Saint John XXIII (1881-1963)

A sharecropping family, rich in faith

Angelo Giuseppe Roncalli was born on 25 November 1881 in Sotto il Monte, a village in the province of Bergamo, Lombardy, and was baptized the same day.^[3] He was the fourth of thirteen children in a family of sharecroppers (mezzadri) : people who work another man's land, share the harvest, and are poor.^[4][5] Once pope, Roncalli liked to recall his origins with neither nostalgia nor shame, with the calm humor of one who knows where he comes from. He is thus credited with this remark about his peasant childhood — that there are three ways to ruin yourself, women, gambling and farming, and that his father chose the dullest of the three — but no primary source has been found for this reported remark, so it is given here only as such, without verbatim value.^[6]

The poverty of the Roncalli household was not spiritual misery : the official biography stresses that it was "poor but rich in faith", and that Christian values were engraved very early "in the heart of young Angelo".^[7] That soil, that labor, that frugality never left him. He later reread them as a gift from God : the Journal reports in substance that, taken away from the countryside, he had received there from God everything he needed.^[8][9]

Parish priest Rebuzzini and the awakening of the soul

The child grew up under the gaze of a priest who marked his whole life : the parish priest of Sotto il Monte, Don Francesco Rebuzzini, who gave him a "profound ecclesiastical formation" which, the canonization biography says, would "sustain him in difficulties and inspire him in the works of the apostolate".^[10] It was at this priest's side that the child acquired a taste for prayer, the examination of conscience and regular spiritual direction — a habit he would keep until his death.

The Bergamo seminary and the first notebook

Having entered the Bergamo seminary at about twelve years old, young Roncalli began as early as 1895, at fourteen, to keep spiritual notes — retreat resolutions, examinations of conscience, resolutions for the day. He would continue them, in various forms, until 1962.^[11][12] Gathered and published after his death, they would form the Journal of a Soul (Il Giornale dell'Anima), one of the great spiritual classics of the twentieth century. Already as a teenager, the future pope set himself four points of support of monastic simplicity, summed up in substance by the Journal of his fifteenth year : union with Jesus, recollection in his Heart, prayer of the rosary, presence to oneself in every decision.^[13][14]

The Franciscan tertiary : "God is everything, I am nothing, and today that suffices me"

In 1896, his seminary director enrolled him in the Third Order of Saint Francis (Secular Franciscan Order) ; he professed its Rule in 1897.^[15] This choice gave his whole spirituality a Franciscan color of joyful poverty and self-effacement, which he summed up in a formula returning like a refrain in his journal, in substance : God is everything, he is nothing, and today that suffices him.^[16][17]

Rome, ordination, the desire for holiness

Awarded a diocesan foundation scholarship, Roncalli was sent to complete his studies in Rome, at the Apollinare seminary. There, during a retreat, the twenty-one-year-old seminarian recorded the decision that commands his whole life, in substance : God wants him to be a saint without reserve, and he must become one.^[18][19]

He was ordained a priest on 10 August 1904, in the church of Santa Maria in Montesanto on the Piazza del Popolo, and celebrated his first Mass the next day over the tomb of Saint Peter.^[20][21] The desire for holiness was no longer in him a pious whim : it had become the settled program of a lifetime.

The master and the disciple

Barely ordained, the young priest became in 1905 the secretary of the new bishop of Bergamo, Bishop Giacomo Maria Radini-Tedeschi, a socially minded, cultivated and reforming prelate, whom he served faithfully until the bishop's death on 22 August 1914.^[22][23] Radini-Tedeschi was his great human and spiritual master ; Roncalli would later devote to him a biography full of filial tenderness. At his side, he learned the pastoral art, concern for workers and the poor, and quiet fidelity to the Church in an age troubled by the Modernist crisis.

The scholar : Saint Charles Borromeo and Saint Francis de Sales

At the same time, Roncalli taught Church history at the seminary and revealed himself as a rigorous historian. Struck by the figure of Saint Charles Borromeo, the great reformer of Milan, he undertook a critical edition of the acts of Borromeo's apostolic visitation to the diocese of Bergamo in 1575 — a colossal work of scholarship which he would pursue, out of fidelity, for decades, even under the cardinal's purple.^[24] That patience of a scholar, carried on without glory amid crushing duties, was already a form of hidden holiness.

At the same time, he nourished himself on Saint Francis de Sales, the doctor of gentleness and devotion. Salesian spirituality — meekness, patience, holiness offered to all in the ordinary state of life — became his own. All the smiling goodness of the future Papa buono has its doctrinal source here : not an easy temperament, but an asceticism of gentleness learned at the school of the bishop of Geneva.^[25]

Chaplain to the wounded (1915-1918)

When Italy entered the First World War, Roncalli was mobilized : first as a medical corps sergeant and stretcher-bearer in military hospitals, then as chaplain to the soldiers.^[26] Prolonged contact with torn bodies and the death agonies of young men engraved in him a concrete, flesh-and-blood compassion that had nothing abstract about it. The pastor who would later visit the prisons and hospitals of Rome was born in those wards of the wounded.

