Martin Luther King’s meeting with Paul VI. The Second Vatican Council and the message of non-violence

On 18 September 1964 Pope Paul VI received Martin Luther King and his fellow, Pastor Ralph Abernathy, in a private audience. The meeting, requested by King, should be considered in light of the transformation of the Catholic Church since the pontificate of John XXIII — marked by a profound ecumenical thrust, a condemnation of war and racial discrimination, and the opening of the Second Vatican Council.

In those months, the Council Fathers discussed the role of the Church in the contemporary world, in a reflection that would lead to the conciliar document Gaudium et spes; in the preparatory discussions, the Archbishop of Acra in India mentions King, along with Gandhi, as a model in the fight against all discrimination.

Four years later, indignation and grief at the news of the murder invested large parts of Catholic communities, particularly pacifist circles. Don Ernesto Balducci, who had edited the Italian edition of King’s sermons, remembers the Baptist preacher as “a pacifist who possessed the earth in the only way he deserved to possess it’ and forcefully invites the Catholic world to the non-violent option”.

On the Sunday following the murder, 7 April 1968, Paul VI mentioned the crime during his homily, associating it with the “tragic tale of the Passion of Christ” that the Palm Sunday liturgy celebrated. The Pope hoped that it might “take on the value of sacrifice; not hatred, not vengeance, not a new abyss between citizens of the same great and noble land become deeper, but a new common purpose of forgiveness, of peace, of reconciliation in the equality of free and just rights be imposed on the unjust discriminations and present struggles”.

King’s thinking emerged in Italian Catholic culture at least as early as the second half of the 1960s, when liberal, progressive and pacifist circles read and discussed the ideas of the Baptist pastor. One of the earliest reports of this interest dates back to January 1960, with an interview with King in the Comboni missionaries’ monthly magazine Nigrizia.

The publishing house SEI, one of the largest Italian Catholic publishers, founded by the Opera Salesiana, published La forza di amare (The Power to Love, 1963), with a preface by Don Ernesto Balducci, and Il fronte della coscienza (The Trumpet of Conscience, 1968). The small publisher La locusta, based in Vicenza, representative of the most advanced reformist and pacifist Catholicism, published King’s Letter from Birmingham Jail in 1965, alongside Letters to a White Liberal by Thomas Merton, a Trappist monk and American pacifist poet, and in 1968 Oltre il Vietnam (Beyond Vietnam), pairing it with Il dovere della rivoluzione (Sur le devoir de revolution) by Hervé Chaigne, a leading figure in French Catholicism in 1968.

Even among oriented magazines, there was a great deal of attention paid to King and the debate on non-violence. Settegiorni, a left-wing Christian Democrat weekly (1967-1974), closely followed the American anti-segregationist movement and dedicated an extensive special feature to King’s death, echoing the notes of hope of Giorgio La Pira, who hailed King as a new Moses who died before he could see the promised land to which he had led his people.