Faith & Spirit Quote by Pope Paul VI

Pope Paul VI frames obedience as something far more ambitious than submission: an apex achievement of the mind. By calling “listening to God” the “supreme act” of reasoning and will, he refuses the modern caricature of faith as anti-intellectual or merely emotional. The line is engineered to sound almost paradoxical to a secular ear: the highest use of reason is to accept that reason has a rightful horizon, and the strongest exercise of will is to consent to a divine address rather than to self-authorship.

The subtext is Vatican II’s tense balancing act, with Paul VI trying to hold together a Church opening windows to modernity without throwing out its load-bearing walls. Postwar Europe was intoxicated with autonomy, ideology, and technocratic confidence; the Church, bruised by history and newly committed to dialogue, still needed to insist on revelation as something received, not manufactured. “Listening” becomes a strategic verb: it’s relational, not coercive; active, not passive. It suggests discernment, attention, interpretation - the very faculties the modern subject prides itself on.

There’s also a quiet polemic against both extremes inside Catholic life: against rationalism that treats God as an optional hypothesis, and against a piety that bypasses thought. Paul VI’s sentence makes docility sound like dignity. It’s a rhetorical reclamation: faith as the culmination of human agency, not its cancellation.