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Saint John XXIII, original name Angelo Giuseppe Roncalli, (born November 25, 1881, Sotto il Monte, Italy—died June 3, 1963, Rome; beatified September 3, 2000canonized April 27, 2014; feast day October 11), one of the most popular popes of all time (reigned 1958–63), who inaugurated a new era in the history of the Roman Catholic Church by his openness to change (aggiornamento), shown especially in his convoking of the Second Vatican Council. He wrote several socially important encyclicals, most notably Pacem in Terris.

Early life and career

Angelo was one of 13 children born to Giovanni Roncalli, a tenant farmer of Sotto il Monte, a tiny village 7 miles (11 km) from the Lombard city of Bergamo. The Roncallis were poor but not nearly as destitute as some later legends would have it. “We had the necessities of life,” the pope used to say testily, “and we were strong and healthy.” Though Angelo, the third child and oldest son of the family, went off to prepare for the priesthood as a child of 11, he continued to spend vacations with his family and remained close to them throughout his life.

No matter how powerful he became, however, he never helped any of the other Roncallis to advance in the world. “The world is only interested in making money…,” he wrote to his brother Xaverio after becoming pope. “A great honour has come to our family,” he acknowledged, but he urged Xaverio and the others to remain humble, seek no honours or preferments, and take no material advantage of their relationship to the pope. “At my own death,” he concluded, “I shall not be denied the praise which did so much honour to the holiness of Pius X: born poor, he died poor.” In his last will he bequeathed each of the living members of the family a legacy of less than $20—his total personal fortune.

Angelo the churchman, however, was destined to spend most of his life among the powerful and cultivated. Inevitably, that set him apart from the other Roncallis almost from the beginning. While still a seminarian, he was already beginning to feel out of place in Sotto il Monte, where he was charged with priggishness and “putting on airs.” “Only three days of the holidays have passed and already I am weary of them,” he recorded in the diary that he allowed to be published after his death. He was eager, he wrote, to return to Bergamo, with its orderly life of study, prayer, and genteel fellowship, and to escape from the petty gossip, suspicion, and jealousies of the village.

Roncalli was not an especially brilliant student. He did well enough, however, to be sent to Rome for theological studies in 1900. After only one year at the Seminario Romano, his education was interrupted when he was drafted into military service and assigned to an infantry company conveniently stationed at Bergamo. Later, as a priest, he returned to the army during World War I. Again he served in Bergamo, first as a hospital orderly and later as a military chaplain with the rank of lieutenant.

Even with the time out for military service, he was not yet 23 when he was ordained a priest in Rome on August 10, 1904. The next day he said his first mass at St. Peter’s Basilica. After a visit to his family in Sotto il Monte, he returned to the Seminario Romano for further study. Eventually he received a doctorate in canon law.

As a graduate student in Rome, Roncalli took the first step that was to lead to the papacy a half century later. Simply because he was a priest of Bergamo, he was asked by the reigning pope, Pius X, to assist in the ceremony of consecration for a new bishop, Giacomo Radini-Tedeschi, who had been appointed to take over the diocese of Bergamo. The new bishop, a member of the Italian nobility, was much taken by the young priest and asked him to serve as his secretary.

Back in Bergamo, Don Angelo, in addition to his secretarial duties, was assigned to the faculty of the diocesan seminary. For the next nine years he served as a professor of theology and spiritual director of the young men preparing for ordination. As the bishop’s right-hand man, he gained a wide range of pastoral experience.

Roncalli had great esteem for his superior, who was known as the most progressive prelate in Italy. After the bishop’s death in 1914, he wrote an appreciative biography of the prelate and sent a copy to the pope, Benedict XV, who had been one of Radini-Tedeschi’s personal friends.

With the war behind him, Roncalli was summoned to wider service in the church. In 1920 Pope Benedict, recalling Radini-Tedeschi’s biographer, named him a director of the Italian organization for the support of foreign missions. The position was not notably significant in a church top-heavy with dignitaries, but it brought him into personal contact with a number of important clerical figures throughout Europe, and his name became recognizable in ecclesiastical Rome. He also gained some attention because of his work as a part-time historian who specialized in some of the minor activities of Saint Charles Borromeo, a cardinal of Milan who played an important role in the 16th-century Counter-Reformation. It was Roncalli’s researches for this project that first brought him into contact with Monsignor Achille Ratti, the Milanese librarian who would become Pius XI.

