John XXIII

Roman Catholic pope (1958-1963)

• Born: November 25, 1881
• Birthplace: Sotto il Monte, Italy
• Died: June 3, 1963
• Place of death: Vatican City, Italy

Pope John XXIII called the Second Vatican Council, which modernized the Roman Catholic Church, and guided the early planning of the council, which helped ensure its achievements.

Early Life

Angelo Giuseppe Roncalli, the future Pope John XXIII, was the fourth of ten children in a poor, devout tenant farmer family in a small Lombard village. Unusually for the time period, when illiteracy was still common in rural villages, Angelo was sent to a nearby village to be educated by the priest. Although not a brilliant student, Roncalli was admitted to the diocesan seminary (a prep school for those who hoped to study for the priesthood later) at age fourteen. Roncalli enjoyed the regimen at the seminary, and he became one of the better students of his class. Because of this improvement, he was chosen to finish his studies at the pontifical Seminary of the Apollinare in Rome in 1901, and he entered the priesthood in August, 1904.

After he had finished his first mass, Roncalli was introduced to Pope Pius X, who was from the same area of Italy. Roncalli had already been selected by one of the rising members of Pius’s household, Monsignor Radini-Tedeschi, as a young man who knew his home diocese of Bergamo well. When Radini-Tedeschi was made bishop of Bergamo in 1905, Pius approved Roncalli’s becoming his secretary. Radini-Tedeschi remained bishop until his death in 1914, and Roncalli became a well-known individual within the Italian clerical establishment because of his connection.

Roncalli spent just more than a year teaching in the local seminary and producing works on the sixteenth century saint Charles Borromeo (which brought him into close contact with the librarian Monsignor Achille Ratti, later Pope Pius XI) and an autobiography of Radini-Tedeschi. Soon after Italy entered World War I, however, Roncalli became a chaplain in the Italian army. When the war ended, he spent a year preparing Church organizations in Bergamo to help returning veterans and students cope with economically depressed postwar Italy.

Roncalli moved up the Church ladder the next year to a position in the Vatican. From 1919 through 1925, he was the director of the Society for the Propagation of the Faith as well as a part-time instructor at the Lateran Pontifical Seminary. Pius XI also entrusted most of the arrangements for the 1925 Holy Year celebrations to Roncalli and, in 1925, chose Roncalli to become the papal representative to the small Catholic population in Bulgaria, thus starting nearly thirty years of work in the Vatican diplomatic service. It also marked Roncalli’s elevation to the rank of bishop.

Roncalli worked hard to make Catholics of the Eastern Rite, who outnumbered Roman Rite Catholics in Orthodox Bulgaria, feel more welcome within the Church, a mission that he would include in the work of the Second Vatican Council. When he left in 1934, Roncalli had become one of the most popular members of the diplomatic corps. He left to become the apostolic delegate to both Greece and Turkey, and it was in these posts that Roncalli started to achieve international notice.

Life’s Work

The first few years of Roncalli’s work centered mostly on Turkey, which was still undergoing a secularization process, controlled by the political leaders of the young republic. Neither Turkey nor Greece had a large Catholic population, and in both cases native Catholics were often treated as social outcasts. Roncalli worked hard to improve relations with the local political and religious leaders and so exert some pressure for his widespread flock, and he was moderately successful.

It was World War II that truly made Roncalli’s work vitally important. He was a vital link in various Catholic attempts to help refugees from Adolf Hitler’s regime, including large numbers of Jews. At the same time, Roncalli was able to satisfy the Turkish officials that their country’s neutrality was not being violated, help bring aid into occupied Greece, and make certain that most of that aid actually reached the Greek people.

Because of his work in Greece and Turkey, Pope Pius XII appointed Roncalli to become his papal nuncio to France in December, 1944. The Catholic Church, like all other institutions in France, was divided. Some Church officials had collaborated with the Nazis while France was occupied from 1940 to 1944, others had worked with various resistance movements, but most, again reflecting the nation, had done neither. It was the new nuncio’s duty to help heal the wounds left by World War II and the occupation within the Catholic community. As he had been in Bulgaria and Greece, Roncalli was soon one of the most popular members of the diplomatic community.

In late 1952, it was announced that Roncalli would become a cardinal the next January. Soon after his elevation, the new cardinal was named the new patriarch (archbishop) of Venice. Roncalli was soon working as hard in his new job as he ever had, in spite of his age. The archdiocese had not had a leader as interested in the everyday affairs of the area since Giuseppe Sarto had left to become Pope Pius X in 1903. After the death of Pius XII in October, 1958, Angelo Roncalli was elected his successor, despite his advanced age of nearly seventy-seven, becoming the second of three twentieth century popes who had been patriarch of Venice before his election (the third was Pope John Paul I).

Roncalli chose John for his name, the first Pope John in more than five hundred years. John also quickly showed the style that had endeared him to the common people of Bulgaria, Greece, Paris, and Venice even more than it had made him popular with diplomats and journalists. John became a common sight in the workshops, grounds, and less frequented parts of the Vatican, talking with the workers. He was also seen visiting the poor and children in hospitals as well as prisons in and around Rome, showing that he was a true bishop of Rome as well as pope. He was quickly called “good Pope John” by the people of Rome, who were more accustomed to going to see the pope than having the pope come to see them.

