to substantiate the remark made by his chauffeur in Milan,
Antonio Mapelli. "He would say to me, 'Hurry, hurry, Anto
nio! Speed it up if you can, because I am in a hurry. 3 He never
wanted to arrive late for anything, never!" In that first week he
began the routine of audiences with his closest associates and
assistants which are held every day except Sunday. He re
ceived his Secretary of State, Cardinal Cicognani, every day,
and began also the so-called di tabella or regular audiences on
fixed days of the week, with the prefects and secretaries of the
Roman congregations. 5 There were audiences also on fixed
days for the heads of the offices and tribunals of the Roman
Curia, or central administration of the Church. He also insti
tuted a practice he had begun in Milan of meeting his closest
collaborators at lunch each Friday so that the problems con
fronting them could be discussed freely during the meal.

In this same week, the Cardinal Secretary of State, acting
in the Pope's name, signed a papal rescript or formal ruling
setting the opening date of the second session of the Ecumeni
cal Council as September 29, 1963. The Council coordinating
committee met to put the finishing touches to the 17 schemata
to be presented to the Fathers of the Council, and the Council
press office issued a statement recalling the words of Pope
Paul the day after his election, that "All men of good will have
their eyes fixed on the Council."

His concern with the Church universal as expressed through
the Council and with world problems did not distract Pope
Paul from what he, in receiving the 2,500 parish priests of
Rome called "the first title of Our Mission and of Our author
ity" his office as Bishop of Rome. "We feel, having spent
thirty-four years of our priesthood here, that we know the reli-

5 These can be likened to the ministries of a civil government.

THE PAULINE PONTIFICATE 215

gious life of Rome, but we know, too, how many are the new
religious needs of the city, and the practical difficulties of sat
isfying them. We know the formidable challenges posed to
pastoral activity by the cosmopolitan character of the city, by
its urban growth, and the influence of all the currents of
modern culture and habit. It is to these that we must dedicate
our primary solicitude." "It is," the Pope added, "Our years in
Milan which have prepared Us for this pastoral confrontation
of the sacred ministry with the most characteristic expressions
of modern life."

The juxtaposition on the same day of the audience for his
priests with the audience for the members of the diplomatic
corps accredited to the Holy See from forty-nine countries,
highlighted the multifaceted ministry of the Pope. To his
priests he spoke in Italian; to the diplomats in French. To his
priests he underscored the challenge of modern life to the pas
toral ministry in a great and growing city. To the diplomats he
spoke of the challenge to peace in a world at once grown small
in its dimensions and large in its conflicts. In his first meeting
with the corps, the Pope said: "This is almost a family re
union: a meeting where one finds, after some years' absence,
friendly faces which bring to life cherished memories. After
the teachings of our predecessors and we refer particularly
to the Pacem in Terris encyclical it is hardly necessary for us
to repeat to you the respect of the Church for the dignity and
mission of every country in the world, both those distinguished
by a long historic and cultural past and those which in our
time have acceded to independence. . . ." He spoke of "true
peace . . . this incomparable treasure which is unceasingly
menaced. . . ."

In his first message to the world, Pope Paul, out of his own
conviction, and in the spirit of Pacem in Terris, had spoken of
the needs of newly emergent countries and of the obligation

216 APOSTLE FOR OUR TIME

of more prosperous and economically developed nations to
help any country where "the level of life often is not worthy of
human beings." The phrase "the third world" has been used
to describe not only Africa but that part of Asia not ruled by
the Communists, and also, with somewhat different emphasis,
Latin America. It signifies those parts of the world where
human misery walks largely unchecked, but where hope is
beginning to stir and where independence has in part been
achieved nations which have not yet entered the industrial
and economically viable society of the twentieth century. Two
messages which Pope Paul delivered in the first weeks of his
pontificate revealed that the Papacy under him would have a
more insistent preoccupation with the conditions of misery
and need which still afflict large portions of the world.

The first was addressed to a group of one hundred Nigerian
Catholics in Rome for his coronation. The Pope had visited
Nigeria during his African tour, and it was with evident pleas
ure that he received these first representatives of the conti
nent which in its Catholic life had impressed him so pro
foundly. "It is with admiration and joy," he said, "that We
greet the reawakening of Africa to civil maturity, and in conse
quence to liberty, to independence and to progress. While We
recognize the merits of all those who have helped the African
people to walk the road of civilization, We nourish the hope
that these people may be able to enjoy the rights proper to
modern civil society and, fraternally assisted by countries
economically and culturally more developed, may attain in
liberty and peace that prosperity which corresponds to their
common human dignity."

A part of the third world which lay neglected and exploited
for centuries and which today smoulders in misery is the vast
continent of South America, where Catholicism had been the
religion, in name at least, of all the people for hundreds of
years. Pope Paul chose his meeting with the Pontifical Com-

THE PAULINE PONTIFICATE 217

mission for Latin America, 6 dedicated to fostering the socio-
religious apostolate in one of the most troublous and destitute
areas in the world, to speak about the Church in that conti
nent.

He assured the members of the commission that the plight
of the Church in Latin America had been one of the deathbed
concerns of Pope John XXIII; that, after receiving the last
rites of the Church, he had spoken of the great work to be
done there. Again a mark of affinity for John, modulated by
his own finely sharpened and realistic response to the con
templation of the widespread distress in Latin American coun
tries, led him to pronounce a word of praise, which could
never be mistaken for triumphalism, for the work the commis
sion had done during the past five years. Thanking Canada
particularly, because she had immediately sent a number of
priests and religious into Latin America in answer to the ap
peal of the commission during the reign of John, he praised
also the United States which had given personnel and eco
nomic aid "with its usual generosity."