From 1921, Roncalli was called to Rome to reorganize the Society for the Propagation of the Faith, then began a long diplomatic career that kept him away from his country for nearly thirty years. Its institutional detail will be found in the dossier Pope Saint John XXIII ; what matters here is that those years of exile were for him a long school of abandonment.

Oboedientia et Pax : the motto of a life

Appointed in 1925 apostolic delegate to Bulgaria, Roncalli was consecrated bishop and chose as his motto two words that already summed up his soul : Oboedientia et Pax — "Obedience and peace".^[27] The canonization biography notes that it "served as the program of his life".^[28] He himself, in 1925, made it the summary of his own history : his life and his history hold, in substance, in these two words, obedience and peace.^[29][30]

Obedience, in him, had nothing servile about it : it was the art of letting himself be "docilely transferred wherever his presence was needed", and thus of abandoning himself to Providence through the orders of his superiors. Where an ambitious man would have chafed, Roncalli saw in each unforeseen transfer God's will for him.

Sofia, Istanbul, Paris : growing through misunderstanding

In Bulgaria (1925-1934), Roncalli spent ten years in a mostly Orthodox country, alongside a small Catholic community, "silently enduring misunderstandings" and growing, says the official biography, "in abandonment to Christ crucified".^[31] In Turkey and Greece (1934-1944), in Atatürk's secular Republic, his ministry stood out for "respectful manner and dialogue" with other confessions and religions.^[32] It was from that Istanbul post that, during the Second World War, he worked to rescue persecuted Jews — the diplomatic side is treated in the pontificate dossier.

Appointed nuncio to France at the Liberation (1944), in an explosive posting, Roncalli "constantly sought to embody evangelical simplicity".^[33] Everywhere, the same man : neither careerist nor embittered, but a religious who turned diplomacy into a spiritual exercise, making obedience the place of his encounter with God.

The patriarch of Venice (1953-1958)

Created cardinal by Pius XII in 1953 and appointed patriarch of Venice, Roncalli received at last, at 71, the "directly pastoral ministry" he had always dreamed of, welcoming it as an evening-of-life gift.^[34] He thought himself on the threshold of retirement, near his native land. Five years later, the conclave would decide otherwise.

Everything else — the surprise election, the council, worldwide glory — did no more than reveal a holiness patiently built in the shadows. A few pillars can be distinguished.

A Salesian soul : gentleness as asceticism

John XXIII's goodness was not an easy character trait, but the fruit of long labor at the school of Saint Francis de Sales. Salesian gentleness — patience with others and first of all with oneself, refusal of harshness, holiness possible in the ordinary state of life — irrigates his whole journal. It is what allowed him, once pope, to govern without tension, to defuse conflicts with a smile, to "have recourse to the remedy of mercy rather than brandish the weapons of severity", in the famous words of his council opening address.

The Journal of a Soul : unceasing self-examination

The Giornale dell'Anima reveals, beneath the debonair public man, an interior life of fearsome exactingness : meticulous examinations of conscience, struggle against self-love, repeated desire for humility and poverty.^[35] It shows that the pope's famous serenity was not a received temperament, but a victory won day after day over anxiety and ambition. John Paul II would underline it at his beatification : the goodness of that face was the visible radiance of a soul.

"Pope John left in everyone's memory the image of a smiling face and two arms open to embrace the whole world." — John Paul II, homily for the beatification of John XXIII, 3 September 2000^[36]

Abandonment to Providence : "sleep peacefully, Angelo"

The heart of his holiness is abandonment. Roncalli so believed that it is God, and not he, who leads the Church that he drew from it a disarming freedom. His biographers thus report, though it is not a verified direct quotation, that overwhelmed one evening by the cares of government, he is said to have reminded himself that it is not he but the Holy Spirit who governs the Church, and that he could therefore sleep peacefully.^[37]

Beyond the anecdote, this is the key to everything : a man who does not take himself for the savior of the Church dares the acts that fear withholds from others. His pastoral boldness was born of his humility, not of self-assurance.

The Decalogue of Serenity : "Just for today"

From this spirituality of abandonment, John XXIII left a popular summary that became one of the most widely circulated spiritual texts of the twentieth century : the Decalogue of Serenity (Decalogo della serenità), also called after its refrain "Just for today" (Solo per oggi).^[38] Ten resolutions for living the single present day, without letting oneself be crushed by the weight of a whole lifetime :

"Just for today, I will try to live my day without seeking to solve the problem of my whole life." — John XXIII, Decalogue of Serenity, no. 1^[39]

"Just for today, I will firmly believe — even if circumstances show the contrary — that God's Providence looks after me as if nothing else existed in the world." — John XXIII, Decalogue of Serenity, no. 9^[40]

"Just for today, I will have no fear. In particular, I will not be afraid to appreciate what is beautiful and to believe in goodness." — John XXIII, Decalogue of Serenity, no. 10^[41]

This little decalogue says plainly what the Journal of a Soul said in secret : holiness is not a heroism of tomorrow, but a fidelity of the present moment, begun anew each morning. It is exactly the "little way" of trust, translated into the language of a country priest become pope.