Service as a Vatican diplomat

Pius XI later remembered the Bergamo priest’s gift for personal dealings and brought him into the Vatican’s diplomatic service. Roncalli was appointed apostolic visitor to Bulgaria in March 1925. In keeping with custom, he was made an archbishop before he left Rome. He spent the next 10 years in that obscure but delicate post, where he was expected to protect the interests of a small Roman Catholic community in a country overwhelmingly Eastern Orthodox. His diary reveals that he was often lonely and discouraged in Bulgaria, but he carried out the assignment with tact, patience, and notable good humour. Still, he was not deemed to be among the best-qualified clerics in the papal diplomatic corps.

Roncalli’s next assignment was equally unpromising. He was appointed apostolic delegate to Greece, which was combined with naming him head of the Vatican diplomatic mission to Turkey. Again he was called upon to represent powerless Catholic minorities in an Eastern Orthodox nation, Greece, and a Muslim nation, Turkey. He made his home in Istanbul, where he was generally ignored by both the Turkish government and the Vatican but was warmly appreciated in the diplomatic colony as an amiable host and affable dinner companion.

None of these posts loomed large in the Western-oriented Vatican, and the archbishop had good reason to believe that his career had reached a dead end. Later he confessed that he was stunned by the announcement, at the end of 1944, that he had been named papal nuncio to Charles de Gaulle’s newly liberated France; his first thought was that an assignment error must have been made in Rome.

The French post was particularly delicate at the time. Roncalli’s predecessor, Monsignor Valerio Valeri, had been close to the collaborationist General Philippe Pétain during the German occupation, and de Gaulle made it clear to the Vatican that, since Valeri had become persona non grata to the French people, he would have to be replaced immediately. France was still seething with a spirit of vengeance against former collaborators. It would be the new nuncio’s obligation to deal with the ill will created by his predecessor and by the bishops who had cooperated with the hated Vichy government. Someone in the Vatican remembered the genial archbishop languishing in the Middle East, and it was decided that, though he was not noted for his political astuteness, perhaps he had precisely the qualifications needed under the circumstances. Roncalli was told that he would be expected to cool the atmosphere, reestablish the independence of the church, and gain the release of a number of German seminarians who were being held as prisoners of war. In addition, he had to deal with an outburst of radicalism among the younger French clergy, which the conservative forces in the Vatican Curia found highly disturbing.

His success in carrying out the assignment was acknowledged by the papacy when Archbishop Roncalli was named a cardinal by Pius XII. In January 1953 the red hat, the symbol of a cardinal, was conferred on him by the socialist president of France, Vincent Auriol.

Reign as pope

As a cardinal, Roncalli immediately became eligible for one of the major Italian archbishoprics. Appointed patriarch of Venice at age 71, he had cause once more to believe that he had reached the end of the line. Thus, perhaps no one was more surprised than he when, after the death of Pius XII on October 9, 1958, he was elected pope on the 12th ballot—clearly a compromise candidate acceptable to all parties only because of his advanced years.

Perhaps a younger pontiff would have been less daring and innovative than John XXIII turned out to be. Soon after his coronation, he announced almost casually that he was summoning an ecumenical council—a general meeting of the bishops of the church—the first in almost a century. He said the idea came to him in a sudden inspiration. His purpose was to “bring the church up to date” (aggiornaménto) and to work for its spiritual regeneration. He was the first pope since the Reformation who acknowledged frankly that Catholicism stood in need of reinvigoration and reform.

It was long a truism among church historians that councils are followed by upheaval and disorder in the church. The pope’s decision, consequently, was received coolly by his conservative Curia, who were convinced that the church had prospered under Pius XII’s leadership and who saw no good reason for the changes John envisioned. Some of the Vatican cardinals in fact did everything in their power to delay the council until the old man had passed from the scene and the project could be quietly dropped. But the pope pushed on with his plan and lived long enough to preside over the first session of the Second Vatican Council in the fall of 1962.

In keeping with his wishes, the council fathers pledged that they would be consistently positive. No condemnations or anathemas were to be made; political hostilities were to be ignored; and the church above all was to recognize that it was not the master but the servant of humanity. The pope made it clear that the Second Vatican Council was convened as a pastoral council. No new dogmas were to be pronounced, though old doctrines and disciplines were to be reexamined. What John sought, he said, was a “New Pentecost,” a new outpouring of the Holy Spirit.

The council, according to John’s design, would make a new start toward achieving Christian unity by putting aside the hostilities of the past and acknowledging the Catholics’ share of responsibility for the scandal of a divided Christianity. With his long experiences among the Eastern Orthodox, John’s interest in Christian ecumenism seemed natural enough, but no one in Rome was quite prepared for the extent of his openness. He received Eastern Orthodox, Anglican, and Protestant religious leaders with extreme cordiality and made sure they were invited to send observers to the Vatican Council. He removed certain words offensive to Jews from the official liturgy of the church. On one notable occasion, he introduced himself to a group of Jewish visitors with the biblical words, “I am Joseph your brother,” referring to the Old Testament story of the meeting of the sons of the patriarch Jacob at the court of Egypt.