He reminded the commission that, although the mission of
the Church is not specifically social or political, "having
'compassion on the crowd' in the manner of the Divine Saviour
is part of the working program of the priest, who will not re
main indifferent, insensitive or inactive before his brothers
and sisters who suffer. . . . Thus, social action, properly
understood, finds its place among the duties of the priest. It
will be an extension of the priestly ministry, understood in the
true sense. We are happy to know that Our venerable brothers
the bishops and Our beloved sons of Latin America have this
pastoral sensitivity which urges them to care for bodies as well
as the good of souls, while bearing in mind always the su
preme end of man."

6 Founded by Pius XII in the last year of his pontificate, it had
done most of its work under John XXIIL

218 APOSTLE FOR OUR TIME

Thus while praising whatever the Church had accomplished
in the past three hundred years, the Pope injected a note of
realism which pervades the account of this meeting. Arch
bishop Miranda, in his address to the Pope on this occasion,
had quoted Pius XITs title for Latin America, calling it "the
continent of hope," yet even a cursory glance at this hungry,
angry continent impresses on the mind that Paul's words con
cerning the care of bodies as well as the good of souls are key
words, and that Pius' continent of hope is still dark. It is a
mark of Christian hope, no doubt, that priests are living with
and helping the poor in Latin America. It is a confirmation of
it that Pope Paul emphatically blesses this form of the Church's
activity. 7

The audience in which the Pope received the Secretary
General of the United Nations, U Thant, was noteworthy for
the tribute which he paid to the United Nations for answering
the dreams of his predecessors and mirroring the same uni
versality as the Catholic Church. "The Church," Pope Paul
said, "considers the United Nations to be the fruit of a civiliza
tion to which the Catholic religion . . . gave the vital prin-

7 On the day following, a report from Washington cited Cardinal
Raul Silva Henriquez of Santiago, Chile, as saying that Pope Paul
would further develop the "determination of Pope John to use the
power of the Roman Catholic Church to promote social and eco
nomic reforms in Latin America. . . . The center of our campaign
is to hasten the improvement of the living standards of the Latin
American peoples, while retaining their political and religious free
dom. If we can prove that ours is an effective solution to poverty and
ignorance, I am convinced that Communism shall be decisively de
feated in all our hemisphere." He stressed that the gap separating the
wealthy from the destitute masses of urban workers and peasants
"must be urgently closed, for there is no time left." He added that
if he lived under the conditions that prevailed in most of rural Latin
America, he "would be a Communist."

THE PAULINE PONTIFICATE 219

ciples. It considers it an instrument of brotherhood between
nations which the Holy See had always desired and pro
moted. . . .

"The ideologies of those who belong to the United Nations
are certainly multiple and diverse, and the Catholic Church
regards them with due attention. But the convergence of so
many peoples, so many races, so many States in a single or
ganization intended to avert the evils of war and to favor the
good things of peace, is a fact which the Holy See considers
as corresponding to its concept of humanity, and included
within the area of its spiritual mission in the world." Reverting
to history, he made reference to the desire of Benedict XV for
such an organization; its "fundamental criteria traced with
happy foresight by Pius XII" at Christmas 1939 and in Sep
tember 1944, and the underlining of its importance and the
encouragement given it by John XXIII.

In retrospect it seems that the mind of Paul was able to see
in this meeting and in the very existence of the United Na
tions, more penetratingly and more reasonably than many
Catholic commentators saw fit to remark, the possibility of a
fruitful cooperation between the Church and the United Na
tions. An astute observation in the London Tablet, however,
pointed out an urgent relevance in the meeting: "The words
addressed to U Thant can be very useful to the Organization,
for it is in the older and richer countries, most of them with
large Catholic populations, that there is most impatience, dis
illusion, and dislike for a body which seems to be chiefly a
stamping ground for Afro-Asians with one dominant and
unfriendly idea. . . . Thus the Pope's words may need to be
remembered when the Vatican Council in its next session
reaches the schema, specially dear to the heart of Cardinal Sue-
nens, which covers mundane activities like the work for peace,
aid for poor countries, the corporal works of mercy on the
large scale of contemporary international life. There may be

220 APOSTLE FOR OUR TIME

temptation to think that the Church herself should try to
create her own agencies, collect her own lay experts, and ask
them to formulate detailed programmes. . . . But there is
no need for an expert on disarmament or nutrition to be a
Catholic. The place of the lay expert is with other lay experts,
to pursue tasks which, as they are for the benefit of all human
ity, are properly to be undertaken by men of all faiths."

A few days prior to his discussion with U Thant, involved
as it was with the emergence of new nations and their socio
political problems, Pope Paul had made one of his first state
ments of political philosophy in a letter to the 50th convention
of the Semaines Sociales de France, meeting in Caen. From
the Christian point of view, he said, democracy does not
necessarily result from any particular political institution or
organization, but rather it is a state which exists wherever
there is effective dialogue between government and governed,
between authority and the people. The "tyranny of social
groupings," and the "abandoning of the individual to mechan
isms in which his liberty disappears" were enemies of demo
cratic progress. "Democracy as supported by the Church is
not so much linked to a specific political regime as to the
structures on which depend the relations between the people
and the authorities in their request for the prosperity of all."

