Pope Paul VI, who steered the Second Vatican Council to its conclusion and then drew out the meanings of its perspectives, died 20 years ago. How has his work stood up to the test of time and how far has it been followed by Pope John Paul II? A well-known Vatican observer in Rome gives his answer to those questions. BETWEEN the conclusion of the Second Vatican Council in the mid-Sixties and the death of Pope Paul VI on 6 August 1978, the Catholic Church underwent an evolution greater than had taken place in the previous century. For the first time since the Council of Trent, the Catholic Church was moulded by reform.

How are we to assess Paul's pontificate 20 years later? There remains a common thread with the papacy of John Paul II: the present Pope holds to the same project of living the Christian Gospel in a new way. But Paul VI's design and style were very different. Today, under John Paul II, there has been a return of a siege mentality, distrust even of the bishops' power to teach, and a tendency in the Roman Curia, which Paul VI had tried to reform, towards dogmatism, claims to infallibility and centralised government.

Nevertheless, there has been no undoing of the move by the Church from monologue to dialogue and discussion. This design of Paul VI remains valid. It was the way by which he gave a strategic framework to the sudden turnabout effected by John XXIII. No longer was the Church considered a society complete in itself: now it saw itself as a community scattered across history, operating in complex situations among men and women of different religions.

The virtue of Paul VI was undoubtedly that he accepted the complexity. He did not pretend that the Church could be made uniform by cramping it into dogmatic pigeonholes. For him, the transformations of civilisation and culture characteristic of modern times had a value which should be respected. So he believed deeply that there should be reconciliation between the Church and the contemporary age on the basis of a shared humanism. In this way traditional structures and doctrines become credible, as was shown in the success of his historic speech to the United Nations on 5 October 1965.

Yet one could already notice how this pope sensed the tragedy in Christianity's crisis. He was sometimes painfully conscious of how impossible it was to reform the Church in line with the most radical demands, in order to catch the complex new characteristics of a culture in the course of rapid change. Christian history could not be so profoundly revised. Probably influenced by the radical thinking of his old friend Jacques Maritain (who had supplied the theoretical basis for the new Christianity), Paul VI foresaw that the rapprochement between the Church and modernity which had galvanised the progressives of Vatican II would be inadequate in the long term. This accord would be unable to avert a disintegration of the Church. He feared the groups who believed that the time had come for a free and unrestricted announcing of the kingdom of God, as Christians became a minority scattered about the world, always less and less protected by the old political certainties.

The presentiment of this new time can be seen in particular in two documents from the latter part of Paul VI's pontificate, Octogesima Adveniens (1971) and Evangelii Nuntiandi (1975).

In the first, the Pope admits that in political and social matters it is difficult for us to pronounce a final word and to propose a universal solution. This was in some measure a declaration on the part of the supreme teaching authority that there was a limit to its own powers. It was now the Christian community as a whole that had to find concrete political and social solutions, and he accepted that believers were entitled to make their own political choices.

Paul VI's admission in Octogesima Adveniens showed that the Pope had abandoned any attempt to reconstruct Christendom as a complete, self-sufficient system for incorporating the Catholic presence in history. This was still clearer in Evangelii Nuntiandi. In it the Pope was true to the universal and dynamic meaning of his name, Paul: the Gospel was now to be announced within the framework of varied cultures. The Church's missionaries had to go beyond the boundaries of the Western synthesis of the Christian message. Till now European structures and culture had been normative for the Catholic Church. Now Christian identity was seeking to press beyond it, just as the earliest Christians had pressed beyond the Jewish framework of early Christianity in the time of St Paul.

In drawing up his encyclical Evangelii Nuntiandi in response to the concerns of the input of the synod of bishops on evangelisation, Montini did not hesitate to urge the Church to realise that the era when Christianity could be expressed in terms of a single Western culture was coming to an end. The classical framework of missionary activity had now to be extended. Christianity must no longer be presented within a Western structure of thought, but must dare once again to earth itself in cultures foreign to it.

This grand perspective had to contend with stiff opposition, and make headway against cultural resistance. It also ran into the secret, though not so veiled, efforts of Curial factions to restore the status quo. They went so far as to take advantage of the dissent proclaimed by Archbishop Marcel Lefebvre to cause difficulties to this unexpected coupling of pope and reform.

Pope Paul knew well how the Curia was thinking ? they were the same men who had been responsible for his exile to Milan in 1954. He was determined to wrench agreement to the reforms out of them. Even the Curia must be in favour of it, he announced one day, speaking about liturgical revision. Otherwise, as they say in Rome: one pope decides, another goes back on it. I shouldn't like everything to return to the status quo after me.

It was mainly this anxiety, some people thought, that made him confine the Vatican II movement of reform within a prudent, institutional framework, resisting other tendencies which were aiming at deeper levels of renewal. This led to a widespread feeling that his perspective lacked a clear line. His reforms seemed to move laboriously and painfully, though he left space even for a radical reinterpretation of the papal role, which the gradual development of ecumenical dialogue would make inevitable.