Humility as a method of government

John XXIII's humility was never a pose : it was a way of governing. Refusing to take himself seriously, he defused curial pride with self-mockery, received the humble as princes and princes as brothers, and placed service above all else rather than prestige.

The nickname "Good Pope" was no invention of communicators : it sprang from the people, who spontaneously recognized in Roncalli a transparent evangelical goodness. John Paul II would give it its exact formula :

"The Pope who struck the world by his affable manner, in which his singular goodness of soul shone through." — John Paul II, beatification homily, 3 September 2000^[42]

Tenderness : the "caress of the Pope"

On the evening of the council's opening, 11 October 1962, before a torch-lit crowd in Saint Peter's Square, the pope improvised a few words that remained famous as the "moonlight address". In them he mingled, with heartbreaking simplicity, the cosmos and the children's bedroom :

"When you go home, you will find your children. Give them a caress and tell them : this is the Pope's caress." — John XXIII, improvised address of 11 October 1962^[43]

The pastor of prisons and hospitals

Having become bishop of Rome, John XXIII did not content himself with governing from the Vatican : he visited parishes, the sick and — a gesture that struck the Romans — the inmates of the Regina Coeli prison, at Christmas 1958, telling them he had come because they could not come to him.^[44] That pastoral closeness, which seemed new, was only the Roman translation of the chaplain to the wounded of 1915 and of the country priest he had never ceased to be.

"My bags are packed"

As early as September 1962, a stomach cancer was diagnosed — the disease that had carried off several of his own family. The pope opened the council in the midst of pain, keeping the illness secret. When his condition worsened in spring 1963, he lived his agony as a final offering, in "a profound spirit of abandonment to Jesus", according to the canonization biography.^[45] Far from fleeing suffering, he united it to Christ's sacrifice for the unity he had so desired.

A saint's testament

On the threshold of death, John XXIII summed up what had been the treasure of his whole life — not a work, not a council, but a Person : in the "final reminder" of his spiritual testament, he reminds everyone of what counts most in life, blessed Jesus Christ, his holy Church, his Gospel, and in the Gospel truth and goodness.^[46]

He died on 3 June 1963, on the evening of Whit Monday, at 81, in a worldwide mourning in which believers and unbelievers, leaders of East and West, bowed together.^[47][48] The detail of that death and its resonance is taken up in the dossier Pope Saint John XXIII.

John XXIII's reputation for holiness was immediate and universal : from his funeral onward, many already held him for a saint.

The beatification (3 September 2000)

On 3 September 2000, John Paul II beatified him, during the Jubilee Year.^[49] The miracle accepted was the unexplained healing, in 1966, of an Italian religious sister, Sister Caterina Capitani, suffering from a severe hemorrhage on a stomach tumor — the very disease the pope had died of.^[50] The pope who beatified him had sat as bishop at the Second Vatican Council (1962-1965) convened and opened by John XXIII, making an important contribution to the drafting of the constitution Gaudium et spes^[51] : a bond between the two saints which their common canonization would seal.

The canonization (27 April 2014) and the dispensation from the second miracle

On 27 April 2014, Divine Mercy Sunday, Pope Francis canonized John XXIII together with John Paul II.^[52] Remarkably, Francis dispensed John XXIII from the second miracle normally required, exercising the authority recognized to the pope in this matter, "on the basis of his virtuous and exemplary life, and of the good that flowed from his opening of the council".^[53][54] The Church thus recognized that the holiness of the Papa buono was evident enough to do without a new prodigy.

His feast was set not on the day of his death, but on 11 October, the anniversary of the council's opening — a way of binding the saint and the work of his life together forever. His body, found remarkably preserved, now rests beneath an altar of Saint Peter's Basilica, where it is venerated by pilgrims from the whole world.^[55]

John XXIII's deepest legacy is neither diplomatic nor even conciliar : it is having shown that holiness remains possible in the ordinary — for a Bergamo sharecropper's son as for a cardinal, in a diplomatic chancery as in a country parish. His life is the patient demonstration of a single conviction, noted at twenty-one : "God wants me to be a saint without any restriction of terms, and I must be one." He did nothing else, for sixty years, but hold to that resolution one day at a time — "just for today".

To a Church tempted by anxiety, he leaves the example of a man who handed everything over to Providence and who, for that very reason, dared to "open the windows". To every baptized person, he leaves a short and sure path : gentleness, abandonment, humility, fidelity to the moment. That is why the Christian people, who had called him the "Good Pope" in his lifetime, were not mistaken in naming him a saint after his death.

• Pope Saint John XXIII (1881-1963) — the dossier devoted to his pontificate : the surprise election, the announcement and opening of Vatican II, the encyclicals, the diplomacy of peace.
• The Second Vatican Council (1962-1965) — the great work of his pontificate, of which he saw only the first session.
• Saint Paul VI (1897-1978) — his successor, who brought the council to its completion.
• Saint John Paul II (1920-2005) — who beatified him and was canonized on the same day as him.
• Saint Pius X (1835-1914) — the pope of his priestly youth, another saintly pontiff of the twentieth century.