"Democracy can be found in any regime that is not totali
tarian," the Pope said. "It requires a society of free men,
equal in dignity and fundamental rights, a society that takes
note of personalities, of responsibilities and rights." 8 In the

8 In August of 1963, during the crisis in Vietnam involving Bud
dhist protests against harshness and intolerance of the government led
by Roman Catholic President Ngo Dinh Diem, the Pope received 41
Vietnamese students studying in European universities. He urged them
to discover that unity is the secret of the Church, and that this voca
tion to unity applies to their nation as to others, "with this essential
priority: that it does not ignore the rights, the merits, the character-

THE PAULINE PONTIFICATE 221

same letter he had also spoken of the function of the press in a
democracy, urging that the people be properly informed, add
ing even more cogently, however, that "the people must strive
to judge and weigh the information they receive." "And," he
added, "the instruments of diffusing (the news) must not be
at the exclusive disposition of any single political viewpoint."

Americans have, from the beginning, found Pope Paul an
appealing figure. His two visits to this country, accounts of
his activities as archbishop of Milan in major news weeklies,
and his sympathy with John, predisposed Americans to look
with favor on Cardinal Montini before his election as Pope,
When he received Cardinal Spellman after his election, he
spoke of the impression made on him during his 1960 visit
by the devotion and participation of the faithful in Saint
Patrick's cathedral, an impression that had inspired him to
encourage the same devotion and participation in his cathe
dral in Milan. He praised the works of charity in the United
States and the Catholic school system, and recalled his visit
to the New York Foundling Hospital, and the Archbishop
Stepinac High School in White Plains.

Early in his pontificate he received four hundred members,
priests and laymen, of the archdiocese of Philadelphia, who
had come to Rome for the beatification of John Nepomucene
Neumann, a bishop of that see in the nineteenth century. The
ceremony had been cancelled because of the illness of John
XXIII. Pope Paul promised them that he would proceed with
it as soon as possible, and spoke to them in English about
their country, its hospitality and generosity. It was the new
Pope's first audience to a large group of Americans.

At about the same time the Holy Father granted a half-
hour audience to the Richard Nixons and their two daughters.

istic aspects of the country named; that it does not suffocate the genius
of the people to which it addresses itself."

222 APOSTLE FOR OUR TIME

The former Vice-President had sought and received the audi
ence a few days before President Kennedy's arrival.

On July 2 the President of the United States and his party
were welcomed at the Vatican with what many American
newspapers referred to as "centuries-old ceremony." The Pres
ident spent forty minutes in private conversation with Pope
Paul, after which the Pope greeted the official party, including
Secretary of State Dean Rusk, and delivered a formal speech
of welcome.

Paul's sense of the rightness of time and his sensitivity to
the gravity of human distress, wherever found, were clearly
expressed in this address: "In the discourses of Your Excel
lency ... we find a spontaneous harmony with that which
our venerable predecessor, Pope John XXHI, said in his last
encyclical letter, Pacem in Terris, when he presented anew to
the world the dignity of the individual human person, a
dignity which the Almighty bestowed in creating man to his
own image and likeness. We are ever mindful in our prayers
of the efforts to insure to all your citizens the equal benefits of
citizenship, which have as their foundation the equality of
all men because of their dignity as persons and children of
God."

The recognizable reference here to integration and the civil
rights program caused mixed reaction in the United States.
The New York Times included a gratified comment in an
editorial: "The message will doubtless have its effect in our
country. History was made when the two men met. If the
visit to Italy proved valuable, President Kennedy will have
Pope Paul to thank."

The audience concluded with the Pope's extending greet
ings and blessings to all the members of the President's family,
and to the citizens of the United States. There was the tradi
tional exchange of gifts between the two rulers, autographed
photographs, desk sets, medallions, and, from the Pope to Mr.

THE PAULINE PONTIFICATE 223

Kennedy, a marble reproduction of Michelangelo's Pieta, the
original of which is to be sent to the New York World's Fair
in 1964.'

On July 17, 1963, the Swiss Bishop Francois Chamere of
Lausanne-Fribourg-Geneva rose to speak before the leaders
of the Orthodox Church gathered in Holy Trinity Monastery
in Zagorsk, about forty miles north of Moscow. Sent by Pope
Paul VI as his personal representative to the golden jubilee
celebration of the Patriarch Aleksei, he was the first Roman
Catholic prelate ever to speak in this holiest shrine of Russian
Orthodoxy.

The bearded patriarchs of the Orthodox Churches with
their graceful, draped headdresses, gave deep, meditative at
tention to the full-faced, spectacled Westerner as he spoke.
Aleksei, patriarch of the Russian Orthodox Church, seemed
to incline his darkly-crowned gray head forward at a more
eager angle than the others. The moment was historic and the
words of the bishop, full of grace and conciliation, leaped
across almost a thousand years of separation.

". . . In the age when brave pioneers strive to reach the
heavens in a thrilling adventure of space exploration, we can
not view our old quarrels from the standpoint of narrow pro
vincialism ... we must apply the dimensions of the planet.
We must view these old quarrels from the standpoint of the
exploration of space, and this perspective will reduce them in
our own eyes to their proper importance and size."

Accompanying Bishop Charri&re was the Very Reverend
Christophe Dumont, O.P., of Paris. The two men had been
carefully chosen for their ecumenical experience and a natural

* Pope Paul sent a medallion on a small gold chain of the Madonna
and Child for Mrs. Kennedy's unborn child. A little more than a
month later, when the child died, Paul sent a personal message of
condolence to the Kennedys.

