{"id":326744,"date":"2014-10-18T03:00:44","date_gmt":"2014-10-18T01:00:44","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.focolare.org\/paul-vi-the-pope-of-the-council\/"},"modified":"2024-05-16T14:58:15","modified_gmt":"2024-05-16T12:58:15","slug":"paul-vi-the-pope-of-the-council","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.focolare.org\/en\/paul-vi-the-pope-of-the-council\/","title":{"rendered":"Paul VI, the Pope of the Council"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"20141018-01\"“At 80 years of age and in the 15th year of his pontificate, Paul VI <\/b>may look back on his pontifical work, amid social and intellectual turmoil, as a rejuvenation process of the Catholic Church. \u00a0[\u2026] <\/b> Pope Montini has received the Second Vatican Council\u2019s message to ‘update’<\/b> itself<\/strong> in order to act against the frenzy of the \u201cdeath of God,\u201d \u201cirreligious Christianity,\u201d and archaic conservatism, a work that entails patience, foresight, courage, updating of the main pontifical institutes and the creation of new dicasteries and services, among which \u00a0are the “Iustitia et Pax” and “Pontifical council for the laity.\u201d These and other universal <\/b>organisations<\/b> <\/b>trigger a growing cooperation <\/b>of bishops and clergy, religious monks and nuns, and laymen and laywomen, in a sense of ecclesiastic renewal: which sprouts from a new communitarian spirit, and fruit of evangelical love which puts an end to individualism and religious classism, and unites the people in the parishes, and local and world institutions at the level of the Church and society in order to fulfill God\u2019s will on earth as in heaven. All of these remind us that the Christian follows God\u2019s will whether in prayer or at work. The Fathers of the Church considered the faithful in prayer, also when they carry out God\u2019s will in all their undertakings. This is why social action – service for the common good – if performed with one\u2019s mind turned towards our Father in heaven, acquires a characteristic and outcome of authentic religiosity. \u00a0Because of this, when speaking to a group of bishops from Cuba, Paul VI reminded them that the Church continually invites the faithful to be \u201cnew men\u201d in justice, truth, and charity, so that it can educate the social conscience of the faithful, favour active cooperation towards the good, teach them to overcome their own egoism and never resign themselves to being \u201cinferior citizens.\u201d This is the inspiration to stimulate a social reform, <\/b>the dawning of a \u201cnew world,\u201d that the young G. B. Montini had foreseen ever since those years when he worked for the Catholic paper of Brescia, “La Fionda,” where he advocated a free school of thought to counter the newborn fascism. With such perspectives, broadness of mind and modernity <\/b>which explain the development of Christian social movements, and which even non-religious sociologists acknowledge, the Pope reminded the Diplomatic Corps of the most audacious principles of equality regardless of origin or race, in the exercise of religious and civil rights and in condemning racism, torture and all violence towards political opponents. The Pope\u2019s interventions manifest that truth which even we, Catholics, forget: that is, that religion is life, that God is life [\u2026]. Love: central theme of the Holy Father\u2019s life and work<\/b>; the central themes of Christianity are the creation and redemption. He has with love, brought closer to the church, individuals and multitudes, separated churches and hostile states. And in the field of ecumenism, his activities in silence rather than acclaimed, have in fact led to the return of churches, for which we comprehend why Athenagoras <\/a>in a prophetic and familiar way, called him: Paul the second.\u201d (Excerpt of: Paul VI the Pope of the Council<\/i> by Igino Giordani, \u201cCitt\u00e0 Nuova,\u201d 10.7.1978, p. 26.)<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

We remember Giovanni Battista Montini, on the occasion of his beatification on 19 October, through an article which Igino Giordani, a long-time friend and confidante of Montini, wrote in 1978 with the typical language of those times, when ecumenism was making inroads.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":27,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"give_campaign_id":0,"_seopress_robots_primary_cat":"","_seopress_titles_title":"","_seopress_titles_desc":"","_seopress_robots_index":"","_seopress_analysis_target_kw":"","_et_pb_use_builder":"","_et_pb_old_content":"","_et_gb_content_width":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-326744","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-non-categorizzato"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.focolare.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/326744","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.focolare.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.focolare.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.focolare.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/27"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.focolare.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=326744"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.focolare.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/326744\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.focolare.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=326744"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.focolare.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=326744"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.focolare.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=326744"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}