In the middle, he caught it from both sides

  Seven new exemplars were canonized last Sunday, but Oscar Romero was clearly the star of the event. That is not surprising. He has been a saint in El Salvador since his assassination in 1980. If bishop is murdered in his cathedral, it does signify. They still write books and plays about St. Thomas a Becket, who died at his altar in1170. Canterbury immediately became a pilgrimage site and inspired the first great (so English majors tell me) work of English literature.

 But one of the saints he upstaged was a pope of living memory, St. Paul VI. It could be argued that the lack of enthusiasm he arouses is because that memory lives. His pontificate from 1963 to 1978 pleased neither liberals nor conservatives.  He has few champions today. Well, politicians often say that if both sides disagree with them they must be doing something right.

  St. Paul’s pontificate was destined, or doomed, to be in a middle: Between Vatican II and its acceptance; between enthusiasts who wanted to go farther, faster and irreconcilables who didn’t want to go anywhere but back; between a pope who could light up a room and a pope who could suck all the air out of it.

 Still, he ought to get respect for playing the no-win hand he was dealt doing and not whining about it.

 Liberals didn’t like Humanae Vitae, the encyclical on birth control. I didn’t think then, and still don’t, that it answered the main question, which (simplified) was: Not all intercourse results in children. Procreation is the result of random acts of intercourse over a 28 to 30-day period. If a thermometer and calendar are permitted to disrupt the randomness, then why aren’t other means?

 In his encyclical the pope wrote an essay on the likely results of decoupling sex from commitment, and most of what he said there proved prescient. But he fudged the original question by invoking authority, and he did it in an era when “because I say so” gets, and deserves, instant rejection.

  That mistaken appeal to authority led the Church to strange mumbles – like Pope St. John Paul’s “theology of the body” -- when all the evils of unfettered sex St. Paul VI warned would come inevitably came. It tied the Church’s tongue while people do what the Church pretends they don’t.

 The pope deliberately (and advisedly I think in retrospect) staffed the Vatican congregations with a liberal head and a conservative Number Two, or vice versa, and hoped they would work out their differences with fraternal charity. One thing that resulted in was no “full speed ahead” for the reformers who had thought their work was finished when the Council voted.

 But any speed ahead was too fast for conservatives feeling the pain of their various losses from the Council. Some lost the Latin they labored to learn and learned to love. Others lost the instinctive and habitual anti-Semitism they grew up with. Some lost power when the laity read what the Council had written. And others found their workload growing.

 St. Paul presided over the creation of a Mass that was unlike the Mass that grew (slowly) out of the Council of Trent, and so – many Catholics seemed to think -- must have been the one Jesus, Mary and Joseph attended. Just for allowing in saecula saeculorum (which used to wake up the faithful) to be translated, the pope was in trouble, And that was only for starters among the unhappy.

 So, as I say, he had a busted flush in his hand when he sat down at the table. But he played the game for 15 tumultuous years.

 And he did write words I carried around in my wallet for years: “No one is justified in keeping for his exclusive use what he does not need, when others lack necessities.”

 That was in his encyclical On The Development of Peoples in 1967. St. Paul VI was a globalist before globalism was cool, and he remains worth reading now that globalism is under attack by people who do not believe that people of all nations should all be “united in … progress toward God,” but rather that  they and their tribe come first.