224 APOSTLE FOR OUR TIME

affinity for the movement by Cardinal Augustin Bea, chair
man of the Vatican Secretariat to Promote the Unity of Chris
tians. In Bishop Charriere's diocese the World Council of
Churches and other international Protestant organizations
have their headquarters, and Father Dumont is director of
Istina in Paris, a center which specializes in studies of Eastern
Orthodoxy. Not since the eleventh century had there been a
formal and ceremonial relationship between the two
Churches. Even in the autumn of 1962, when the Russian
Church had accepted John's unprecedented invitation to send
observers to Vatican II, the exchange was less direct, less
specifically religious. But John's invitation had been the forth
right and disarming overture that was necessary for this more
precise, dimensional step, this overture to dialogue. "To go
out to them" had always been the animating principles of the
priest who is Pope Paul, and now, in the first days of his
pontificate, he had sent wise men to the East, that the Eastern
and Western Churches might develop through such en
counters a relish for brotherhood. But a rapprochement,
Bishop Charriere felt obliged to point out, could not be
reached except on these terms: "The foundation can only be
truth and justice; the climate, freedom; the motive and the
inspiration, charity and love. This rapprochement cannot be
directed against anybody."

The addresses of Bishop Charriere and of Father Dumont
were reciprocated in speeches of amity expressed by their
Russian hosts, and the participation by the Vatican in the
jubilee was acclaimed also by members of the Russian Ortho
dox Church meeting in Montreal, in July 1963, at the fourth
World Conference on Faith and Order. Such responses to
evidence of openness and Christian charity had given the
Church under John, and now under Paul, a sense of nearness
to men and institutions, mentally and spiritually distant for
centuries. The Pope, in this gesture of response to the invita-

THE PAULINE PONTIFICATE 225

tion of the Russian Orthodox Church, had opened another
window. In the matter of aperturismo, the words, the world
noted, were the words of John, but the voice was the voice of
Paul.

The Russian Church had sent observers to Vatican Coun
cil II, but the Greek Orthodox Church had maintained its
reserve. A little more than a month after the address of Bishop
Charriere at Holy Trinity Monastery, Pope Paul visited the
eleventh-century monastery at Grottoferrata, not far from
Castelgandolfo, where the Eastern rite is followed in the litur
gical observances. Here he celebrated Mass for the monks
and then delivered an unprepared address in which he pleaded
for unity with all Eastern Churches.

"Does my vision stop here?" he asked, after paying tribute
to the spiritual ties which bind Western and Eastern Chris
tianity. "You, yourselves, in your rites invite me to look to
ward all the Eastern Churches that have the same baptism,
the same fundamental faith, a valid hierarchy, and sacraments
full of grace." Referring to the delegation to the jubilee of
Patriarch Aleksei, he continued: "It was done with the inten
tion of rendering homage, of showing that there is no reason
for rivalry for prestige, neither for pride nor ambition nor
for any desire to perpetuate dissonances and dissidence exist
ing in the past, but which are now, it seems to me, totally
anachronistic. Let us seek to render common and solid our
creed, seek to render articulate and fitting our hierarchical
union." In praying that Christian unity be achieved, he added,
"if not in our age, at least in succeeding ages."

And again the Christian world which seeks to understand
Paul discovers here a combination of John and Paul: the
voice of John in the implicit plea that the Greek Church be
among the observers of Vatican Council II; 10 and Paul in the

10 The Greek newspaper Ethnos reported in July that the Patriarch
Athanagoras of Constantinople and the leaders of the Church in

226 APOSTLE FOR OUR TIME

patient attitude of being willing to wait, to work out the divine
design by progressive steps.

In the constellation of qualities which Pope Paul brought
to the Papacy was his desire to continue the heritage of Pope
John's willingness to open his heart to men of all faiths and
of no faith, to men of all political credos, if they came pre
pared to enter into honest, active dialogue. 11 This was one
point of the heritage of John left unmentioned in some anal
yses appearing after the election. After his death, John was
praised for this willingness in Nedelya, the Sunday supple
ment of Izvestia, and Paul, after the conclusion of the con
clave received commendation from the same journal.

Like John, Paul believes that the West must deal with Com
munism but the position to him is not doctrinaire. Describ
ing himself in Milan as "a priest of the workers, yes a priest
of the Left, no," he went into factories employing hundreds
of Communist workers, not asking that they cease to be Com
munists before he spoke to them. He was called "a strong
proponent of coexistence," yet many observers maintained
that since the Italian elections in April 1963, when Commu
nist gains amounted to over one million votes, his attitude as
archbishop of Milan had stiffened. Paul had been known to
condemn "selfish" wealth, but in doing so, had not been ac
cused of compromising with Marxism. In Italy, shortly after
the conclave, some leftist groups, made anxious by what they
called his "Christian Democratic background," urged him to

Greece had agreed not to send observers to the second session of the
Vatican Council.

11 Pope John was quoted by Archbishop Roberti, nuncio to the
Congo, as having said that there had been overtures made by the So
viets to the Holy See in regard to diplomatic relations. "But he (Khru
shchev)," the Pope had added, "must first assure us freedom for the
Church. We are hopeful that this will be done." Archbishop Roberti
at a memorial convocation at Louvanium University, Leopoldville,
June 17, in honor of John XXIII.

THE PAULINE PONTIFICATE 227

avoid "ideological crusades." American newspapers, on the
other hand, on the eve of President Kennedy's visit, expressed
the hope that Communism would be an area of discussion.
And in July, when speaking to an association of Roman
Catholic workers in Italy, with a directness characteristic of
Ms Milan days, Pope Paul recommended to Church assistants
in the association that they study the psychology of the worker,
thus indicating his awareness that response to workers' un
rest must make use of more than merely religious means.
There is often, he said, a contrast between the psychology of
the worker and the language of the priest which leads to
difficulty in their understanding one another.

