Pope St. Paul VI
Born: September 26, 1897
Died: August 6, 1978
Feast day: May 29
Patron saint of: Archdiocese of Milan, Paul VI Pontifical Institute, Second Vatican Council, Diocese of Brescia, Concesio, Magenta, Paderno Dugnano
Elected in 1963 following the death of St. John XXIII, amid intense debates among bishops at the Second Vatican Council, the former Cardinal Giovanni Montini inherited the difficult task of seeing the council through to its conclusion in 1965. In the following years, he pushed through the council’s changes, including updating the liturgy from Latin to the vernacular and completing a major reorganization of the Roman Curia.
He also discarded the papal triple tiara and other trappings of the monarchical papacy, sending a message “that the pope was not a king, but a bishop, a pastor, a servant,” as the website of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops put it in one of its tributes.
And Paul was the original “pilgrim pope,” the first pontiff to travel outside Italy in the modern era. On his first trip, Paul met the Eastern Orthodox patriarch in Jerusalem in 1964, and during Paul’s eight other foreign journeys he visited Asia (where a knife-wielding artist in the Philippines tried to stab him), Africa, and Latin America. In 1965, Paul became the first pope to visit the U.S., where he celebrated Mass at Yankee Stadium and delivered a ringing denunciation of war to the United Nations General Assembly.
More about Pope St. Paul VI:
Beyond birth control: A look at the legacies of Pope Paul VI
Pope Paul VI is most famous for reaffirming the Catholic Church’s ban on artificial contraception, but he made many other groundbreaking contributions.
Image: Vatican City (picture official of pope) [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons
