Pope Paul VI,- The beatification ceremony will be held at the Vatican on 19 October, Pope Francis announced.
BBC News:
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| Paul VI seen here in 1963 with US President John Kennedy wrote the encyclical Humanae Vitae in 1968 |
Pope Francis has set another of his predecessors on the road to sainthood.
He approved a miracle credited to the intercession of Paul VI - who died in 1978 after a 15-year pontificate and is remembered by many for his ban on artificial contraception for Catholics.
The beatification ceremony will be held at the Vatican on 19 October, Pope Francis announced.
The move came two weeks after the canonisation of two other 20th Century popes - John XXIII and John Paul II.
Beatification is the third of four steps in the process by which someone officially becomes a saint.
It requires at least one miracle to have been attributed to the intercession of a candidate for sainthood who, once beatified, is given the title blessed.
After beatification, a separate miracle would have to be verified in order for Paul VI to be canonised - declared a saint - allowing him to be venerated by the universal Church as "an example of holiness that can be followed with confidence".
Church teaching on families
Paul VI was born Giovanni Battista Montini in the Lombardy region of Italy in 1897, the son of a prominent newspaper editor.
He was elected pope in 1963 and continued the reforms of his predecessor, John XXIII.
Paul VI died in August 1978 and was succeeded briefly by Pope John Paul who died in October 1978.
During his 15-year pontificate he wrote seven encyclicals - the most controversial of which was Humanae Vitae (Of Human Life), published in 1968.
Its uncompromising position on birth control led to protests around the Catholic world and some national Roman Catholic Church hierarchies openly modified the statement.
In 1995 Pope John Paul II supported Paul VI's view on birth control in his encyclical, Evangelium Vitae (The Gospel of Life).
The teaching on contraception is widely disregarded by modern-day Catholics, says the BBC's David Willey in Rome.
October's beatification ceremony will be held at the end of a crucial meeting of global bishops to discuss Catholic teaching on family life, called by Pope Francis.
The bishops will be discussing the results of a worldwide survey commissioned by the Pope about what parts of the Church's teaching on human sexuality Catholics actually follow today.
As is customary, the Vatican gave no details about the miracle - which the Holy See requires must be a phenomenon certified by doctors as having no medical explanation.
But Italian media report the miracle involved a Californian baby who was born healthy despite the pre-birth diagnoses of a ruptured foetal bladder and absence of amniotic fluid.
The mother reportedly refused to abort the child, instead praying for Paul VI's intercession at the behest of a nun.
Youtube ...
TWENTY-NINTH WEEK IN ORDINARY TIME Year II
SUNDAY 19/10/2014
First Reading
Sirach 26:1-4.9-18
Responsory Sir 17:9-11
The Lord has set before them knowledge, a law of life as their inheritance. +
An everlasting covenant God has made with them.
V. His majestic glory their eyes beheld, his glorious voice their ears heard. + An
everlasting covenant ...
Second Reading
From
a discourse
by Paul
VI (Discourse,
4 May 1970)
Human love is good by its very origin
As holy scripture teaches us, before it is a sacrament marriage
is a great earthly reality: God created man
in his own image; he created him in the image of God; he created them man and
woman. We always have to go back to that first page of the Bible if
we want to understand what a human couple, a family, really is and what it ought
to be. Psychological analyses, psychoanalytical research, sociological surveys,
and philosophical reflection may of course have a contribution to make with the
light they shed on human sexuality and love; but they would blind us if they neglected
this fundamental teaching which was given to us at the very beginning: the duality
of the sexes was decreed by God, so that together man and woman might be the image
of God, and like him, the source of life: Be
fruitful and increase, fill the earth and subdue it. Attentive reading
of the prophets, the wisdom books, and the New Testament, moreover, shows us the
significance of this basic reality, and teaches us not to reduce it to physical
desire and genital activity, but to discover in it the complementary nature of the
values of man and woman, the greatness and the weaknesses of conjugal love, its
fruitfulness, and its opening onto the mystery of God's design for love.
The Christian knows that human love is good by its very origin: and
if, like everything else in us, it is wounded and deformed by sin, it finds its
salvation and redemption in Christ. Besides, isn't this the lesson that twenty centuries
of Christian history have taught us? How many couples have found the way to
holiness in their conjugal life, in that community of life which is the only one
to be founded on a sacrament!
Love one another, as I have loved you. The ways in which they express their
affection are, for Christian husband and wife, full of the love which they draw
from the heart of God. And if its human source threatens to dry up, its divine source
is as inexhaustible as the unfathomable depths of God's affection. That shows
us the intimacy, strength, and richness of the communion which conjugal love
aims at. It is an inward and spiritual reality, transforming the community of
life of husband and wife into what might be called, in accordance with the teaching
authorized by the Council, "the domestic Church," a true "cell
of the Church," as John XXIII already called it, a basic cell, a germinal
cell in the ecclesial body.
Such is the mystery in which conjugal love takes root, and which
illuminates all its expressions. The rapture which moves husband and wife to
unite is the carrier of life, and enables God to give himself children. On
becoming parents, the husband and wife discover with a sense of wonder, at the baptismal
font, that their child is from now on a child of God, reborn from water and the Spirit; and
that the child is entrusted to them so that they may watch over his physical
and moral growth, certainly, but also the opening out and blossoming in him of the new nature. Such a child is no longer
just what they see, but just as much what they believe, "an infinity of mystery
and love which would dazzle us if we saw it face to face" as Emmanuel Mounier
says. Therefore upbringing becomes true service of Christ, according to his own
saying: Whatever you do for one of these little
ones, you do for me.
Responsory Ps 5:7; Is 6:3
Through the greatness of your love I have access to your house. + I bow down before your holy temple, filled with awe.
V. Holy, holy, holy is the Lord of hosts; the whole earth is full of his glory.+ I bow down ...
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