During the reign of Pope John XXIII, quiet negotiations
had been begun in order to effect more favorable conditions
for Catholics in Iron Curtain countries. Shortly after Pope
Paul's election, the Most Reverend Endre Hamvas, bishop
of Csanad, acting head of the bench of Hungarian bishops, 12
in an audience with the Pope reported the Hungarian govern
ment's desire for the continuation of talks on the relations
between the Church and State in Hungary. Interviews leading
to the release of Cardinal Josef Mindszenty were repeatedly
referred to after Pope Paul's election by "unusually reliable
sources." Although the negotiations were apparently dropped
after the illness and death of Pope John, his unbounded
fraternity seems to have kept them alive until now, and in the
first period of Paul's pontificate they passed into the more
delicate and hazardous final stage.

12 Cardinal Mindszenty, primate of Hungary, whose fate is the most
sensitive of questions to be discussed between the Vatican and the
Hungarian government is reported to have asked, in conversation with
Monsignor Casaroli of the Secretariat of State who visited Budapest
in May, that he should not be succeeded by Bishop Hamvas, who is
thought to be close to the "peace priests." (London Tablet, July 20,
1963, p. 803.)

228 APOSTLE FOR OUR TIME

In an apostolic letter sent to the Czechoslovak hierarchy
in connection with the eleven-hundreth anniversary of the
arrival of SS. Cyril and Methodius in their country, Pope
Paul expressed the wish that "as soon as possible good news
about the position of the Church in the Czechoslovak Re
public might reach the Vatican." 13 Cardinal Wyszynski, pri
mate of Poland, assured members of the Polish colony in
Vienna that Paul intended to continue John's policy of im
proving relations with Iron Curtain countries. Further assur
ance was discerned in the proposed plan of Cardinal Konig
of Vienna to visit Czechoslovakia "to explore chances for a
relaxation of the Czechoslovak government's attitude toward
the Church, 14 and to revisit Hungary and Cardinal Mind-
szenty. In midsummer, Deputy Premier Kallai of Hungary
spoke encouragingly about the possibility of filling the va
cant episcopal sees in Hungary, while later, Italian sources
quoted Plojhar, minister of public health in Czechoslovakia,
as saying that the situation of Archbishop Beran might admit
of solution, "if the Vatican continues to proceed according
to the way outlined by Pope John XXm." Marshal Tito of
Yugoslavia was quoted as saying: "I rtnnV we can improve
relations with the Vatican."

TTius it appears that for the Communists the resolution of
many problems lies essentially in following the program of
Pope John. The difficulty of doing this over a period of years
cannot be overestimated. Pope Paul's qualities of ingenuity
and acumen will be called upon to their deepest fathom by

13 In Prague, the weekly Katholicky Novtm described Pope Paul as
one who would continue the "peace-loving line" of Pope John XXIII.
It was certain, the paper said, that he had taken the name Paul be
cause he was striving for a lasting and just peace throughout the
world.

14 Archbishop Beran had been under house arrest in Prague since
1948.

THE PAULINE PONTIFICATE 229

what he knows of the Church in these Eastern European
countries. This position may be, as one Italian writer sees it,
subject always to the humor of the government, but the
politico-religious question "is now at grips with the actuality
of a Church which enjoys enormous prestige and is considered
a mediator of world peace."

The state of relations between the Church and the Com
munist world in the summer of 1963 seemed to justify the
hope of Pope John. Denunciation had not been the answer,
but rather the renewal and strengthening of the Church
through an infusion of charity and a willingness to speak to
man of the things of man, if not of the things of God. And
because life is a sequential existence, the occasions which seek
and challenge this charity, this openness to encounter, will
constantly arise and seek recognition. To discern these, to
meet them, to use them justly this is the towering task of
Pope Paul VI.

It is a truism to say that a man's life centers around his con
flicts. Yet the conflicts of the successor to Peter tend to be
come submerged, not only before the public, the press, and
the faithful they become submerged within the man him
self. Without ceasing to be, as all men are, both the arena and
the protagonist of psychic struggles, the man who is the
Vicar of Christ, especially in modern times, begins to take on
dimensions commensurate with the Body of Christ. He may
suffer cosmic agony. He risks universal obloquy. The corners
of his cross knock at the poles; he is stretched taut, with the
protective contraction which all men learn, both willingly
forgone and denied him by the reaches of his commitment.
His new selfhood becomes such that it absorbs his former
self, so that he may, in an odd moment of leisure, regard it
quizzically and with affection, touched by its former isolation,
but feeling its deep consanguinity with all men. Small men

230 APOSTLE FOR OUR TIME

have been Popes, and have remained small. Were Paul VTs
dimensions less than they are, however, it would be impos
sible for him in today's world not to grow beyond accustomed
limits in a way which he himself might at one time have
thought impossible.

Even on the level of his assessable dealings with men and
his thoughts about them, the present Pope has been called a
global thinker. In his diplomatic relations, in his writing, in his
pastoral activity, he has never been "European" in the sense of
Charles de Gaulle. The native turn of his mind has always been
one in which the words of Pacem in Terris would find quick
understanding: "One cannot overlook the fact that even though
human beings differ from one another by virtue of their ethnic
peculiarities, they all possess certain essential common ele
ments, and are inclined by nature to meet each other in the
world of spiritual values, whose progressive assimilation opens
to them the possibility of perfection without limits. They have
the right and duty therefore to live in communion with one
another." Paul's interest in coming to the United States and
Canada, in visiting South America and Africa, does not mean
that he has something in him to which the peculiar quality of
Americans (or Latin American, or Africans) appeals almost
by reflex (as has been hinted by Americans writing about the
new Pope). It means that rather he sees these continents as
the places of man.

Paul's great challenge will be the study of unity, and teach
ing of unity, the apostolate of unity and ecumenism. His
early announcement of the date of the reconvening of Vatican
Council n and his declared dedication to the Council indicate
this. 15 As archbishop of Milan he was once quoted as saying:

15 One week before the Council's second session began, Pope Paul
announced plans for reorganizing the structure of the Roman Curia, in-

THE PAULINE PONTIFICATE 231

"The truth is that the world's inability to achieve a unity of
thought and to end spiritual divisions is the real reason why
society is so deeply unhappy, so poor in ideas and enthusi
asm, and so lacking the shared spiritual concepts which are its
own inner joy, nobility and strength."

