Will 2018 be the Year that Sees Pope Paul VI Canonized?

This announcement comes after the approval by the Congregation for the Causes of the Saints on February 6, 2018, of the recognition of a “miracle” attributed to the intercession of Giovanni Battista Montini.

On April 27, 2014, Pope Francis had already canonized Popes John XXIII (1958-1963) and John Paul II (1978-2005). On October 19 of that same year, at the conclusion of the Synod on the Family, he had beatified Paul VI.

On February 17, 2018, during a meeting with the clergy of Rome, he had confided that the canonization of Paul VI would take place during 2018: “Paul VI will be this year, the beatification of John Paul I is under way, and as for Benedict XVI and myself, we are on the waiting list,” he had joked at that time.

A Forced March of Canonizations

Through these canonizations of all these modern popes at a forced march, the general reform of the Church for the last fifty years is in a way being canonized and made irreversible, as it were. So they claim to strengthen the conciliar religion, in other words, the concept, spirit and practical of Catholicism as Vatican Council II redefined it through its destructive reforms of worship, faith and doctrine.

Once again this raises the question about the evolution of the procedures for beatification and canonization, and also about their utilization for purposes of ecclesiastical politics.

Abp. Marcel Lefebvre, who incurred a suspensio a divinis [was suspended from celebrating Mass and administering the sacraments] during the pontificate of Paul VI, had explained to the seminarians in Ecône the judgment that he passed on that Pope, during the conferences that he gave him about Acts of the Magisterium, which provide the material for his book They Have Uncrowned Him (Angelus Press, 1988). Chapter XXXI, “Paul VI, a liberal pope” allows us to know exactly what the founder of the Society of Saint Pius X might have said about the announcement of this upcoming “canonization.”

The pontificate of Pope Paul VI (1963-1978) will go down in history as the pontificate of Vatican Council II and of its application, which brought about the revolution in the Church. Among the chief reforms involved, let us mention the new Mass, the spirit and rite of which come dangerously close to the Protestant Lord’s Supper; a false ecumenism that ignores the true unity of the Church; general aggiornamento that abolishes the venerable traditions of the Orders and Congregations by calling priestly and religious life into question; the ongoing crisis of the Church, with the collapse of the faith, of vocations, and of the Catholic spirit in education, morality and religious practice in all its aspects, etc.

A tormented Pope, prey to doubt and uneasiness, Paul VI claimed at the 1976 Consistory to forbid the Mass of Saint Pius V and persecuted the legitimate reaction of Tradition, which opposed the conciliar revolution with twenty centuries of the life and teaching of the Church.