CHAPTER TWO

Family, Youth, and Seminary (1881–1904)

In the year of 1881, 25 November, I, Francesco Rebuzzini, the priest of this church of San Giovanni Battista of Sotto il Monte, baptized the infant born today of the lawfully married couple Giovanni Battista Roncalli and Marianna Mazzola, from Brusico in this parish. The infant was given the names Giovanni Giuseppe.

—PARISH REGISTER

This simple entry in the parish register of a northern Italian hill town is the first public record of the future Pope John XXIII, and the error it contains—the priest recorded the infant’s name as Giovanni Giuseppe when it was actually Angelo Giuseppe—highlights a number of the circumstances surrounding the child’s birth.

Tucked away in the foothills of the Alps, just north of the Lombard plains, the village of Sotto il Monte—whose name means “Under the Mountain”—was a nondescript, out-of-the-way place. A cluster of gray stone buildings, it was home to about 1,200 people, most of whom made their living from the land. The weather in Sotto il Monte was often inclement—hot summers alternating with wet winters, when fierce winds swept down from the Alps, bringing rain that made roads nearly impassable with mud.

Angelo Roncalli was born on one such day, when the tramontano—the northerly mountain gale that can reach speeds of 50 miles per hour—buffeted the town. He came into the world around ten in the morning in his parents’ stone house, in the first-floor bedroom. It was the custom of the inhabitants of Sotto il Monte to name their houses, and the Roncallis called theirs the Palazzo, or palace, but there was nothing quite so grand about the place, especially since six cows shared the house with an extended family of Angelo’s aunts, uncles, grandparents, and cousins. Angelo’s birth brought the number of inhabitants in the Palazzo up to thirty-two.

Angelo was Giovanni and Marianna’s fourth child. The fact that here was a boy, after three girls, caused great rejoicing for Giovanni, a tenant farmer who would now have someone to help him till his five hectares of land. But it was no less a cause of joy for Uncle Zaverio Roncalli, Angelo’s great-uncle, the patriarch of the family, known to one and all as “Barba.”

Shortly after Angelo was born, Zaverio and Giovanni and Marianna, who had roused herself from her bed and wrapped up the infant in shawls, went in search of Father Francesco Rebuzzini in order to have Angelo baptized. When they were told the parish priest was out, they simply sat down and waited on the cold benches of the church vestibule. There was no question of returning later—it was the custom of the family to baptize infants immediately, not only because of the high rate of infant mortality at the time, but because of the Roncallis’ profound faith in their God and their Church.

Rebuzzini did not return until late that evening and stepped into the dark church to find Zaverio, Giovanni, and Marianna waiting for him. Although he was no doubt tired—tired enough to make a mistake about the infant’s name in the church register—he knew that these devout people could not be put off, and he baptized Angelo in a simple ceremony, with Uncle Zaverio as the child’s godfather.

And then the four returned home and the cycle of their lives began again—the cycle of faith, family, and farm. This cycle would give shape to the life of one of history’s greatest popes.

 

After his election as supreme pontiff, Angelo Roncalli wrote, with typical humor, “There are three ways of ruining oneself—women, gambling and farming. My father chose the most boring.” And the most arduous. Giovanni Roncalli was a sharecropper, tilling land that belonged to several wealthy landlords. He gave half his crop—wine, kale, milk and veal from the cows, silk from the silkworms on his cultivated mulberry bushes—to his landlords and kept the rest for himself. In good years, the Roncallis barely got by, but in bad ones they sometimes did not have enough to eat, given the mouths they had to feed: Giovanni and Marianna would go on to have ten more children after Angelo.

The Roncallis seldom even had bread, but made do with polenta (a dish made of corn flour). Despite this, they always had room at the table for one more. As Roncalli was later to write, “When a beggar appeared at the door of our kitchen, when the children—20 of them—were waiting impatiently for their minestrata—there was always room for him and my mother would hasten to seat the stranger alongside us.”

Roncalli became pope as the world sped into the 1960s, but he grew up in a place where time stood still. Roncallis had lived in Sotto il Monte since the early fifteenth century and were as much a part of the countryside as the stunted trees and the hills. (Their very name comes from the Italian word ronchi, an earthen terrace for planting grapes on hillsides.) They divided their days with church bells: The Angelus rang three times, awakening them at five in the morning; reminding Marianne to make lunch at noon; and calling the men in from the fields at six. The year was marked by Catholic feast days.

Angelo Roncalli and his brothers and sisters were surrounded by God and Church. When his Uncle Zaverio woke him up in the morning, the older man would say, “Time to get up, Angelo,” and recite from the Angelus: “ ‘The Angel of the Lord declared unto Mary.’ ”

And Roncalli would respond, “ ‘And she conceived by the Holy Spirit. Hail Mary, full of grace. . . .’ ”

A short, stocky-legged, and powerfully built boy, Angelo worked in the fields alongside his father and the other Roncalli men, but he was especially close to Marianna, who provided him with his earliest memory: a journey to a shrine to the Virgin Mary, about a mile from the Roncalli home. On November 21, 1885, the feast of Mary’s Presentation at the Temple, a great crowd gathered at the doors of the shrine. Unable to get her son inside, Marianna held him high to look through the window and said, “Look, Angelino, look how beautiful the Madonna is. I have consecrated you wholly to her.”