There are personal marks about this man which are noted
with surprise and delight, even in reading of them, by those
who are in the habit of seeing the Pope as rather a symbol
than a man. Much that he did during the first days of his
pontificate reveals the person. Certain semiofficial acts also
show how his personality shapes his public gestures. He wrote
a letter in his own hand to two Protestant ministers who
wished him well in his pontificate. He celebrated Mass in the
Ambrosian rite on the Feast of SS. Peter and Paul for pil
grims from Milan who brought him the tiara to be used in
his coronation the first Pope ever to celebrate Mass in this
rite. On September 8 he twice offered Mass for the people and
in their midst at Genzano and Pavona becoming the first
Pope in modern history, at least, to celebrate two Masses on a
Sunday.

He said Mass for the townspeople in Castelgandolfo in
the local church of Saint Nicolas on August 15 and urged
them in a homily on the feast not to forget in their prayers
those whom suffering prevented from enjoying the beautiful
summer holiday weather. His acceptance of a miner's lamp
from Belgian miners who felt a special fraternity with this
priest of the workers; his special appeal for the prayers of
pilgrims, beyond his personal messages of sympathy and gifts
of money for the victims of the earthquake in Skopje, Yugo
slavia; his instruction to UOsservatore Romano and Acta
Apostolicae Sedis to drop grandiloquent titles and refer to him

eluding its internationalization. (Confer appendix for excerpts of his
address.)

232 APOSTLE FOR OUR TIME

simply as "Holy Father" all these are more than the indis
criminate minutiae that go to fill the many moments in a
Pontiff's life. They constitute a medium by which a many-
faceted man becomes known to his people. He may, as some
writers have put it, have a subtle mind, and a strong hand.
The hand, however, is fine and sensitive, and the mind is on
good terms with the heart.

These things will reveal him personally more effectively at
the beginning of his pontificate than any effort to make a
thorough study of his official acts. It is because we are in a
life of Christian hope, especially in the present age of the
world, that an account of him can be only an essay. The
charity which this Father to his people deserves is the effort
to look on the prospect of his pontificate with his own eyes. It
is likely that Paul will estimate his own acts in the light of the
priesthood which has shaped his life and his opinions. If
there is a priestly type, even his physical appearance places
him in this category. Tall, thin, with an unusually high fore
head, he has penetrating gray-blue eyes under bushy brows,
a large straight nose, and two vertical lines in his brow which
add another note of individuality and reserve to a face which
is strongly handsome. It is a mobile face, capable of multiple
shades of human expression and arresting expressiveness.
And the man who looks from it on the world is also flexible,
reserved, resilient and firm.

The direction of his power he himself has expressed in
speaking of Christianity: "The Christian message is not a
prophecy of condemnation. It calls to penance in order to
call to salvation. It is not bitter; it is not ill-tempered; it is
not discourteous; it is not ironic; it is not pessimistic. It is
generous. It is strong and joyful. It is full of beauty and
poetry. It is full of vigor and majesty. Indeed, it raises the
Cross: suffering, sacrifice, death, but only to bring comfort,
redemption, and life."

Appendix

The following are excerpts from Pope Paul VI's address to the Ro
man Curia on September 21, 1963.

. . . the Roman Curia is the instrument of which the Pope has need,
which the Pope uses to undertake his divine mandate. Its function calls
for high capabilities and virtues, because its office is high.

As everyone knows, this old and complex body in its most recent re
ordering dates back to Pope Sixtus V's famous constitution Immensa
Aeterni Dei of 1588. St. Pius X gave it new life with his constitution
Sapienti Consilio in 1908, and the Code of Canon Law in 1917 substan
tially made its architecture. Many years have passed: It is understanda
ble that such ordering has been aggravated by its venerable old age, as
is shown again by the disparity of its organs and practices to the needs
of new times and usages of new times, and as it shows at the same time
the need to be simplified, decentralized, to enlarge itself and adapt itself
to new functions.

Various reforms are therefore necessary. They will certainly be pon
dered, set in motion according to venerated and reasonable traditions,
on one hand, and according to the needs of the times, on the other.
And they will certainly be functional and beneficial, because they will
have no other aim than that of allowing to fall that which is already
perishing and superfluous, in the forms and norms which regulate the
Roman Curia, and to put in being that which is vital and provident for
its more efficacious and appropriate functioning. They will be formu
lated and promulgated by the Curia itself!

The Roman Curia will not be frightened, for example, to be recruited
with larger supranatural vision, nor to be educated by a more careful
ecumenical preparation.

The Roman Curia will not be jealous of temporal prerogatives be
longing to other times nor of external forms no longer fitted to express
and impress true and high religious meaning. It will not be miserly of
functions that bishops can today exercise better themselves locally with
out injuring universal ecclesiastical order. Neither will economic aims
or advantages ever have any weight in suggesting some reserve or some
centralization on the part of the Holy See's organs, if this is demanded
by the good of ecclesiastical administration and the welfare of souls.

It is the sacred norm of the departments of the Roman Curia to ques
tion the bishops and weigh their judgments in dealing with affairs.

233

234 APOSTLE FOR OUR TIME

Among the consultors of the sacred congregations, there figure not
a few bishops, coming from various regions.

