Saint Paul VI

Giovanni Battista Montini spent three decades inside the Secretariat of State, the last of them as one of Pius XII's two closest aides, before an abrupt transfer to Milan in 1954 without the red hat that traditionally went with the see. John XXIII gave him the hat in his first consistory, and on 21 June 1963 the conclave elected him on the sixth ballot as the obvious man to steer the council its dead convener had begun. He did. Paul reconvened Vatican II that September, held its factions together through three more sessions, and closed it on 8 December 1965 with sixteen documents that rewrote the liturgy, the church's relationship with Jews and other religions, and its stance on religious liberty. The day before, he and Patriarch Athenagoras lifted the mutual excommunications of 1054.

He was the first pope to fly: Jerusalem in January 1964, the United Nations in October 1965 ("no more war, war never again"), then India, Colombia, Uganda, and Manila, where a man with a knife wounded him in 1970. He gave up the tiara to be sold for the poor. Populorum progressio (1967) put development and the just sharing of wealth at the center of Catholic social teaching, and the new Roman Missal of 1969 put the Mass in the vernacular, facing the people.

Then came Humanae vitae, 25 July 1968, which reaffirmed the ban on artificial contraception against the majority of his own commission. The dissent it drew, from theologians, bishops' conferences, and ordinary Catholics, wounded him permanently; he wrote no further encyclical in the ten years he had left. Melancholy, scrupulous, and shrewd, he governed a church in open argument with itself, watched priests leave by the tens of thousands, and pleaded in vain for the life of his friend Aldo Moro in 1978. He died at Castel Gandolfo on 6 August 1978. Francis canonized him on 14 October 2018.