Pope Saint Paul VI was born Giovanni Battista Enrico Antonio Maria Montini, on September 26, 1897, in Concisio, Brescia, Italy, and died on August 6, 1978, in Castel Gandolfo, Italy.
He served as pope from June 21, 1963, to his death in 1978. Succeeding Pope Saint John XXIII, he continued the Second Vatican Council, which he closed in 1965, implementing its numerous reforms in the Catholic Church and fostered ecumenical relations with Eastern Orthodox and Protestants.
Montini served in the Holy See’s Secretariat of State from 1922 to 1954 and was considered as the closest and most influential advisor of Pius XII, who in 1954 named him Archbishop of Milan, the largest Italian diocese.
John XXIII elevated him to the College of Cardinals in 1958.
Pope Francis canonized him a saint on October 14 in Saint Peter’s Square, Vatican City, together with Archbishop Oscar Moreno and five others.
In his homily during the Canonization Mass, Pope Francis sees Paul VI “as the pope who had a broad vision of the Church that was inspired by Vatican II.”
Saint Pope Paul VI was the first pope to travel outside Italy. As pope, he visited the Holy Land in 1964, where, overcoming centuries of division, he embraced the Orthodox Patriarch of Constantinople, Athenagoras I in Jerusalem.
He also traveled to India and Lebanon that same year to reach out to the poor and later to Geneva. He went to the United Nations in New York in 1965 and appealed to the governments in the world, “Never again war.”
He visited Fatima in 1967 and Turkey that same year to meet the ecumenical patriarch and reach out to Muslims.
He went to Colombia in 1968 to encourage the bishops of Latin America and the Caribbean to implement the teachings of the Second Vatican Council through the preferential option for the poor; and he went to Iran, Pakistan, the Philippines, the Samoan Islands, Australia, Indonesia, Hong Kong and Sri Lanka in 1970.
He wrote famous encyclicals, including “Ecclesiam Suam” (1964), which highlights the importance of dialogue, “Populorum Progressio” (1967) on “the development of peoples” and “Humanae Vitae” (1968) on “the regulation of birth.”
At the Canonization Mass, Pope Francis exhorted all the pilgrims in the City and the World: “Today, Paul VI still urges us, together with the Council, whose wise helmsman he was, to live our common vocation: the universal call to holiness not to half measures but to holiness.”