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the commission. He chose them to
represent a variety of theological
schools and tendencies in the church. In
1971 he restructured the 70-year-old
Pontifical Biblical Commission along
similar lines.
Among his early decisions to
provide wider access to ideas and to give
the church vehicles by which it could
make its teaching better known, Pope
Paul established in 1964 a secretariat to
deal with non-Christian religions. The
following year another secretariat was
established to open dialogue with
non-believers such as atheists and
Marxists. He also reconfirmed and
expanded the Secretariat for Promoting
Christian Unity, established by Pope
John to work actively toward the
reunion of Christendom.
In 1974 he added a commission for
Religious Relations with Judaism to the
Christian Unity Secretariat and a
Commission for Religious Relations
with Islam to the Secretariat for
Non-Christians.
In response both to the council and
to his own concern to provide a better
means of two-way dialogue between the
church and world at large, Pope Paul
established in 1967 the Council of the
Laity and the Commission for Justice
and Peace. In 1973 he established a
Committee for the Family to study the
spiritual, moral and social problems of
the family in terms of pastoral care. The
same year he also set up a temporary
study commission to examine the role
of women in society and the Church.
At the end of 1976 he restructured
the laity council, renaming it the
Pontifical Council for the Laity,
broadening its powers and prestige, and
placing the Committee for the Family
under it. At the same time he also
broadened the powers of the Justice and
Peace Commission.
The complete revision and reform
of the codes of canon law for both the
Latin and Eastern-Rite churches
received strong support and constant
encouragement from Pope Paul,
although neither of these extensive tasks
was finished during his pontificate. As
the postconciliar commissions carried
out their work, the pope strove to
solidify the results with new norms and
instructions.
In the latter years of his pontificate
Pope Paul was especially concerned with
putting into order and codifying all the
best results of the council. He
repeatedly spoke of the need to
transform the church’s laws and
regulations into a service tool to
promote the spiritual and community
life of Catholics.
Of all the conciliar changes, those
in the liturgy were among the most
important and most immediately
evident to Catholics.
Latin as the universal language of
the church disappeared from its liturgy
almost entirely in practice — a
development that Pope Paul himself
publicly regretted. Not surprisingly,
since the church has always held that
the Mass and sacraments are at the heart
of Catholic life, opposition to liturgical
changes became a rallying point -for
Catholic traditionalists who opposed
much of what the Second Vatican
Council stood for. On the other hand,
unauthorized liturgical experiments
often were a vehicle of expression for
those who felt conciliar change had
gone fast enough or far enough.
A recurring theme in Paul’s
pontificate was his often-repeated plea
to both sides not to turn the Eucharist,
the sacrament of unity, into a sign of
discord.
Even while overseeing the council
and the massive reforms that followed,
Pope Paul set another major precedent
by becoming the first pontiff to travel
around the world while in office.
Describing himself as a “pilgrim pope,” :
during his pontificate he visited every
continent except Antarctica.
His first trip was to the Holy Land
in 1964 to pray at the shrines made
venerable by the life and death of
Christ. There he established an
ecumenical breakthrough by meeting
with Greek Orthodox Patriarch
Athenagoras I of Constantinople on
ground revered by two Chrisian
churches.
* Later trips took the pope to India
in 1964, to the United Nations in New
York in 1965, to Portugal and Turkey
in 1967, to Colombia in 1968, and in
1969 to Switzerland and Uganda.
The series of papal visits outside
Italy culminated with a 10-day trip to
Asia, the Pacific islands and Australia in
1970.
On his pilgrimages the pope visited
with thousands of people of every
religion, race and social stratum. No
pope in history had traveled farther or
more often than Pope Paul VI.
He caught the world by surprise
when he announced his Holy Land
pilgrimage on the closing day of the
council’s second session.
Basing himself in the apostolic
delegation in Jerusalem, then Jordanian
territory, the pope crossed into Israel to
visit Nazareth, the Sea of Galilee, Mount
Tabor and the Mount of the Beatitudes.
On the night of Jan. 5, 1964, the
PAGE 3—The Georgia Bulletin, August 9,1978
WELCOME IN AMERICA - Pope Paul VI waves
to noontime crowds from the steps of St. Patrick’s
Cathedral in New York City. Onlookers were not only
at street level, but cheered from windows in
Rockefeller Center buildings across Fifth Avenue. The
pontiff spent 14 hours in the city on that day, Oct. 4,
1965. The main purpose of his visit was to plead for
peace at the United Nations. (NC Photo)
pope and Patriarch Athenagoras met
face-to-face at the apostolic delegation,
wrapped their arms around each other
in an emotion-filled embrace, and
exchanged the kiss of peace.
