It’s official: Paul VI to be beatified in October

From Rocco: 

It’s been expected for months… and this morning, it’s official: continuing his predecessors’ respective rises to the honors of the altar, the Pope signed the decree affirming a miracle through the intercession of Giovanni Battista Montini, Pope Paul VI, scheduling the tormented, tragic figure’s beatification for October 19th, coupling it with the closing Mass of the Extraordinary Synod on the pastoral challenges facing the family.

While Paul’s oversight of the bulk of Vatican II and the reforms which sprung from it has chiefly made him a figure of acclaim among the ecclesial Left, the context for his elevation to the step before sainthood points instead to his signal accomplishment in the eyes of church conservatives: Humanae Vitae – the 1968 encyclical which, rejecting the almost-unanimous advice of a papal commission, reaffirmed the Magisterium’s condemnation of artificial contraception, an act whose fallout increasingly cowed Papa Montini away from the stage for the last decade of his 15-year pontificate.

According to Italian reports, the miracle approved today echoes the spirit of the still-controversial document. In the early 1990s, a California woman prayed to Paul to save her unborn child after in uterotests showed the baby afflicted with significant organ damage. After the mother rejected a recommendation to terminate the pregnancy, the child was born healthy and no trace of issues were ever found.