Paul VI's vision of a Church which no longer had a nostalgic longing to have a solution to everything, which had lost the illusion that by powerful competition with the world it could produce a powerful faith, has now given way once more to the image of a Church that does everything, that tries to carry the entire wounded world, like Atlas, on its shoulders. But the problems do not suddenly become soluble just because squares and stadiums are filled with cheering excited crowds.

So it would seem likely that the problematic questions which are at present censored by the church authorities will throw a dark shadow extending well beyond the areas that they are concerned with. That could lead to far greater disaffection than was produced by Paul VI's 1968 encyclical Humanae Vitae reaffirming the ban on contraception. Perhaps only the prospect of a new and truly ecumenical council being called at the dawn of the third millennium could mend the broken links of Christian freedom in the Church and allow the authentic pentecostal and universal spirit of Vatican II to escape from the stifling new interpretation of the revisionists.

IT may be true that the Council and the post-conciliar period ? largely the work of Paul VI ? did not succeed in developing an adequate relationship between tradition and the new, or producing a valid synthesis for Catholicism between memory and mission. Nevertheless, Paul VI's initiatives have had their effect. Even at the level of the highest institutional authority, we can find elements which are incompatible with the old perspectives, such as the primacy of God's word, the Church's self-definition of itself as communion and as a pilgrim journeying through human history, the dialogue between the Christian Churches, the opening up to the Jews, the prospect of dialogue between the great world religions.

There is now probably a greater diversity of methods and attitudes in Catholicism than ever before. Different forms and ways of living the same religious faith coexist in the Roman Church, and it seems likely that this variety will go on increasing. At present, however, the Roman Curia, as the Pope's mental and physical health declines, shows some signs of wanting to freeze Catholicism by imposing unified control.

A balance sheet of Paul VI's papacy will give credit to the space that he knew how to make for local churches and episcopates, will recognise the priority he gave to pastoral care rather than legal rights, and to the truth incarnate in Christ rather than to doctrinal formulae.

But perhaps the reform of the appointment of bishops over which he presided did not go far enough to prevent the centre manipulating the way they were chosen. This is one of the main defects of the contemporary Church and a major source of the crisis of authority.

Nor was his reform of the diplomatic service sufficient. He emphasised the pastoral duty of the nuncios, but the ambiguity of this structure, which continues to confuse the Church with a political power, remains. Paul VI took only the first steps: more in the same direction will be needed.

Let faith think was St Augustine's exhortation: it could be used as an epigraph for Paul VI's pontificate. Whenever contemporary Catholicism shows itself resistant to fundamentalist attacks, to the pressure of zealots with their cast-iron certainties, to the inventors of definitive truths stretching down to the second or third level, to extremists who hide behind a mask, and those unable to deal with the complexities of real life in the Church and in contemporary society, both of which are engaged in a huge cultural revolution ? then, in direct proportion, Paul VI's influence is felt.

At the end of the Seventies, the greatest success of the decade of reforming popes probably consisted in the check imposed on Catholic intransigence and the revised understanding of the ways the Church is present in society. In the wake of the Council, and in a relatively short time, Paul VI's Church had supplied a fairly effective reply to the question of secularisation. His aim was to provide new foundations for Christianity as Christendom faded away. His was a narrow way, attempting to bridge the gap between the Church and the world ? a gap which had been widened by the attempts of Pius XI and Pius XII to reconquer the world. He eschewed on the one side a theocratic political approach, on the other a defensive withdrawal into a private spirituality, such as appeared in the intransigent movements which held sway after him.

His narrow way involved some fundamental choices: a lay Christianity as the style of the Church, with the overcoming of residual confessional barriers, and charity as the guiding principle for political action by believers.

The difficulties Paul VI experienced in the task he had undertaken did not come only from the resistance to change within his own Church. They came also from the nature of the world with which he wanted to open up a dialogue. Having battled against modernity, how were Catholics now to discern its values? ? and modernity was in crisis. There were processes of violence, alienation and nihilism at work, producing a radical individualism in society.

The response of the Church, which Paul VI never failed to encourage, was to present itself as a critical force within society, having a spiritual discernment capable of exposing the world's idols (the nation, capital, the class system, the market, money). He never ceased to emphasise that Christianity, since it can point to the one thing that is necessary, liberates people in respect of every other value, so that they can test every system from the standpoint of the dignity of the human person and of freedom. For this reason Christianity is in solidarity with all those who have no lobby or protection to call on: the weak, the poor, the oppressed, those who suffer discrimination, unborn children. Paul VI strongly urged the synod of bishops on justice in the world, held in Rome in 1971, to confirm this social dimension as a constitutive dimension of the Gospel, thus responding in a positive and balanced way to the challenges of liberation theology, with its Latin American origins, and of revolutionary Catholicism.

The encyclical Populorum Progressio is still a valuable lesson in avoiding the mistakes of a Christian liberalism which bases itself on a theology of capitalism rather than on the traditional sources of the Church's social teaching. The inescapable social principle of Christianity is solidarity ? defined forever in the Gospel: I was hungry and you gave me food, I was thirsty and you gave me drink.

Paul VI's decisive legacy can be seen in the way that he broke down the frontiers of Christian solidarity so as to give them a worldwide dimension. This was highlighted by the first great journeys of a pope to Latin America, Asia and Africa. This legacy must not be forgotten, which is the failing of the conservatives.

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