Word: montini
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Giovanni Battista Montini was born in 1897 in the country village of Concesio, near Brescia, in northern Italy. His father, Giorgio Montini, was a newspaper editor and an early champion of the Popular Party (a forerunner of the Christian Democrats) who served three terms in the Chamber of Deputies. Young Giambattista, second of Giorgio's three sons, was so frail and sickly that he had to get much of his education-including some of his seminary training-at home. But he learned quickly: in 1920, not yet 23, he was ordained a priest in Brescia Cathedral. Dispatched to Rome...
While the young Montini studied the works of Catholic liberals, he also listened to one of the Church's last great autocrats-his superior in the Secretariat of State, Eugenic Cardinal Pacelli. In 1939 Pacelli became Pope Pius XII. Monsignor Montini, as a Substitute Secretary of State, was soon embroiled in the delicate Vatican maneuvering between the enemy forces of World War II. It was Montini, evidence suggests, who coined the famous phrase that Pope Pius uttered on the eve of that conflict: "Nothing is lost by peace; everything may be lost...
After the war the relationship between the two men became strained. Pius again promoted Montini in 1952, making him a Pro-Secretary of State,* but the Pope and his protege were drifting apart politically. Pius was so hostile to Communism that he sometimes trembled when he spoke of it; Montini, on the other hand, was sensitive to the social and economic distress of postwar Italy and elsewhere, and more understanding of those who were driven to radical solutions. When Pius named Montini Archbishop of Milan in 1954 but failed to give him the Cardinal's red hat that normally...
...first parish. To combat the influence of the Communists, he said Mass in factories, mines, jails and workers' homes. He commissioned priests to conduct street-corner crusades. He built scores of new churches in the working-class suburbs that ring the city. Pope John XXIII named Montini a Cardinal in 1958, and Montini reportedly had a hand in John's keynote address at the opening of the Second Vatican Council, which encouraged the church "ever to look to the present, to new conditions and new forms of life...
Pope John had written in his diary that he wanted Montini to be his successor. When John died in 1963, the College of Cardinals agreed. They elected him on the fifth ballot. The day after his election, Paul announced on television that the Vatican Council would continue, and he guided it through three more sessions. His interventions were rare but usually decisive. During the fourth session, in 1965, when the critical document on religious liberty seemed threatened by a filibuster of Conservative Prelates, Paul forced a vote. The declaration passed overwhelmingly, 1,997 to 224, affirming to the world that...