Fifty years ago on 28th October 1958, on the twelfth count, the Conclave to elect a Pope chose the man who has since come to be known throughout the Christian world as ‘good Pope John’ or ‘Il Papa Buona’. He took the name ‘John’, he explained because his father was called John and most Pope Johns in the history of the church had not had long pontificates. The name was a little controversial because the last pope called John XXIII had been an Anti-Pope. The new Pope was aware of all this for he had been a trained historian and a history teacher as a young priest.
He was born Angelo Giuseppe Roncalli in Sotto il Monte, near Bergamo, in rural Italy in 1881. He was the fourth child in a family of fourteen. The domestic structure was that of an extended farming family. They made their meagre living by share-cropping. The future Pope was said to have remarked that their family was so poor that, ‘the children had no wine’. ‘There are three ways of ruining oneself’ he observed, ‘women, gambling and farming. My father chose the most boring’.
In his early days as a priest he had served as a Bishop’s secretary and as a teacher in the local seminary. During World War I he had been drafted into the Royal Italian Army as a sergeant, serving in the Medical Corps as a stretcher-bearer and as a chaplain. He put on the army uniform and, in what he later described as, ‘a moment of weakness on my part’, grew a fat, bristly moustache. After the war, in 1921, he was recalled to Rome, to work in a Curial Office. In 1925 he was consecrated Bishop and sent to Bulgaria as Apostolic Delegate. He took as his motto ‘Obedience and Peace’.
He later served in Turkey and Greece and in 1944 he was sent to Paris as a diplomat. 1953 saw him return home to Italy as Patriarch of Venice. A glimpse of the future Pope’s approach can be ascertained in an address he gave around that time. He said, ‘Authoritarianism suffocates truth, reducing everything to a rigid and empty formalism that is dependent on outside discipline. It curbs wholesome initiative, mistakes hardness for firmness, inflexibility for dignity. Paternalism is a caricature of true fatherliness. It is often accompanied by an unjustifiable proprietary attitude to one’s victim, a habit of intruding, a lack of proper respect for the rights of subordinates’.
Pope John XXIII was almost diametrically opposite in style, appearance and approach to his predecessor, the distant, ascetic Pope Pius XII who had appointed all but eleven of the cardinals who voted in his successor. Many people believed that John had been elected as a ‘papa di passagio’, a transitional pope. He was seventy-seven years old.
John XXIII’s personal warmth, his good humour and personal kindness captured the affection of countless people in a way his predecessor had failed to do. Once again he joked about his election to the papacy at such an advanced age. He was aware of the potential for cynical comment and exposure especially in the left-wing Italian press. He was a short man, overweight and heavy-featured, with a prominent, hooked Roman nose. He thought out loud saying that God surely knew from the beginning of time that he, John, would one day be Pope. Surely, he mused, ‘he could have made me a little more photogenic’. Despite these apparent physical drawbacks he became a media favourite because of his charism, his sense of humour and his exciting vision for the Church and for the world.
His sense of humour once led him to utter a famous reply when he was asked, ‘How many people work in the Vatican?’ ‘About half of them,’ he replied. He visited prisoners in a Roman gaol, telling them, ‘You could not come to me, so I came to you’. Another story told of how reporters descended on his bemused family following his election as Pope. One of his bachelor brothers looked unimpressed and a reporter asked him why he was so unexcited at his brother having been elected Pope. He replied that, in their part of the country, so many young men had become priests that it was, ‘bound to have happened sometime’. Good Pope John could also be emotional and tender in his dealings with crowds or with individual guests. Many recall his extraordinary capacity to establish an intimate relationship with tens of thousands without being mawkish. Once he asked the crowd in St. Peter's Square beneath his apartment window to take his caress home to their sleeping children.
Good Pope John could hardly have imagined the tide of change that has swept Europe and elsewhere since his election. He was part of that change but he was an unlikely liberal. His episcopal motto, ‘Obedience and Peace,’ does not suggest a radical outlook on life. What endeared him to people was his ability to receive them with grace and courtesy. Visitors often left his presence feeling that they were the important person rather than the Pope. He often greeted visitors saying, 'I am your brother Joseph' (Guiseppe was his second name). He was an eternal optimist too. His opening speech to the Second Vatican Council on October 11th 1962 contained the following pertinent words: ‘In the daily exercise of our pastoral office, we sometimes have to listen, much to our regret, to voices of persons who, though burning with zeal, are not endowed with too much sense of discretion or measure. In these modern times they can see nothing but prevarication and ruin. They say that our era, in comparison with past eras, is getting worse, and they behave as though they had learned nothing from history, which is, nonetheless, the teacher of life. We feel we must disagree with those prophets of gloom, who are always forecasting disaster, as though the end of the world were at hand.’
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