Archbishop Rino Fisichella’s slim book I Met Paul VI (Gracewing) is not a personal memoir. Rather, it collects stories from those who knew Blessed Paul personally. Fisichella was the reporting judge in the Cause for Paul’s beatification, which took place in 2014. There are interesting glimpses of Paul’s personality from this book, but you have to search for them, which is made harder by the lack of an index. Footnotes and a bibliography would also have been helpful.
Nevertheless, the Archbishop writes with piety, affection and circumspection, anxious to show that that Paul VI was a holy man. Aware of the frequent criticisms of his subject, he occasionally sounds defensive, remarking at one point that Paul was not “a Hamlet figure, incapable of decision”.
