CHAPTER ONE

Pastor et Nauta, Shepherd and Navigator

The eight other modern popes—Leo XIII (1878–1903), Saint Pius X (1903–14), Benedict XV (1914–22), Pius XI (1922–39), Pius XII (1939–58), Paul VI (1963–78), John Paul II (1978–2005), and Benedict XVI (2005–present)—exerted their distinctive influence on the Church they had inherited in their time. (John Paul I occupied the papacy for only thirty-three days in 1978.) Yet for the most part their concerns were internal to the Church, which had been buffeted, battered, and split during nineteen centuries. So many of their predecessors down through the ages had built up defensive walls and sent out armies to conquer rather than open doors and persuade souls to come to the gentle Christ. These modern popes, indeed, faced the myriad threats to the faith with no temporal power at their disposal and diminished spiritual authority, though they tried valiantly (albeit not always successfully) to regain the moral ground on which prior successors of Saint Peter had stood.

Pope John XXIII came to the throne in a world that had survived Nazism and the Holocaust—if barely—and a devastating world war prior to that. Besides fascism and Nazism, he confronted communism and the Cold War, the atomic arms race, and civil strife in many corners of the earth. Science and technology were taking great leaps forward in the West, and the population of the planet was exploding, especially in the undeveloped nations or “Third World.” He was quite well attuned to and prepared for this world. Throughout most of his forty-year career, he worked in the world, far removed from the oftentimes claustrophobic papal court of Rome.

His Church had survived two world wars, and many within its hierarchical leadership felt that it should retrench in the face of “enemies” such as communism and modernism—in effect refighting the battles of previous centuries but without any new weapons in its armory.

His status as a non-Roman, from outside the inner circles of power, made him not only a long shot for election to the papacy but an unlikely candidate for revolutionary. He was seventy-seven when he was elected the Roman pontiff. As a diplomat in Bulgaria, Greece, and Turkey in the years leading up to and during World War II, he had not overly impressed his teachers or army commanders, nor his masters in the Vatican. “Unlikely” may as well have been tattooed on his forehead.

Yet a lifetime’s varied experience had taken hold of Angelo Giuseppe Roncalli: his life had been a rich synthesis of places, people, and circumstances. He had grown up among the farmer-peasants of Bergamo; served with down-to-earth army men; worked with fund-raisers for a curial congregation within the Vatican; spoken with beleaguered Orthodox Christians in Bulgaria; and reached out to Muslims in Turkey, collaborationists in France, and communists there and in Italy. He ministered respectfully to priest-workers, irrespective of whether they were in or out of favor in Rome.

Pragmatic and friendly, he kept the flame of his spiritual life lit always through prayer and quiet good works—and with an intelligent, ironic humor. Intuitive, he was schooled in sacred theology and ecclesial history but was never overtly intellectual; rather he navigated human relationships within and outside the Church with skills and instincts honed over decades in the Vatican Foreign Service.

The startling ascent of a convivial backwater diplomat from rural Italy to the supreme and most powerful office in Christianity in 1958, unlikely as it was, pales somewhat in historical significance to what followed immediately upon the coronation of Roncalli as John XXIII. When he called for a new Vatican Council—a gathering of all the bishops in one place and the first since 1870—he shattered all previous expectations that his would be a transitional or uneventful pontificate.

 

As he lay dying on the last day of May 1963, Roncalli received his Roman cardinals. He told each of them he was “on the point of leaving.” It was as if he were setting out on a journey and would not see his friends and associates for a while. Having fulfilled his role as pastor et nauta, shepherd and navigator, a fisher of men, and having set the “Barque of Peter” (an old-fashioned term used to describe the Church and the papacy, in reference to the apostle’s profession as a fisherman) out onto the sea of the world, he could now himself set forth on the sea of eternity, almost alone. He called for the viaticum (the last Holy Communion means Christ “with you on the way”—a via tecum), and soon he was off on his final voyage beyond the horizon of eternity.

