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Biography

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Pope Paul VI was born Giovanni Battista Enrico Antonio Maria Montini on 26 September 1897 in Concesio, in the province of Brescia in Lombardy, then part of the Kingdom of Italy. He was the second of three sons of Giorgio Montini, a lawyer, journalist, and Catholic activist who sat in the Italian Chamber of Deputies, and Giuditta Alghisi, who came from a family of rural landowners. The household combined bourgeois professional standing with a strong commitment to Catholic social and political life. Frail in childhood, Montini received much of his early schooling at home and at the Jesuit Cesare Arici institute in Brescia before entering the diocesan seminary. He was ordained a priest for the Diocese of Brescia on 29 May 1920. Further studies followed in Rome at the Pontifical Gregorian University, the University of Rome, and the Pontifical Ecclesiastical Academy, after which he entered the Vatican diplomatic service.

A brief posting to the nunciature in Warsaw in 1923 ended when ill health forced his return to Rome. Thereafter he spent three decades in the Secretariat of State. From 1937 he served as sostituto for ordinary affairs, first under Cardinal Eugenio Pacelli and then under Pacelli as Pope Pius XII, becoming one of the most influential officials of the Roman Curia during the Second World War and the early Cold War. In November 1954 Pius XII named him Archbishop of Milan, a major industrial see then undergoing rapid social change; he was created cardinal by John XXIII in December 1958. In Milan he was known for pastoral visits to factories and working-class districts and for a cautious openness to contemporary culture.

Elected pope on 21 June 1963, he took the name Paul VI and inherited the Second Vatican Council, which he brought to a close in December 1965. His pontificate was devoted to implementing the Council’s decrees: liturgical reform (including the Roman Missal promulgated in 1969–70), episcopal collegiality, and a new emphasis on ecumenism and dialogue with the modern world. He was the first pope in the modern era to travel widely outside Italy, visiting the Holy Land in 1964, India, the United Nations in New York in 1965, Fátima, Colombia, Uganda, and several countries of East Asia and Oceania. Major documents of the reign included the encyclicals Populorum Progressio (1967) on integral human development, Sacerdotalis Caelibatus (1967) reaffirming priestly celibacy, and Humanae Vitae (1968) on the regulation of birth, the last of which provoked sharp and lasting controversy. Evangelii Nuntiandi (1975) set out a theology of evangelization that later popes continued to cite.

The later years of the pontificate were marked by the turbulence of the post-conciliar period: liturgical disputes, a wave of departures from the priesthood and religious life, and public challenges to papal teaching. Paul VI simplified papal ceremonial, laid aside the triple tiara in 1964 as a gift for the poor, and abolished much of the old papal court. He died at the papal villa of Castel Gandolfo on 6 August 1978 and was buried in the Vatican Grottoes beneath St. Peter’s Basilica. Pope Francis beatified him on 19 October 2014 and canonized him on 14 October 2018; his liturgical memorial is kept on 29 May, the anniversary of his priestly ordination.

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