In December of the same year,
Pope Paul flew to Bombay, India, as a
“pilgrim of peace, of joy, of serenity
and love” to take part in the 38th
International Eucharistic Congress. For
four days the pope, then 67, visited
with the people of India — rich people,
poor people, old people, statesmen and
religious leaders, Catholics, Protestants,
Jews, Orthodox, Hindus and Buddhists.
On returning to Rome, Pope Paul
indicated that more trips were in store.
“We must accustom ourselves better to
know, respect and love others,” he said.
His next trip was among the most
dramatic of his reign. On Oct. 4, 1965,
the pope flew for a one-day visit to New
York and the United Nations. Sitting in
a simple armchair before the
representatives of 117 nations of the
U.N. 20th General Assembly, Pope Paul
pleaded for peace.
“No more war,” he exclaimed.
“War never again ... If you wish to be
brothers, let the arms fall from your
hands. One cannot love while holding
offensive arms.”
Foreshadowing his controversial
1968 encyclical, “Humanae Vitae”
(“On Human Life”), which forbade the
use by Catholics of artificial means of
birth control, the pope also told the
United Nations flatly:
“Respect for life, even with regard
to the great problem of birth, must find
your assembly its highest affirmation
and its most reasoned defense. You
must strive to multiply bread so that it
suffices for the tables of mankind, and
not rather favor an artifical control of
birth, which would be irrational, in
order to diminish the number of guests
at the banquet of life.”
During his stay in New York, Pope
Paul visited with President Lyndon B.
Johnson, prayed in St. Patrick’s
Cathedral, visited the papal pavilion at
the World’s Fair, and celebrated Mass in
Yankee Stadium, all in one day before
flying directly back to Rome.
The pope let a year and a half
elapse before his next pilgrimage. On
May 13, 1967, he made a one-day visit
to Fatima, Portugal, on the 50th
anniversary of the apparition of the
Blessed Virgin there.
In that same year, 1967, the pope
went to Turkey in July. There he visited
ancient Christian shrines and prayed
with Moslems as well as with Catholics
and other Christians.
But it was his second meeting with
Patriarch Athenagoras there that
highlighted the trip, bringing into sharp
focus the distant but desired goal of
Christian unity.
“Charity enables us to acquire a
better awareness of the very depths of
our unity,” the pope said on that
occasion. “At the same time, it makes
us suffer more painfully the present
impossibility of seeing this unity expand
into concelebration. And it spurs us on
to do everything possible to hasten the
advent of that day of the Lord.”
In June, 1968, Pope Paul became
the first pope to visit Latin America.
For three days he was on hand at
Bogota, Colombia for the ceremonies
and meetings of the 39th International
Eucharistic Congress.
At a rally in nearby San Jose he
told tens of thousands of poor farmers,
“We will continue to denouce unjust
economic inequalities between rich and
poor and abuses of authority and
administration against you and the
community. We will continue to
encourage the designs and programs of
the responsible authorities and of the
international organizations, as also those
of the prosperous nations, in favor of
the developing peoples.”
Perhaps the most controversial trip
of the pope’s reign was his one-day visit
to Geneva, Switzerland, headquarters of
the World Council of Churches. The
pope flew into Geneva on June 10,
1969, and addressed the International
Labor Organization and the staff of the
council, headed by its American-born
general secretary, the Rev. Dr. Eugene
Carson Blake.
To the labor organization Pope Paul
repeated papal teachings on the
relations of man to work:
“In labor, it is man who comes
first,” Pope Paul said. “Never again will
work be superior to the worker. Never
again will work be against the worker,
but always work will be for the worker.
Work will be in the service of man, of
every man and of all men.”
To the World Council of Churches
leaders Pope Paul proclaimed, with a
directness characteristic of his speeches
on ecumenism, “I am Peter.”
On the question of Catholic
membership in the council, which
remained unresolved at the time of his
death, the pope told the assembled
religious leaders:
“In fraternal frankness, we do not
consider that the question of
membership of the Catholic Church in
the world council is so mature that a
positive answer could or should be
given.”
The question, he added, “contains
serious theological and pastoral
implications. It thus requires a profound
study and commits us to a way that
honesty recognizes could be long and
difficult.”
Later that year, to the sound of
African drums and antelope horns, Pope
Paul arrived in Kampala, Uganda. The
purpose of his three-day visit there, July
31 - Aug. 2, 1968, was to pray at the
shrines dedicated to the 22 Catholic
African martyrs whom he had
canonized in 1964 and the 23
Protestant martyrs who had been killed
at the same time.
Speaking to the Ugandan
Parliament, Pope Paul rejected all forms
of racism and discrimination, saying,
“Such situations constitute a manifest
and inadmissible affront to the
fundamental rights of the human person
and to the laws of civilized living.”
