Pope Paul VI as Anti-Modernist?

Appreciating how the Holy Spirit works despite the weakness of His instruments

At this Substack, I have often published articles critical of Paul VI. Most recently, I posed the question: “Bugnini, Francis, Paul: Who’s Most Radical of Them All?” I have also publicly called into question the validity of Montini’s canonization. So, my publication of the following essay by my friend Fr. Thomas Crean, O.P., is by no means intended as a sort of “retraction” of my well-known views. But I desire to be scrupulously fair-minded, giving praise where praise is due and blame where blame is due; and from this vantage it must be said that Fr. Thomas brings forward material worthy of any Catholic’s consideration. —PAK

If one were to ask which of the twentieth-century popes was the staunchest ‘anti-modernist’, the most obvious answer would be Pius X. A three-fold cord is not quickly broken, says Ecclesiastes: and in his magisterial triplet Pascendi (an encyclical ‘against the errors of the modernists’), Lamentabili (a new ‘syllabus of errors’), and Sacrorum antistitum (better known as the ‘anti-modernist oath’), this pope gave the faithful a powerful arsenal for responding to the assaults of his time, and ours.

On the other hand, it seems unlikely that Paul VI would come at the top of anyone’s list of papal anti-modernists. Was he not the pope who suspended the obligation of swearing the anti-modernist oath, an obligation that had been binding on all office-holders within the Church for the preceding fifty years and more? Did he not preside, someone might ask, over the greatest dismantling of ecclesiastical traditions in the Church’s history? Was he not a disciple of Jacques Maritain, speaking as if the United Nations, rather than the social kingship of Christ, was the best hope for world peace?¹

We must distinguish. Temperamentally, it is only too clear that Giovanni Battista Montini was not an anti-modernist in the mould of Giuseppe Sarto. Hamish Fraser, a convert from practical Communism to ardent Catholicism, and founder of the journal Approaches, once remarked that while Paul VI was not a communist, he was nevertheless anti-anti-communist. That is to say, he instinctively disliked anti-communist rhetoric and activity. In the same way, we can say that although he was not a modernist, he was temperamentally anti-anti-modernist. His natural sympathies were for the scholar, not for the warrior, whether the warrior in arms or in words.

But this makes it all the more impressive, and a striking sign of the divine protection of the Church, that it was given to Pope Paul VI to issue several anti-modernist documents of prime importance.

First, however, we should explain what is meant by this slippery term, modernism.