And we will say more: If the Ecumenical Council wishes to see some
representatives of the episcopacy, particularly bishops heading dioceses,
associated hi some way and for some questions in conformity with the
doctrine of the Church and canon law, with the supreme head of the
Church, in the study and responsibility of ecclesiastical government, it
will certainly not be the Roman Curia that will oppose the suggestion.
On the contrary, it will feel a growing in the honor and burden of its
sublime and indispensable service which is, as we know well, specifi
cally administrative, consultative and executive, apart from the due
procedure of the ecclesiastical tribunals both in the Roman Curia and
in the dioceses. The Roman Curia, yet again, will thus feel even more
strongly its vocation to give an example to the whole Church and to the
secular world.

The Roman Curia is not an anonymous body, insensible to the great
spiritual problems, that automatically dictates laws, but a live body
faithful and docile to the head of the Church, a body made of grave
responsibilities and functions, and imbued with reverence and solicitude
to those prelates who "spiritus sanctus posuit episcopos regere ecclesiam
DeiJ'

Therefore let the Roman Curia not be a bureaucracy, as some have
wrongly judged it, pretentious and apathetic, legalistic and ritualistic, a
fighting ground of hidden ambitions and deaf antagonisms, as others
accuse it of being. But let it be a true community of faith and charity,
of prayer and action, of brothers and sons of the Pope, who do all to
serve him, with a sense of collaboration, in his duty to the brothers and
sons of the universal Church and all the world.

We know that our wish expresses yours, sincere and good, and that
it is this wish that hi us and in you makes prayer, so that our Lord
Christ, with the intercession of the most Holy Mary and the holy apos
tles Peter and Paul, will cause this old and ever new Roman Curia to
shine like a lantern "ut luceat omnibus qui in domo sunt in domo," that
is, in the Church of God!

Index

Africa, 135-37; Cardinal Mon-
tini's impressions of, 136-37;
Pope Paul on, 216
Agagianian, Cardinal, 176, 181
Ambrosian Social Institute, 106
Art: Cardinal Montini on, 133
Association of Catholic Italian

Workers, 107

Association of Catholic Univer
sity Graduates, 44
Association of Christian Workers

(ACLI),72

Atheism: Archbishop Montini on,
115-16

Bea, Cardinal, 175, 177

Benedict XV, Pope, 3, 4, 25-27,
48

Berlin, 56

Bishops, role of: Cardinal Mon
tini on, 162-63. See also Colle-
giality

Boston, 135

Brazil, 135

Brescia, city of, 1 ff

Budapest, 50-51

Bulgaria, 128

Canada: visit by Msgr. Montini,

74-75
Canon law, reform of: Pope Paul

on, 211

Canterbury, archbishop of, 160
Carroll, Msgr. Walter S., 75
Castro, Fidel, 160

Catholic Action, 3, 5, 33
Catholic Centre Party, 47
Catholic Electoral Union of Italy,

3,5

Catholic University of Milan, 108
Cesare Arici Institute, 11-14, 16,

18

Chicago, 75, 135
Christian Democratic Party, 5,

43, 73, 139
Christian unity: Cardinal Montini

on, 148; Pope Paul on, 225
Cicognani, Amleto Cardinal, 75,

128, 177,181,208,214
College of Cardinals, 127, 171 ff
Collegiality of bishops: Cardinal

Montini on, 144-45
Communism, 205, 226-29
Communist Party: in Italy, 73,

96; in Milan, 88, 96-98, 100-

101, 107,116
Concesio, village of, 1, 9, 10, 17,

106
Conclave after death of Pope

John XXIII, 159 ff
Congar, Yves, 132, 206
Coronation of Pope Paul VI, 198-

203; coronation speech, 201-

203

Cuba, 160
Cushing, Richard Cardinal, 128,

135, 175, 177, 186

Delp, Alfred, 59-60, 94
Democracy: Pope Paul on, 220-
221

235

236

APOSTLE FOR OUR TIME

Der Stellvertreter, 57-59; Cardi
nal Montini on, 61-64

Diplomacy, papal: Msgr. Mon
tini on, 29-32

Diplomatic corps, 81; addressed
by Msgr. Montini, 81-82

Eastern Europe, Church in, 71-72
Ecumenical Council. See Vatican

Council II
Education, Catholic: Archbishop

Montini on, 124-26
Eisenhower, President, 133-34
Englehard, Charles W., Jr., 199
Eucharistic Congress, Budapest,

50

Fascism, 4-5, 25, 27, 34-35, 38-

40, 73, 205

Fascist University Youth, 36, 40
Federation of Italian Catholic
University Students, 34-40, 42-
43; Cardinal Montini on, 43
Finkelstein, Rabbi Louis, 199
FIosFlorum, 181
Franco, Generalissimo, 54; Car
dinal Montini telegram to, 141
Free Federation of Labor, 108
Frings, Cardinal, 56, 178, 181
FUCI. See Federation of Italian
Catholic University Students

Hitler, 47, 56, 59
Hochhuth,Rolf,57ff
Hughes, Philip, 118

// Cittadino, 5-6, 41

Introduction to the Study of

Christ, 44
Ireland, 76
Italian Federation of Church

Schools, 124

Jewish refugees, 54-55

John XXIII, Pope, vii, 19, 52, 137,
141, 150, 224; and Vatican
Council, 141 ff; death of, 154 ff;
evaluation of reign of, 164 ff;
creation of cardinals by, 171-
175; Cardinal Montini on, 148-
149, 157-58, 161; Pope Paul on,
210