The last — and most ambitious,
time-consuming and exhausting — of all
Pope Paul’s trips outside of Italy was
taken in 1970, when he was 73 years
old. From Nov. 26 to Dec. 4, the
pontiff traveled to Teheran, Iran; Dacca,
East Pakistan; Manila, the Philippines;
the islands of American Samoa and
Western Samoa in the Pacific; Sydney,
Australia; Djakarta, Indonesia; Hong
Kong; and Colombo, Ceylon now Sri
Lanka.
An attempt on his life as he
debarked at Manila’s airport threw a
brief shadow over the trip, but
otherwise it was probably the most
successful and varied of his entire reign.
To literally millions of Christians,
Moslems, Buddhists, Hindus and
Confucianists, Pope Paul was the pilgrim
pope from Rome.
In the Philippines he addressed
himself to the serious imbalance of rich
and poor in a country where 10 percent
of the people control 90 percent of the
wealth. In Sydney, while praising
Australia’s dynamism, he warned
Australians to be sure that “a desire for
material goods must neither harden our
hearts nor make us underrate spiritual
values.” He also risked their displeasure
by chiding them about restrictive
BREAKING NEW GROUND -- An embrace ends
centuries of separation as Orthodox Patriarch
Athenagoras and Pope Paul VI meet in the Holy Land
in 1964. Not only the Pope’s ecumenical encounters,
but also his travels to far distant lands broke new
ground for his office. (NC Photo)
extremely adaptable and open to new
approaches and ideas on the political
scene. Like Pius XII, who was immersed
in the Vatican diplomatic world, Pope
Paul used to the utmost his office as
head of the church to work for peace
and progress through diplomatic action.
He instituted the annual observance
of a World Day of Peace on New Year’s
Day as a means of addressing a message
of peace to all the world’s political
leaders. In trouble spots such as Nigeria,
the Dominican Republic, Northern
Ireland and the Middle East, the pope,
through his representatives, was
constantly at work to ease tensions and
calm passions.
Throughout the war in Vietnam,
Pope Paul was careful not to take sides
but worked continuously to bring the
conflicting parties to the peace table. He
sent appeals to Hanoi, Saigon, Peking,
Washington and Moscow through
various diplomatic means and at one
time (1966) even used the future
secretary of the Italian Communist
Party, Enrico Beriinguer, to try to make
contact directly with the leaders of
North Vietnam.
Furthering his sphere of influence
in the work of peace, the pope
resurrected the diplomatic rank of
special envoy, a category which had
been allowed to lapse after World War
II. As a result U.S. Ambassador Henry
Cabot Lodge, special presidential envoy,
visited the Vatican and the pope
regularly beginning in mid-1970. He was
replaced in 1977 by David Walters as
special envoy.
Since his election, Pope Paul has
received many of the top leaders of the
world. President John Kennedy visited
him in 1963, President Lyndon Johnson
in 1967, President Richard Nixon in
1969 and again in 1970, and President
Gerald Ford in 1975. After President
Jimmy Carter’s inauguration in 1977, he
immediately dispatched Vice President
Walter Mondale on a European
diplomatic trip that included a visit with
Pope Paul.
Among other heads of state who
visited the pope were King Juan Carlos
and Queen Sophia of Spain, who in
1977 became the first Spanish heads of
state to visit the Vatican in more than
50 years.
In 1967 President Nikolai Podgomy
became the first head of Soviet Russia
to visit the Vatican. Other Communist
leaders followed, including Yugoslavia’s
Marshal Tito in 1971 and Romania’s
President Nicolas Ceausescu in 1973.
Visits from heads of Communist
states would have been unthinkable at
the end of World War II. The stem,
implacable stand against the
Communists which characterized the
reign of Pius XII began to dissolve only
during John XXIII’s time.
Under Pope Paul the Vatican
worked constantly to reduce tension
between the church and the Eastern
European Communist states. As a result
diplomatic relations were resumed once
again with Yugoslavia, and negotiations
with Poland, Czechoslovakia and
Hungary permitted new appointments
of bishops and some improvement in
the religious life of Catholics in these
countries.
Pope Paul also made special efforts
to establish diplomatic relations with a
large number of countries with whom
no diplomatic ties existed. In his
pontificate he achieved this goal with
more than 40 countries, many of them
in Africa.
In another effort to modernize
church-state relations in accord with
council teachings and with current
political realities, he agreed to
significant revisions of the Vatican’s
concordat with Spain and initiated
efforts to revise the concordat with
Italy.
(Continued on next page)
IN 1966 he took one in a series of personal
ecumenical steps by greeting the Archbishop of
Canterbury, Dr. Michael Ramsey, in the Sistine Chapel.
