Saint Paul VI

Giovanni Battista Montini was born in Concesio, at the mouth of the Val Trompia, on September 26, 1897. His father Giorgio was a lawyer, a journalist and a member of parliament for the Popular Party; his mother Giuditta came from the minor rural nobility of the Brescia area. He was the second of three brothers. He was ordained a priest in 1920 and soon joined the Secretariat of State, where he stayed thirty years. In his university years he was chaplain to FUCI, the Catholic university students’ federation, and he formed a generation of Catholics who would go on to build the Republic. In 1954 Pius XII sent him to Milan as archbishop: he went to be the bishop of a working-class city, and spent eight years among the factories and the outskirts. They called him the workers’ archbishop. He was elected pope on June 21, 1963, with the Council already under way and his predecessor dead. It fell to him to see it through — which was anything but a given — and then to put it into practice, which was harder still. He did things no pope had ever done: he went to the Holy Land and embraced Patriarch Athenagoras, effectively ending nine centuries of excommunication between Rome and Constantinople; he spoke at the UN, saying “never again war”; he gave up the tiara and sold it for the poor; he wrote Populorum progressio, on the development of peoples. He was also the pope of Humanae vitae, which brought him a hostility he carried with him to the end. He died at Castel Gandolfo on August 6, 1978. Francis proclaimed him a saint in 2018. If your name is Paul, today is your name day — though many wait for the twenty-ninth of June.