Paul VI

Giovanni Battista Montini was born in 1897 near Brescia, son of a lawyer and Catholic member of parliament. Thirty years in the Roman Secretariat of State made him a man of the curia; as archbishop of Milan from 1954 he became known in the working-class districts. Elected pope in 1963, he chose to continue the council opened by John XXIII and brought it to its close in 1965. The implementation fell to him: reform of the liturgy, creation of the synod of bishops, opening towards other confessions, and the first journeys by a pope outside Italy in centuries — to the Holy Land, India, the United Nations, Uganda. His encyclical Populorum progressio made the development of peoples a question of justice. Humanae vitae, in 1968, maintained the ban on contraception and provoked a dissent that has never subsided; he wrote no further encyclical in his last ten years. He died in August 1978. Canonised in 2018, he is commemorated on 29 May.