Feast day: May 29
Pope St. Paul VI
The pope who brought the Second Vatican Council to its close and guided the Church through the upheavals that followed, a tireless traveler and advocate for the poor of the world.
Giovanni Battista Montini was born in 1897 near Brescia in northern Italy, the son of a journalist and politician, and spent most of his priesthood in the service of the Vatican's diplomacy and central administration, a thoughtful and somewhat reserved man of great culture and deep faith. Late in life he was made archbishop of Milan, Italy's largest diocese, where he labored among the workers and the poor of a great industrial city.
Elected pope in 1963, he took the name Paul VI and inherited an enormous task: the Second Vatican Council, which his predecessor John XXIII had begun. It fell to Paul to guide the council to its conclusion and then to carry out its sweeping renewal of the Church's worship, its relations with other Christians and other religions, and its engagement with the modern world — a delicate and often painful work of steering between those who wanted no change and those who wanted everything overturned.
He became the first pope in over a century and a half to leave Italy, and the most traveled pope up to his time, carrying the Gospel to the Holy Land, to India, to the Americas, to Africa and Asia, and in a historic appearance pleading for peace before the United Nations: 'No more war, war never again.' He worked tirelessly for the development of the world's poorest peoples and for justice as the foundation of peace.
In 1968 his encyclical 'Humanae Vitae,' reaffirming the Church's teaching on married love and the transmission of life, drew intense controversy, and his last decade was marked by suffering over the divisions and turmoil within the Church. He bore it with quiet faith until his death in 1978, and was canonized in 2018, honored as the pope who brought the great council to harbor.
He was the first pope in over a century to leave Italy, carrying his message to five continents and to the United Nations itself.
“If you want peace, work for justice.”
— Pope St. Paul VI
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