Saint Paul VI, Pope

Giovanni Battista Montini was born in 1897 near Brescia and ordained in 1920; the feast falls on the day of his ordination. He worked for many years in the Vatican Secretariat of State, became archbishop of Milan in 1954 and was elected pope in 1963, taking the name Paul.

He continued the Second Vatican Council and brought it to its end in 1965, and put its reforms into practice, among them the new rite of Mass. He was the first pope in modern times to travel widely: to the Holy Land in 1964, where he met the Patriarch Athenagoras, to the United Nations in 1965, where he said “No more war, war never again,” and to Asia, Africa and Latin America. He died at Castel Gandolfo on 6 August 1978 and was canonized in 2018.