John quickly enlarged the College of Cardinals, adding more of the world’s important archbishops so that it would be a better reflection of the Church, including the first black African in 1960. He also quickly announced, in January, 1959, that he was calling an ecumenical council, a general meeting of the world’s bishops and other Catholic Church leaders. There had been only twenty called in this manner, the first in 325, all to settle some major problem or doctrine, and only one since the Reformation. John had called this new one, known as the Second Vatican Council or Vatican II, not to fight a heresy but to redefine the Church in terms of the modern world, or as he is said to have phrased it, “to open a window and let in some air.”

John would spend much of the rest of his life making certain the same “fresh air” was indeed let into the open discussions at the Second Vatican Council, blocking attempts of the Church’s central administration, known as the Curia, to control the council. John also made certain that representatives of the non-Roman Rite portions of the Church were well represented, and he also had observers invited from other Christian churches, other religions, and the world’s press. Although John lived to see only the first session of the council (October through December, 1962), the other three sessions (which would last through the end of 1965) reflected the concerns that John had raised; the council produced sixteen documents that today define the role of the Catholic Church in the modern world and the way that the Church is run, as well as update the teaching authority of the Church.

John not only relied on the council to get his points across but also gave more direct evidence of his concerns in his encyclicals. His 1961 encyclical Mater et magistra (English translation, 1962) restated in postwar terms the social encyclicals of Leo XIII and Pius XI, while his most famous was the 1963 Pacem in terris (English translation, 1963). This last sought to define the role of the state and the rights of the individual. Both encyclicals try to ensure the rights and dignity of every person in the face of modern economic and political systems, which often claim superiority over the individual.

John fell ill soon after the end of the council’s first session. He worked as hard as he could during the last six months of his life. Around noon on June 3, 1963, he went into a coma, and he died a few hours later.

Significance

John XXIII was elected as a short-term “caretaker,” but he was determined, in the light of all he had seen since he was a chaplain during World War I, to bring the Catholic Church into a closer understanding with the twentieth century, which the Second Vatican Council accomplished. He also brought areas of the Church that might have been considered on the periphery into closer communion with the central Church, particularly between the Eastern and Uniate Rites. Moreover, by increasing the College of Cardinals, John brought the national leadership of the world’s larger non-European countries into a more powerful position within the Church and so started the trend of the Church’s leadership being less Eurocentric (and especially less Italian).

Bibliography

Alberigo, Giuseppe, and Joseph A. Komonchak, eds. History of Vatican II. 5 vols. Maryknoll, N.Y.: Orbis, Leuven, and Peeters, 1995-2006. A lengthy account, from official Roman Catholic sources, of all aspects of the council, from its inception under John XXIII through its conclusion under Paul VI.

Benigni, Mario, and Goffredo Zanchi. John XXIII: The Official Biography. Translated by Elviro Di Fabio with Julia Mary Darrebkamp. Boston: Pauline Books and Media, 2001. English translation of the official biography of John.

Cahill, Thomas. Pope John XXIII. New York: Viking, 2002. Brief but comprehensive and well-written biography, tracing John’s life and his eventual reform of the Roman Catholic Church.

Daughters of St. Paul. Popes of the Twentieth Century. Boston: St. Paul Editions, 1983. A short work that serves as a favorable introduction to the twentieth century popes, laying out the salient facts of each one’s biography and life’s work.

Grasso, Kenneth L., and Robert P. Hunt, eds. Catholicism and Religious Freedom: Contemporary Reflections on Vatican II’s Declaration of Religious Liberty. Lanham, Md.: Sheed and Ward, 2006. These essays interpreting the reforms of the Second Vatican Council include discussion of the work of Pope John.

Hales, E. E. Y. Pope John and His Revolution. Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1965. Early but excellent study on John’s policies, especially on the social concerns that the pope brought to his pontificate and the manner in which he brought attention to them.

Hatch, Alden. A Man Named John: The Life of Pope John XXIII. New York: Hawthorn Books, 1963. Written in the last months of John’s pontificate, this book is a good, general biography, even if the praise is a bit overwhelming at times. Most interesting is a memorial section added after John’s death, describing his death and funeral.

Hebblethwaite, Peter. Pope John XXIII, Shepherd of the Modern World. Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1985. An excellent biography of the pontiff, with very good endnotes that often offer interesting additional material. Contains a bibliography with short annotations and an appendix of the Roman Curia officials at the start of the council, which helps identify the behind-the-scenes players mentioned in the text.

John XXIII. Journal of a Soul. Translated by Dorothy White. New York: McGraw-Hill, 1965. John started keeping a spiritual diary in 1895, after he had finished his work in the junior seminary in Bergamo, and he added to it, especially when he was on retreats, through 1962. Some of his written prayers and letters and his spiritual testament are also included.

Trevor, Meriol. Pope John. Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1967. An easy-to-read, well-documented general biography, which concentrates more on John’s personality and reactions to events than on John as a Church administrator or on his policies. Contains a bibliography with some annotations.