Paul VI. Pope

† 6 August 1978 Castel Gandolfo, Italy

Pope Paul VI. Real name Giovanni Batista Enrico Antonio Maria Montini

Paul VI. He was a mystic who said: “as if irradiated by the sun, I close my eyes to the infinite mystery of the Holy Trinity and in my heart I keep only the feeling of the ocean of bliss”. These words of his were brought by an article of the Vatican newspaper Osservatore Romano on the occasion of the 35th anniversary of the death of Pope Paul VI. His coronation (June 30, 1963) was the last in the history of the Catholic Church. Paul VI, elected on June 21, received a tiara presented to him by the faithful of Milan. According to Osservatore Romano, the key to reading Montini’s pontificate must also be found in his sense of mysticism. Montini spent 30 years in the Roman Curia and led the world’s largest Catholic diocese, Milan, for nine years.

• The love for the Church, which was the unifying factor of his life – as he himself admitted when he said: “it seems to me that I lived for her and only for her” – is connected with two conditions: with the renewal or reform of the Church and with her personal conversion of members. The first condition depends on the second. The ability of the Church to be as “Christ wanted her to be: one, holy, completely focused on the perfection to which he calls her” depends on the personal effort of the faithful to follow Christ and on the spiritual and moral strength that this following requires.

The two main lines of the pontificate of Paul VI. They are based on the authenticity of the conversion process, which he explained in more detail in his program encyclical Ecclesial Sum. They are  dialogue with the world and the effort to restore complete Christian unity.

• According to Paul VI. The Church, if she deeply lives her mystery in the power of love that unites her with the Lord, can give it to the world in order to bring it into contact with the Gospel. “The Church must enter into a dialogue with the world in which it lives. Let the Church become a word, let it become a message; The Church should become a conversation”. In this union of trust and evangelization, animated by fidelity to Christ, the Church can be accessible even to the mind of the contemporary world. After all, “there is no stranger in the heart of the Church. No one is indifferent to her service”.

As part of this movement of internal renewal, which makes the Church a clearer sign of God’s presence and God’s action, Paul VI. Perceives the necessity of the unity of all Christ’s disciples. His pontificate was particularly focused on seeking full communion with the Eastern Churches. The purification of the Church and its members, the spiritual power of evangelization, humility, dialogue with the world, a new ecclesiological approach based on the principle of sister churches, which makes it possible to hope for the unification of East and West: these are not exactly the main pillars of Montini’s pontificate, which also echo in words and deeds Pope Francis. Intuitions of Paul VI. They are constantly up-to-date.