The exceptional witness of Saint Pope Paul VI: Homily for Thursday, May 29, 2025

Today is an optional memorial of Saint Pope Paul VI. He was an exceptional witness to the need for unity after the Second Vatican Council and in the tumultuous period of the 1960s. Readings for Today.

The exceptional witness of Saint Pope Paul VI

So when I visited the Vatican, when I was in Rome for one of my doctoral classes, and went to St. Peter’s, like many, it’s just an overwhelming experience. This beautiful, beautiful church and just everything about it. The Vatican, the courtyard, and I remember it struck me as I was in the courtyard before I went in, just how universal the church is. Just how international the church is.

I remember John Allen, who was writing about his experience because he used to work for the National Catholic Reporter and some of the people he worked with were noticing that he was becoming more conservative, shall we say. And he said, “Well, I’m seeing the church from a different position.” And he began to realize that our interpretation of the church here in the United States is not the interpretation of the church in much of the rest of the world. In fact, much of the rest of the world, it’s quite different.

When I went in, I took in all of the things and looked and so forth, and then wanted to see the tombs of the Pope, of the Popes. So this is a good experience. I think they should have hired me to help them with signage. Because there was one sign that said “The Tomb of the Popes,” but the entryway to the Tomb of the Popes is not much of anything at all. And I looked and looked and saw the sign and wandered around.

And the staff, they only spoke Italian. I found some elderly staff that I thought might speak French because that used to be the predominant second language in Italy. And I did find that, well, eventually I got there. And then I got to the tomb of Pope Paul VI.

I’ve heard other people since this, my experience, describe a similar experience in praying before the tomb of Pope Paul VI. I don’t even know why, but I became very emotional. I started to cry. I’m not sure why, but I’ve heard any number of other priests who have had similar experiences at the tomb of Pope Paul VI. And it caused me to think about his time as Pope, that experience there.

Because he had one heck of a job. We tend to believe a popular narrative that John XXIII woke up one day and said, “Hey, let’s have a council,” like it was a spur-of-the-moment decision. That is completely historically inaccurate. If you want to know why the document on the liturgy was first, it was largely because it was already written before the Second Vatican Council.

We can think that so many of the changes that we experienced in the world, we can falsely assume that it was the result of the council, that people lost their faith because of the Second Vatican Council or stopped practicing. But popes before John XXIII really acknowledged the challenge of belief. People did external things, but it didn’t appear that their hearts were deeply changed by the experience of their faith.

Paul VI then comes along with these changes that had been in the works for decades and has to kind of keep the church together. It strikes me that Pope Leo picks up on this same theme that was part of Pope Paul VI’s life. It was about unity. And it was a different age in terms of the press, and so most of the world did not realize that there had been an assassination attempt on Pope Paul VI. He was stabbed in Manila.

He had to navigate the implementation of the council. And every major church council has a pretty messy implementation. And he had to keep the church together. And he did it really, I think, as well as could be expected.

The ’60s were a very turbulent time in the world. And so it wasn’t that the council in the early to mid ’60s brought about all this turbulence, but that the world itself was turbulent. If you think of this country, for example, we had the assassination of John Kennedy. We had the assassination of his brother. We had major riots. We had protests against the Vietnam War. And in 1968, we had terrible carnage in America because of that war.

And in the midst of this, Pope Paul VI had to help us all to recognize that God was still active in the world, that we were still disciples of Jesus. He wrote about evangelization, about the sharing of the message that we needed to share with others, that we needed to be evangelized, and in fact, that others needed to be evangelized with.

Secondly, he accurately predicted, I think, in probably his most controversial encyclical, the damaging effects of the sexual revolution. He was a prophet in that sense. He was one who saw that this would lead to not such pleasant things. By the way, if you haven’t read Humanae Vitae, I would suggest that you do.

Unfortunately, because of the controversy, all the attention was focused on really essentially a small section of the encyclical. What’s really beautiful about the encyclical is this reflection on what it means to love as human beings and how we live that.

In many ways, Pope Paul VI’s choice of the name Paul is because Paul had very much the same considerations in his age. He was preaching that Jesus was the Messiah. He was preaching it to the Jews. For Paul, when he had his great moment of conversion, it became clear to him that this was the fulfillment of the Jewish religion. That this was what everything was pointing to in the Jewish religion.

And he tried to convince other Jews of this truth, and we know that it didn’t always go so well. It was hard for Paul to preach the need for unity. First of all, to the Jews, preaching that Jesus was the Christ and therefore people should place their faith in Jesus. Then unity that was needed when the Gentiles began to receive the Holy Spirit, just like the Jews.

He needed to kind of hold the early church together by his witness and by his example and by his experiences. It’s easy to be disunited. It’s easy to insist that our view of anything is the only view. It’s easy for us to really be so convinced that we’re right that we don’t understand that there might be a different perspective. Another experience of God.

That in some ways we’re no different than the early Jews that Paul preached to because we’re so convicted in our own correct interpretation of everything. Today, through the intercession of Pope Paul VI, let us ask him to help us to be a church of unity and to pour abundant blessings upon Pope Leo, who has articulated the need for unity in his own pontificate.

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