But not before he told many he was offering his life “for a good outcome of the ecumenical council and for peace among men,” which was, in effect, his dying wish. To the last he was quietly insistent on his basic vision. Intuitive, not always well expressed, it came across nevertheless in the Second Vatican Council and in the hopeful love for all men of good will that was expressed in Pacem in terris. With no ambiguity now at the end, with the lucidity of a dying man, he repeated and repeated his wish, “that the great work will be crowned with success.”

Pope John XXIII was a gentle revolutionary. Far from being the caretaker that the Church expected, John created an atmosphere in which, said Jesuit theologian John Courtney Murray, “a lot of things came unstuck—old patterns of thought, behavior, feeling. They were not challenged or refuted, but just sort of dropped.”

The monolithic Church of the Middle Ages would not—perhaps could not—resist the historic movement, encouraged by this pope, toward dynamism and diversity. However painfully, Mother Church would change. And she would then face the inevitable internal reaction and retrenchment that follows any cultural or spiritual revolution.

 

Where did he come from? His birth, youth, and early priesthood—his first twenty-five years—are fairly well documented, considering his unremarkable progress through life in those years. He was a child not only of the Roncalli clan of Sotto il Monte in the region of Bergamo in northern Italy, but a son of the Church, literally, from the day of his birth. There seems to be no question in anyone’s mind that he was always destined for a vocation as a priest, as natural a fact of his life as breathing.

Angelo Giuseppe Roncalli came from the soil of the mountains, from the heart of a traditionally pious and typically boisterous family of twelve siblings (three of whom died very young) and numerous close relatives. He grew up under the direct and unending influence of the Roman Catholic Church of Pope Leo XIII, one of the most able and progressive pontiffs of the past two centuries. Just as young Roncalli reached his majority and shortly before his ordination as a priest, Pius X was elected to the papacy and for a dozen years stood as an antimodernist bulwark, to be succeeded by the scholarly Benedict XV on the eve of the Great War.

Young Roncalli experienced more continuity than change in his holy, enduring Church, even though the theological winds and emerging modern values blew up against the fortress that had been buttressed by the sixteenth-century Council of Trent and Pius IX’s inwardly focused Council of the Vatican in 1869–70, which defined papal infallibility at that time and for all time. Piety trumped inquiry in the Church in which Roncalli came of age, but he felt encouraged to follow the path of historical research and reflection that would feed his capacious mind and fill his big heart—over time—with insights into the human and organizational aspects of his beloved institution, Holy Mother Church.

It must be remembered, however, before hoping to understand John, that doubts and speculations seemingly never entered the picture for the seminarian or the neophyte priest. There was no room in a life devoted to faith—his own, his family’s, and that of those to whom he sought to minister and for whom he prayed—to entertain such worldly distractions or intellectual game playing. Life was too precious, and too short for most, and salvation was its ultimate end for the faithful Christian. Period.

And where did he go? From the parochial world of his mountain village, and even of Bergamo, a small but storied imperial city northeast of Milan with famous traditions of music, sanctity, and warfare, he would move to Rome, the living heart of the Church, then to ever-widening roles on the European diplomatic stage before emerging, late in his life, as the “Pope of the World.” He also experienced World War I firsthand, in the trenches, as a young noncommissioned officer and chaplain in the Italian Army. His was a remarkable pilgrim’s progress that began inauspiciously, to say the least.

He progressed, it might be said, from family to family, from his own flesh and blood to the fraternity of seminary and priesthood, to the distant “family” of the faithful in the Balkans and in cosmopolitan France, to the people of Venice for whom he was patriarch and pater familias. Always he tried to remain in contact with the Roncallis of Sotto il Monte, including his parents, who both died in the 1930s (when Angelo was in his fifties), siblings, and nieces and nephews. Finally, as il Papa and Holy Father, his family extended across the globe, to mountain villages in Africa and Asia and cities in the Americas that he could never hope to visit in person as his successors one day would.

Who and what formed his character? As a boy, it seems he was touched with holiness (a term that needs to be explained and explored in depth in the context of this man and his time) from a source outside himself. He was a good boy and a good man, by all accounts. How he became the Good Pope, then, is the story that cries out to be told to a new generation.