 |
Author Tuohey has compiled a unique, scholarly, and clearly heartfelt biography of Pope Paul VI, who served the Catholic Church and humanity as pope from 1963 to his passing in 1978. Tuohey presents a concentration, in this first volume, on the man's slow rise to prominence and acceptance among his peers. There was some reluctance to choose him for the religion's highest office, and indeed one of the most esteemed global occupations, because as priest and later bishop, Montini (his surname from birth) had proved he was unafraid to speak frankly about international conflict, warfare, and the treatment of the lowly and the oppressed wherever found.
Although he developed chronic health problems as a child, he was highly educated, the son of an Italian lawyer and journalist who encouraged his son's persistence, which led him from college studies to Rome, where Montini was selected to work at the Vatican Secretariat of State. Montini's wide-ranging viewpoint expanded as political divergence afflicted Europe and Soviet states, and when, as an aide to Pope Pius XI, he observed the Vietnam conflict rapidly expanding into a much-disputed and vigorously protested war. After attaining his position, Montini recorded in his journal that the role "brings great solitude." Still, he toiled to reform Catholicism from within, in symbolism such as relinquishing his special tiara and in action, boldly visiting and addressing his faith's members on six continents. Much of his papacy was spent conferring with and sometimes confronting national leaders. He addressed the United Nations General Assembly in 1965, bringing his pacifist viewpoint to international light as he advocated "No more war, never again war." His international stance underpinned his wish that Catholicism might expand to tolerate even those of dissimilar rites and beliefs.
Tuohey brings an insider's perpective to his impressive work. As a Catholic oblate of Benedict with a PhD in religious studies, he has taught moral theology and served in official capacities as an advocate for ethical healthcare. The subject matter he effectively arrays in this volume of Pope Paul VI's life and efforts moves forward at times to provide an alluring look at what the second volume will include, always with the writer's purpose to ensure that his readers will learn and intellectually embrace the facts gathered here. This is a task Tuohey deftly performs.
Pope Paul VI assumed his title and carried out his duties in a manner that clearly established him as a pacifist. Tuohey successfully illustrates this point by emphasizing his subject's assertion that "an informed conscience" could not approve of weapons of mass destruction. The Pope was honored by a second invitation, in 1978, to join in a special session of the United Nations General Assembly Dedicated to Disarmament. Though he was aging and ill at the time, he wrote an address suggesting, as Tuohey styles it, that nations should "disarm and build new mechanisms to preserve the growing peace." Ever the realist and always outspoken, the pope's position was simple, yet profound: "If you want peace, make war irrational."
Throughout this undeniably glowing and timely work, Tuohey skillfully presents Pope Paul VI as a spiritual figure to be cherished. As skillfully propounded by the author in his narrative, Pope Paul VI was a brilliant philosopher whose words should be shared among all believers in the vital importance of peace, acceptance, and tolerance, particularly in light of current global upheavals.
RECOMMENDED by the US Review