(NC Photo)
In defending his decision to the
bishops, the pope said: “It is not a blind
race toward overpopulation. It does not
diminish the responsibility or the liberty
of husband and wife and does not
forbid them a moral and reasonable
limitation of birth. It does not hinder
any lawful therapy or the progress of
scientific research . . .
“It is ultimately a defense of life,
the gift of God, the glory of the family,
the strength of the people.”
Pope Paul rarely referred directly to
the encyclical in subsequent years, but a
decade later, in an address to the
College of Cardinals in June, 1978, he
declared that it was “a painful
document of our pontificate, not only
because the issue was serious and
delicate, but also - and perhaps even
more important - because there was a
certain climate of expectancy” that the
encyclical would relax traditional
church teaching.
But he insisted to the cardinals that
his decision had been the right one and
that it had been confirmed by “the
more serious scientific studies” since
then.
Uncompromising on doctrinal
matters, Pope Paul showed himself to be
immigration policies saying, “Do not
close your limited circle for the sake of
selfish satisfaction.”
At Hong Kong on the doorstep of
Communist China, the pope sidestepped
political questions to send a message of
good will and Christian love to the 700
million Chinese people when he
declared, “While we are saying these
simple and sublime words, we have
around us — we almost feel it — all the
Chinese people wherever they may be.”
The dominant chord of this journey
was the pope’s desire to stress the
missionary role of the universal church.
Summing up his 10-day trip, Pope
Paul said it proved “the church is made
for the world, the world of today.”
The summary could apply to the
entire chain of global visits in the first
seven years of his pontificate. There is
an old saying in Rome which goes,
“Where Peter is, the church is.” But
through his trips around the world,
Pope Paul effectively reversed the
saying, making it equally true to say,
“Where the church is, Peter is.”
In his pontificate Pope Paul issued
seven encyclicals, of which the last three
were considered major statements that
characterized his reign and thought.
These were “Populorum Progressio”
(“The Progress of Peoples”), March 26,
1967; “Sacerdotalis Caelibatus”
(“Priestly Celibacy”), June 24, 1967;
and “Humanae Vitae” (“On Human
Life”), July 25, 1968.
In “Populorum Progressio,” Pope
Paul appealed to the rich countries of
the world to take “concrete action” to
foster man’s development and the
development of all mankind to combat
the growing imbalances between richer
and poorer nations.
The 13,000-word document, which
expressed Pope Paul’s social and
economic thought, built on and
expanded the social teachings of popes
from Leo XIII to John XXIII.
The encyclical calls for spiritual and
cultural as well as economic
development of poorer nations.
Excessive economic, social and
cultural inequalities among peoples
arouse tensions and conflicts and are a
danger to peace...” the encyclical
said. “To wage war on misery and to
struggle against injustice is to promote,
along with improved conditions, the
human and spiritual progress of all men,
and therefore the common good of
humanity. Peace cannot be limited to a
mere absence of war, the result of an
ever precarious balance of forces.”
Fully aware of the trend toward
violence and revolution as a means of
overthrowing tyrannies and politically
repressive states, Pope Paul warned that
revolution “produces new injustices,
throws more elements out of balance
and brings on new disasters.”
But the key to his economic
thinking, developed in many speeches
and letters during his reign was in his
statement in the encyclical,
“Superfluous wealth of rich countries
should be placed at the service of poor
nations, and this can only be done by
concerted planning.”
In June 1967, the pope published
his encyclical reaffirming the church’s
traditional teaching on the need for
priestly celibacy. In the 12,000-word
encyclical “Sacerdotalis Caelibatus,” the
pope described priestly celibacy as a
“heavy and sweet burden” and as a
“total gift” of the priest to God and to
his church. He confirmed the strict
observance of priestly celibacy
throughout the Western church.
Priestly celibacy was also a major
topic of the third Synod of Bishops
during the October-November, 1971,
meeting. It was debated freely with the
result that at the end of the meeting,
participants in the synod voted 168 - 10
to keep “the law of priestly celibacy
which exists in the Latin church as it
stands.”
In his seventh encyclical,
“Humanae Vitae,” Pope Paul
condemned abortion, sterilization and
artificial birth control. The encyclical,
published in July, 1968, brought a wave
of criticism, particularly for the papal
stand against artificial birth control. The
criticism was intensified because the
Pope himself reportedly set aside the
majority opinion of a special theological
commission he had convoked to study
the issue.
Pope Paul admitted that he had
been deeply anguished by the reaction
which he knew would greet his teaching
approving responsible parenthood but
ruling out artificial contraception. A
year later in Bogota, the pope told the
assembled Latin American bishops that
his encyclical was “ultimately a defense
of life.”