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Paul VI began following the path blazed by John with his very first actions as Pope. He renamed John's old friend Amleto Cicognani as the Vatican's Secretary of State, and Monsignor Angelo Dell'Acqua as Substitute Secretary. The new Pope descended to the grotto beneath St. Peter's to pray by the side of his predecessor's tomb. And in the spirit of John's footloose ways, Paul VI left the Vatican the day after his election—to visit Spain's ailing primate, Enrique Cardinal Pla y Deniel.
Even more John-like in spirit was Pope Paul's first public address, delivered in Latin before the assembled cardinals in the Sistine Chapel. There he paid tribute to his predecessor and announced that his pontificate would be devoted to the completion of the great churchly tasks John began: the Vatican Council, the revision of canon law, "the prosecution of efforts, following the lines set by the great social encyclicals of our predecessors, for the consolidation of justice in civil, social and international life."
Paul VI promised to continue John's work for Christian unity: "The common aspiration to reintegrate the unity sorrowfully broken in the past will find in us an echo of fervent will and moving prayer." And he would work also for peace—"a peace which is not only an absence of warlike rivalries and armed factions, but a reflection of the order wished by the Lord, creator and redeemer, a constructive and strong will for understanding and brotherhood, a clear-cut expression of good will, a never-ceasing desire of active concord, inspired by the true well-being of mankind, an unaffected love."
Subtle & Strong. From his words and acts, it was clear that the new Pope had aperturismo—the sense of openness to the world. But Paul's aperturismo would not be John's. Angelo Roncalli was a warm and intuitive man, with a fatherly love of men rather than ideas. The new Pope, says one Spanish Catholic layman who has worked with him, "is a Gothic priest not only in physical appearance but in spiritual formation. He has a subtle intelligence and a strong hand." Subtle, strong-handed Pope Paul VI will unquestionably differ from John in his stand on the great questions that face his church:
∙THEOLOGY. No theologian himself, John XXIII had an open mind about the work of such forward-looking Catholic thinkers as Tubingen's Hans Küng and Innsbruck's Karl Rahner; in his encyclicals he tried to find a new, less austere language of teaching that would speak to modern man. Montini, trained in the ways of scholastic thought, is more conservative by temperament, yet also seems to be tolerant toward the new. Through Augustin Cardinal Bea, he notified Scriptural scholars at the Pontifical Biblical Institute and Gregorian University that there would be no more arbitrary monita (warnings) issued by conservative theologians at the Holy Office.