John traveled around Rome freely, breaking with the tradition that the pope, deprived of his former temporal power, was a “prisoner of the Vatican.” In an attempt to depoliticize the church, he played down his position as ruler of the Vatican and emphasized his role as “servant of the servants of God,” a traditional title of the pope. In that spirit he called on the president of Italy and cordially received the son-in-law of the Soviet premier, Nikita Khrushchev, in private audience. Among his other visitors were the archbishop of Canterbury—the first such meeting since the 14th century—the moderator of the Scottish Kirk, and a Shintō (the indigenous religion of Japan) high priest—the first such official in history to be received at the Vatican.

During the Cuban missile crisis of 1962, the pope publicly urged both the United States and the Soviet Union to exercise caution and restraint and won the appreciation of both President John F. Kennedy and Premier Khrushchev. His major encyclical, Pacem in Terris (“Peace on Earth”), addressed to all humankind, was received warmly throughout the world and praised by politicians as well as churchmen. Straightforward and frankly optimistic, it avoided the language of diplomacy and set forth the requirements for world peace in profoundly human terms. Distinguishing between the philosophy of Marxism and actual governments to which it gave birth, John suggested that peaceful coexistence between the West and the communist East was not only desirable but actually necessary if humankind was to survive. He thereby diluted the religious energy that had been poured into the Cold War as a result of the militant policies shaped by his predecessor.

John saw himself as a reconciler. In statement after statement he emphasized the church’s significance as a suprapolitical spiritual force in the world. His greatest claim on the world’s affection, however, rested on the warmth of his personality rather than on any of his formal statements. He remained simple and unaffected, in spite of the baroque setting in which he found himself, and instinctively appealed directly to human values that everyone could understand. “Since you could not come to me, I came to you,” he told the inmates of a Roman prison. When Jacqueline Kennedy, the wife of the president of the United States, came to call, he rehearsed “Mrs. Kennedy, Madame Kennedy” in his poor English. Then, when she appeared, he spontaneously spread open his arms and cried out, “Jacqueline!” He once told a communist diplomat, “I know you are an atheist, but won’t you accept an old man’s blessing?” When a shabby peasant woman reached up to touch him as he was being carried through St. Peter’s, he stopped to clasp her hand. “There is no reason why you shouldn’t get as close as the king of Jordan did,” he said. The roly-poly pontiff—he was short of stature and never overcame a tendency toward corpulence—gradually became a kind of father figure for the world. When he died in 1963, it was generally recognized that he had become one of the best-loved men in the world.

Legacy of Saint John XXIII

There was nothing in the earlier life of Angelo Giuseppe Roncalli to suggest that his reign as pope would be anything other than the decorous, tradition-bound, static pontificate the Sacred College of Cardinals was counting on when it chose him as an “interim” pope—a papa di passaggio—in October 1958. His brilliant, strong-willed predecessor had shaped a defensive policy for dealing with the modern world that the cardinals thought would serve the needs of the church for another century, and they had every reason to believe, from his past behaviour, that the elderly Cardinal Roncalli would maintain the status quo for the few years he had to live. Then, according to the plan, the church would be turned over to a younger prelate who was cast in Pius XII’s mold. As pope, however, Roncalli put into effect so many of the ideas he had entertained privately during a half century of obediently serving others that the church was never the same again.

Angelo Roncalli might have lived and died as an obscure parish priest had he been less of a conformist throughout all but the last few years of his life. The child of a peasant family, he began his career in the church with no connections of any significance and no powerful patron to guide him through the maze of ecclesiastical politics. His steady climb was above all due to his readiness to subdue his own preferences, follow orders, and adjust without complaint to the will of his superiors. Such was the clerical ideal proposed at his seminary in Bergamo, and it guided him throughout his life.

His successor, Paul VI, instituted the formal proceedings that would lead to John’s canonization as a saint. Had the ancient custom of popular canonization still been in effect in 1963, that honour would probably have been given to him immediately by the tearful crowd who were gathered in St. Peter’s Square when his death was announced. In 2000 he was beatified by Pope John Paul II. In 2014 he and John Paul II were canonized on the same day.

Courtesy - John Cogley

The Editors of Encyclopaedia Britannica
- John XXIII

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