COMMENTARY: The famous phrase from Pope St. Paul VI is widely invoked in discussions about the Catholic Church. But what did he actually have in mind?

In recent weeks, as the Church marked the 60th anniversary of the close of the Second Vatican Council, a quotation from Pope St. Paul VI — “from some fissure the smoke of Satan has entered the temple of God” — began circulating widely online.

The line, drawn from a 1972 homily, is often taken as a frank admission that Vatican II was a big mistake — that in the years following the council, the Church had been subverted by evil forces bent on destroying her from within. In this reading, “the temple of God” refers to the Vatican; the “smoke of Satan” to corrupt or heretical clergymen; and the “fissure” (sometimes translated as “crack”) to the modernizing reforms of Vatican II.

But is this what Paul VI really said?

As with many such quotations circulating online, numerous versions of the passage appear with no reliable source cited or linked — an immediate red flag. Fortunately, the original (and brief) homily, delivered on June 29, 1972, is available on the Vatican’s website in Italian, and an English translation is available on Jimmy Akin’s website.

What do we find there? Not only that the “smoke of Satan” line has been pulled from its context — and in some cases, rearranged or stitched together inaccurately — but that Paul VI’s overall message runs largely opposite to its popular portrayal.

Here is the passage in question:

Referring to the situation of the Church today, the Holy Father affirms that he has a sense that ‘from some fissure the smoke of Satan has entered the temple of God.’

There is doubt, incertitude, problematic, disquiet, dissatisfaction, confrontation. There is no longer trust of the Church; they trust the first profane prophet who speaks in some journal or some social movement, and they run after him and ask him if he has the formula of true life. And we are not alert to the fact that we are already the owners and masters of the formula of true life.

Doubt has entered our consciences, and it entered by windows that should have been open to the light. Science exists to give us truths that do not separate from God, but make us seek him all the more and celebrate him with greater intensity; instead, science gives us criticism and doubt. Scientists are those who more thoughtfully and more painfully exert their minds. But they end up teaching us: ‘I don’t know, we don’t know, we cannot know.’

The school becomes the gymnasium of confusion and sometimes of absurd contradictions. Progress is celebrated, only so that it can then be demolished with revolutions that are more radical and more strange, so as to negate everything that has been achieved, and to come away as primitives after having so exalted the advances of the modern world.

This state of uncertainty even holds sway in the Church. There was the belief that after the Council there would be a day of sunshine for the history of the Church. Instead, it is the arrival of a day of clouds, of tempest, of darkness, of research, of uncertainty.

The first thing to note is that the text is presented as a third-person summary — “a rendering of the Homily of His Holiness,” as it says at the outset — with occasional direct quotations, including the “smoke of Satan” line. This was evidently a convention of the time. Thus, any presentation of the entire passage as Paul VI’s verbatim words, without qualification, therefore omits an important caveat.

But let’s assume that Paul VI said these words, or something very close to them. What did he mean?

The homily does offer a sober analysis of the postconciliar moment and a forthright warning of a diabolic attack upon the Church. All was not well in the early 1970s, as Paul VI makes clear. The devil was prowling about, “looking for someone to devour” (1 Peter 5:8), and modern secularism — marked by an overemphasis on doubt, scientism and social “progress” — plainly had a great deal to do with it.

But that’s where the accuracy of the popular reading ends.

By “the temple of God,” Paul VI clearly didn’t mean the Vatican. On the contrary, the overall theme of the homily leading up to this passage is “the Church” in the fullest sense — the “common priesthood” of all the faithful, called to “extend the sense of sacredness even to profane actions.” His overall warning is about a “desacralization” of Christianity in the world and disaffiliation of Christians from the Church — “all our brothers who are leaving us.”

And in speaking of the “smoke of Satan,” Paul VI wasn’t warning about heretical clergymen; instead, as we see in the passage above, his focus was on skepticism, scientism and progressivism. To the degree that bishops and priests promoted or enabled these errors, they are implicitly included in the Church’s crisis. But with respect to the teaching Church itself, Paul VI — in lines that are usually omitted from online quotations — urges greater trust, not suspicion.

This brings us, finally, to Vatican II. Was Paul VI acknowledging that the council was a huge blunder, and that the hoped-for springtime had led instead to a winter’s darkness? No. His concern isn’t with the council letting in smoke, but with smoke “suffocating” the council: “We believe in something that is preternatural that has come into the world,” he adds in the next paragraph, “precisely to disturb, to suffocate the fruits of the Ecumenical Council, and to impede the Church from breaking into the hymn of joy at having renewed in fullness its awareness of itself.”

An unexpected example of this “suffocation” appears just two lines later: “We preach ecumenism but we constantly separate ourselves from others. We seek to dig abysses instead of filling them in.” The temptation toward worldliness on the one hand and withdrawal from the world on the other, the Pope seems to suggest, are mutually reinforcing errors born of doubt. And the way out from the dilemma is to begin living out Vatican II — the authentic council, not a distorted “spirit of Vatican II” — trusting in God’s plans for it.

The “smoke of Satan” passage will no doubt continue to circulate in Catholic discourse online. But the source text, while dire in tone, is ultimately a summons: a call for the whole Church, “animated by the Holy Spirit,” to place its trust not in the world, but in the Word of God and the teachings of the Church — including Vatican II.

Anything else, one might say, is just blowing smoke.

This article was originally published by NCRegister.