Giovanni Battista Montini

Peter Hebblethwaite, NCR's late Vatican correspondent, subtitled his excellent biography of Giovanni Battista Montini, Pope Paul VI, "the first modern pope." By "modern" Hebblethwaite meant that he was the first pontiff to embrace the 20th century and jettison the trappings and pretensions of the absolutist post-Reformation papacy.

Paul VI began his life in 1897 as Giovanni Battista Montini, the son of an Italian parliamentarian from northern Italy.

Born Giovanni Battista Montini in 1897, Paul spent much of his career in the Vatican's diplomatic service before becoming cardinal of Milan.

Giovanni Battista Montini, ad ispirare quel discorso?

All the major players on the ecclesial world stage were at the council: Cardinals Joseph Frings, Leon-Joseph Suenens, Giacomo Lercaro, Bemardus Johannes Alfrink, Achille Lienart, Alfredo Ottaviani, Ernesto Ruffini, Augustin Bea, Pericle Felici, Giovanni Battista Montini, the Melkite Patriarch Maximos IV Saigh, and in lesser roles the American Cardinals Francis Spellman and Joseph Ritter.

In 1963, Cardinal Giovanni Battista Montini was chosen during a conclave of his fellow cardinals to succeed the late Pope John XXIII; the new pope took the name Paul VI.

Born in 1897 in a small town in the northern Italian province of Brescia, Giovanni Battista Montini was cardinal archbishop of Milan before he was elected to succeed John XXIII in 1963.

It links Giovanni Battista Montini, who later became Pope Paul VI, to the theft of property of Jewish, Serb, Russian, Ukrainian and Roma victims during World War II in Yugoslavia.