St Paul VI
Giovanni Battista Montini (1897–1978) reigned as Pope Paul VI from 21 June 1963 until his death on 6 August 1978. The son of an Italian lawyer and journalist, he spent three decades in the Secretariat of State under Pius XII before being named Archbishop of Milan in 1954 and a cardinal in 1958. Cultivated, diplomatic, and famously hesitant — 'the Hamlet pope,' some called him — he was elected to succeed John XXIII in the very midst of the Second Vatican Council.
He presided over the Council's final three sessions and closed it on 8 December 1965, then gave the rest of his pontificate to carrying out its reforms. The greatest and most consequential of these was the wholesale revision of the Roman liturgy, which produced an entirely new Order of Mass in 1969. The same pope who promulgated that new rite also issued, against the whole tide of the age, the encyclical Humanae Vitae — so that his reign holds, in a single grip, both the act traditionalists most lament and the act they most admire.
His final decade was marked by suffering, dissent, and visible sorrow over a Church convulsed by the very renewal he had set in motion; in 1972 he spoke of 'the smoke of Satan' having entered the temple of God. He died at Castel Gandolfo on the Feast of the Transfiguration, 1978, and was canonized by Pope Francis on 14 October 2018.
Here is the hinge on which the whole traditional question turns. Whatever else is said of Giovanni Battista Montini — and much that is good can be said — it was under his hand and by his authority that the Roman Rite of fifteen centuries was set aside and a new Mass put in its place. The crisis the traditional Catholic laments begins here, at his signature.
What must be said in fairness is that he was not blind to the magnitude of it. In his own General Audiences of November 1969, preparing the faithful for the new rite, he spoke with startling candour. The change, he admitted, touched 'our hereditary religious patrimony, which seemed to enjoy the privilege of being untouchable and settled.' He confessed 'regret, reason almost for bewilderment,' and said plainly: 'We are giving up something of priceless worth.' He grieved aloud the loss of Latin and of 'that stupendous and incomparable artistic and spiritual thing, the Gregorian chant.' This was no man sleepwalking; he saw the treasure he was relinquishing and named it.
And at times he seems to have been genuinely shocked at what was done in his name. Louis Bouyer — his friend, a Consilium member, no traditionalist firebrand — left in his Memoirs the damning testimony that Annibale Bugnini played the pope and the commission against each other, telling each that the other had demanded the changes. When Bouyer finally protested to Paul VI directly, the pope could only answer, bewildered: 'But is it possible? He told me that you were unanimous in approving it.' Bouyer judged Bugnini 'a man as bereft of culture as he was of basic honesty' — and the pope had trusted him.
Nor did he lack for warning from above. The most senior guardian of the faith he had inherited, Cardinal Ottaviani, told him to his face — in writing — that the new Mass was 'a striking departure' from the doctrine of the Mass defined at Trent. Paul VI had every reason to pause, and every authority to halt it.
He did not. Whatever his private grief, his public act was endorsement: he signed Missale Romanum, fixed the date, imposed the new rite on the whole Latin Church, suppressed the old, and even swept away the minor orders. As Dr Peter Kwasniewski observes, in the whole drama of the reform it is Paul VI, not Bugnini, who 'comes off as the worst villain' — for the technician only ever had the authority the pope chose to give him. A man may regret a thing and still do it; and the doing is what governs the Church.
Cardinal Ratzinger, who would one day try to undo the damage, rendered the verdict most exactly: what should have grown like a living thing had been 'replaced — as in a manufacturing process — with a fabrication, a banal on-the-spot product.' That fabrication was promulgated by Paul VI.
We will not be ungenerous to him. He suffered for the Church, and he loved her; in Humanae Vitae he stood alone against the world and was right; he heard, before anyone, 'the smoke of Satan' entering the temple — and wept for it. But the verdict that concerns this page is rendered at the altar, and there the ledger is plain. He was handed an inheritance whole, and he gave a great part of it away. For all his anguish, Paul VI was no friend of Tradition. Requiescat in pace.