The Border-Crossing Pope

As a young priest, Fr Giovanni Montini was appointed to serve in the pope’s diplomatic mission in Poland.

One experience from that time that weighed on him heavily was what he considered to be an excessive nationalism, betrayed in the attitude which considered strangers as enemies.  People closed borders to wrap around themselves.

It was big relief to him when he was recalled to Rome. “This concludes this episode of my life, which has provided useful though not always joyful experiences,” he recorded.

Indeed, as response to the “suffocation” of isolationism, Giovanni Montini would later consecrate himself to opening frontiers.

In 1963 Cardinal Montini became Pope Paul VI, succeeding John XXIII who had convoked the Second Vatican Council but died shortly thereafter (Pope John featured in this series last month).

Paul VI presided over the council until its conclusion in December 1965. He also oversaw the implementation of the council’s resolutions until his death at 80 in August 1978.

He remained faithful and kept burning the torch of reconciliation and unity put aflame by John XXIII.

One monumental event of Paul VI’s pontificate was his meeting with the Orthodox ecumenical patriarch of Constantinople, Athenagoras I, in Jerusalem in 1964.

Pope Paul VI was the first pope in centuries to meet the heads of various Eastern Orthodox faiths. The meeting with Athenagoras, the “first among equals” in the Orthodox Church, bore fruit by annulling the mutual condemnations and the subsequent excommunications of the Great Schism of 1054.

Another fruit was the Catholic-Orthodox Joint Declaration of 1965, which was read out on December 7, 1965, simultaneously at a public meeting of the Second Vatican Council in Rome and at a special ceremony in Istanbul.

Although the schism did not end, it was a big step, a sign of willingness to take a new path of friendship and reconciliation. It opened the door to many other later forms of collaboration in pursuit for unity.

There was joy in the recognition of the many riches shared by the two churches: the faith and the sacraments. Thus, they could talk of Two Sister Churches fundamentally related, surpassing all the differences that may have arisen out of canonical, political and doctrinal variation that had precipitated the division.

In their declaration Paul VI and Athenagoras I regretted the offensive words, the reproaches and the gestures on both sides that accompanied the sad events of the schism. So they removed both from memory and from the midst of the Church the sentences of excommunication and committed these to oblivion.

Finally, they deplored all the subsequent events that led to a breakdown of mutual trust, and thus the break of communion between the two churches.

During his visit to Rome in 1967, Patriarch Athenagoras I recaptured the encounter in Jerusalem three years earlier in the wisdom of oriental poetical language, hailing Paul VI as one who brought “from the West to the East the kiss of love and peace”.

That 1964 meeting was so momentous that last year Pope Francis and the current patriarch of Constantinople, Bartholomew, met in Jerusalem to commemorate its 50th anniversary.

Pope Paul VI directed the gaze of reconciliation also to the Anglican Church. He became only the second pope to meet an Anglican archbishop of Canterbury, Dr Michael Ramsey, in 1966, following the visit of Archbishop Geoffrey Fisher to Pope John XXIII in 1960.

Paul VI was a good friend of the Anglican Church, which he described as “our beloved sister Church”. Along with Archbishop Ramsey, he encouraged the foundation of the Anglican Centre in Rome.

Pope Paul’s legacy is that of all the “Saints of Christian Unity”: to dare crossing the borders of division.

Next month, the final “Saint of Christian Unity” in this series will be Patriarch Athenagoras I.