Pope Paul VI - Mysticism and Modernity

Vatican City, 06 August 2013: Paul VI was a mystic who said “as if dazzled by the sun, I close my eyes before the infinite mystery of the Most Holy Trinity, and in my heart retain only the impression of oceanic bliss”. It was mentioned in an article that was reproduced by Vatican’s newspaper Osservatore Romano on the 35^th anniversary of the death of Pope Paul VI, which fell on Tuesday.
The coronation of a pope took place for the last time in the history of the Catholic Church on 30 June 1963. Paul VI, elected on 21 June, received the tiara offered to him by his Milanese faithful. The key to reading the pontificate of Montini – well prepared for it by about 30 years of work in the Roman Curia and by the nine years spent at the helm of the largest Catholic diocese in the world, Milan – is perhaps above all to be sought in its mystical dimension, the article noted.

Love for the Church which constituted the unifying factor of his life – as he himself recognized: “it seems to me that I have lived for her and for her alone” – posited two requirements: the renewal or reform of the Church, and the personal conversion of her members. The possibility of the first requirement depends on the second. The Church’s possibility of showing herself as “Christ wishes her to be: one, holy, totally oriented to the perfection to which he called her, to attain which he endows her with the means”, would derive from the personal commitment to following Christ and from the spiritual and moral energy that this demands.

Two bastions of Pope Paul VI’s pontificate result from the authenticity of this process of conversion, on which he expounded in his programmatic Encyclical Ecclesiam Suam. They are the dialogue with the world of life and of salvation, and the restoration of full Christian unity.

For Paul VI a Church which lives her mystery more deeply, in the very impulse of the love that unites her with her Lord, can give herself to the world to put it vitally in touch with the Gospel. “The Church must enter into dialogue with the world in which she lives. Let the Church become a word; let her become a message; the Church should make herself conversation”. In this link of trust, evangelization, enlivened by total fidelity to Christ, can be received by the contemporary mind set. In fact “no one is a foreigner in the heart of the Church. No one is indifferent to her ministry”.

In this movement of inner renewal which makes the Church a more readable sign of God’s presence and action, Paul VI has a keen sense of the need for the unity of Christ’s disciples. His pontificate was entirely and especially engaged in the search for full communion with the Orthodox Churches. Purification of the Church and of her members, spiritual tension in evangelization, humility and dialogue with the world, a new ecclesiological approach – the ecclesiology of the Sister Churches – which makes it possible to envisage full communion between the Church of the West and the Churches of the East: aren’t these major poles of Montini’s pontificate echoed in the words and approaches of Pope Francis? Paul VI’s intuitions are still truly up to date. Source: Oss. Rom