Johnson, Lyndon B., 161

Journalism: Pope Paul VI on, 7,
79-80

Journet, Charles, 132

Kennedy, President, 155, 197,

199, 222-23
Khrushchev, Nikita, 160, 180,

197
Konig, Franz Cardinal, 129, 174,

175, 177, 180, 228

Gaggia, Bishop Giacinto, 19-23
General Confederation of Work
ers, 107

Germany, 55-60
Ghana, 136

Greek Orthodox Church, 225-26
GUF. See Fascist University
Youth

Labor: Archbishop Montini on,
99-100. See also Workers

LaSapienza, 37-38

Lateran Treaty, 27, 39

Latin America: Pope Paul on,
217

Lercaro, Giacomo Cardinal, 116-
117, 178, 180-81

INDEX

237

Liceo Arnaldo da Brescia, 16, 18
Liturgical movement: Archbishop

Montini, 106
Lombard College, 24-25

Macchi, Msgr., 130, 136, 164,
213

Mclntyre, Cardinal, 186

Malachy of Armagh, papal proph
ecies of , 181-82

Management: Archbishop Mon
tini on, 103-104

Mann, Thomas, 35, 132

Mansfield, Senator Mike, 199

Marian Year, 1953, 74

Maritain, Jacques, 35, 132

Marxism: Archbishop Montini on,
97

Milan, ix, 8, 80, 86 ff; Great Mis
sion of , 11311

Mindszenty, Josef Cardinal, 71,
168, 227-28

Montini, Francesco, 8, 163, 208

Montini, Giorgio, father of Pope
Paul, viii, 2-10, 15, 17, 19, 21,
23,25,51,71,130

Montini, Giuditta Alghisi, mother
of Pope Paul, viii, 2, 8-10, 17,
19,23,71,130

Montini, Ludovico, 8, 40, 85,
163, 208

Montini, Vittorio, 9

Mooney, Cardinal, 75

Mussolini, 4, 25, 40, 47, 67

National Catholic Welfare Con
ference, 75

Nazism, 27, 57, 205

Negro Catholics, 75

New York City, 133, 135

New York Herald Tribune, 162,
165

New York Times, 75, 97-98, 163,

197

Nigeria, 135
Nixon, Richard, 222
Notre Dame University, 133-35;

citation of Cardinal Montini,

134-35
Nuclear test ban treaty: Pope

Paul on, 207

O'Hara, John Cardinal, 75, 128
Osborne, Sir D'Arcy, 57, 64
Osservatore Romano, 67, 109,

117, 133, 143, 155, 190, 198,

231
Ottaviani, Alfredo Cardinal, 159,

175, 177,189,194-95,201
Overseas College, Milan, 126

Pacelli, Cardinal Eugenio, 48-49,

50-51. See also Pius XJI
Peace: Cardinal Montini on, 157;

Pope Paul on, 21 1-12, 215
Persico, Father, 16-17
Pirelli factory, 103
Pius IX, Pope, 3
Pius X, Pope, 48
Pius XI, Pope, 27, 32-33, 36-41,

48,51-52,88,95
Pius XII, Pope, viii-ix, 49 ff, 65-

71, 76 ff, 85, 92, 120, 127, 132;

Cardinal Montini on, 61-64
Pizzardo, Giuseppe Cardinal, 28,

32,34,39,41,49
Pontifical Academy of Noble Ec
clesiastics, 28-32, 35
Pontifical Gregorian University, 4,

24,28
Pope, divine rights of: Cardinal

Montini on, 145
Priesthood: Archbishop Montini

on, 122

238

APOSTLE FOR OUR TIME

Priest-worker movement, 73, 139;
Cardinal Montini on, 73

Randall, Sir Alec, 48, 70
Reform of the Church: Cardinal

Montini on, 145-47
Rhodesia, 135
Ricketts, Cardinal, 175
Ritter, Cardinal, 75, 175, 186
Roman Question, 26-28, 36, 48
Roncalli, Angelo, 127. See John

xxin

Roosevelt, Franklin D., 65-67
Rugambwa, Cardinal, 172
Russian Orthodox Church, 161,
223-25

Saint Laurent, 75

Secretariat of State, 32, 41, 47 ff

Sesto San Giovanni, 94, 97, 104

Social Progress: Archbishop Mon
tini on, 105, 106

South Africa, 135

Spain, 213; Spanish Foreign Of
fice, 141

Spellman, Francis Cardinal, 72,
76, 135, 161, 178, 181

Stritch, Cardinal, 75

Suenens, Cardinal, 150-51, 175,
178, 180

Tardini, Cardinal, 65, 68, 78, 128,

142

Taylor, Myron, 65
Tisserant, Eugene Cardinal, 83,

159, 161, 168, 176, 189, 194,

209 ff
Trent, Council of, 118; Cardinal

Montini on, 145
Turkey, 128

United Nations, 160, 178; Pope

Paul on, 218-19

United States, 221-22; visit by
Msgr. Montini, 74; visits by
Cardinal Montini, 133, 161
University, the: Cardinal Mon
tini on, 134

University Conscience, A, 44
Urbani, Cardinal, 176, 181, 188
U Thant, visit to Pope Paul, 218-
220

Vatican Council, First, 162
Vatican Council II, 139 ff; Cardi
nal Montini on, 142 ff; Pope
Paul on, 210-11
Vatican Radio, 53, 117
Verolovecchia, 8, 10, 15, 17

Ward, Barbara, 166-67

Warren, Earl, 199

Warsaw, 32 ff

Way of Christ, The, 44

Washington, D. C, 75, 135

Women's Italian Center (CIF),

73
Workers: Archbishop Montini on,

94, 95, 96, 97, 98, 102-103,

106; Pope Paul on, 227. See

also Labor
World Conference on Faith and

Order, 224
Writing: Cardinal Montini on,

132-33
Wyszynski, Cardinal, 161, 177,

181,228

Youth: Archbishop Montini to,
117, 126

64

!i