With this as what he called “the first clear memory that I have of my childhood,” it’s no wonder that Roncalli would later write, “I can’t remember a time when I did not want to serve God as a priest.”

In October 1887, Angelo started at the village’s only school, a simple one-room building with three benches, one for each grade. His younger brother Zaverio marveled that Angelo actually “wanted to go to school,” and it showed. Angelo was quick and clever, sometimes too much so for his classmates. One day a visiting inspector of schools posed a trick question: “Which is heavier, a quintal of iron or a quintal of straw?,” and all the children, quite sure of themselves, shouted out, “Iron!” There followed a silence, and then Angelo gave the correct answer: “A quintal is a quintal. They weigh the same.”

Not taking too kindly to this, Angelo’s fellow students beat him up. As one of them later remembered gleefully, “We waited for him on the street and we beat him up—just a little.”

This didn’t stop Angelo, who quickly became the best student in the village as he made his way through his primary school’s three grades, taught in part by Father Rebuzzini. Angelo was a voracious reader with a near-photographic memory. When not in school, he either studied independently or under the religious tutelage of Uncle Zaverio. Barba, in his sixties and unmarried, was a profoundly faithful, well-read Christian who traveled to Rome in 1888 to attend the fiftieth anniversary of Pope Leo XIII’s ordination as a priest.

On February 13 the following year, when he was eight, Angelo received the sacrament of confirmation at Carvico, the neighboring parish, by Bishop Gaetano Camilo Guindani. And two weeks later, on March 3, he made his first Holy Communion, a rare privilege for a boy of that age. (In the nineteenth century, children were generally not allowed the sacrament of the Eucharist until they were between ten and fourteen years old. It wasn’t until the reign of Pope Pius X, twenty years later, that the age was changed to seven or eight.)

Later, as a young adult, Roncalli noted the occasion in his journal: “I was allowed to make my first communion on a cold Lenten morning, in the Church of Santa Maria di Brusicco. Only the children, the parish priest, Rebuzzini, and his curate, Don Bortolo Locatelli, were present.” Roncalli remembered that Father Rebuzzini had asked the future pope to inscribe the names of the new communicants in the Apostleship of Prayer, which he said was “the first writing exercise I can remember doing, the first page of so many that would proliferate in half a century of living pen in hand.”

The Apostleship of Prayer was a group of devout Catholics who daily offered their work and prayers to some good cause or intention approved by Pope Leo XIII. It was just another way for Roncalli and those who were as pious as he to devote every minute of their waking lives to Christ. The extraordinary thing about Roncalli, however, was that despite his evident religious zeal and sanctity, even as a very young boy, he was human—full of life and mischief.

While he respected and loved elders like Barba and others in the Roncalli family, he also saw through them. Half a century after he left his little village, he wrote to his brother Giovanni, “Fortunately, you brothers do not imitate our old people . . . who hardly ever spoke to each other except to grumble. . . . I remember that when I was a child I used to implore the Lord most fervently to make the old Roncallis talk to each other a little. And I used to wonder: how will they ever get to Heaven if the Lord says we must all love each other.”

Despite their flaws, Roncalli loved his family deeply. He was not as close to his father, Giovanni, as he was to his mother, Marianna, but he carried with him deep in his memory a day in the summer after his first communion when his father held him on his shoulders to watch a religious parade in a nearby village. Years later, in 1958, on first being carried in the sede gestatoria, the portable papal chair, he recalled, “Once again I am being carried aloft by my sons. More than 70 years ago I was carried on the shoulders of my father. . . . The secret of everything is to let oneself be carried by God, and so to carry Him [to others].”

Roncalli began carrying God to others when he entered the Bergamo junior seminary in 1892, when he was nearly eleven years old. Entering the seminary at this time did not mean he was certain to become a priest—it was a kind of high school, the only place where gifted male children in the district could receive a higher education. Angelo knew in his heart that he had a vocation, but his father was far from convinced: “He is a poor farmer’s son,” Roncalli the elder said. “He’ll make a poor priest.”

Before Angelo left for school, his mother had collected all the money she could from the cash-strapped Roncallis, who lived mainly by barter, and presented it to her son. It was only two lire—a few cents—and she wept at how paltry it seemed, the only time the son could remember her crying.

 

Bergamo was only about 8 miles from Sotto il Monte, but it was in many ways situated in another universe. It was the biggest town in the area, had a shopping district and fine cafés, and was famous for its commedia dell’arte productions. The town’s inner city, where the seminary was located, dated back to the time of the Etruscans.

Here Roncalli was exposed to a level of urbanity and sophistication he had never before experienced, but he also became aware of some of the harsh realities of the world beyond his home village.

Twenty-two years earlier, in 1870, Pius IX famously declared himself a “prisoner of the Vatican” after King Victor Emmanuel annexed Rome and the papal states. Pius IX, who ruled as pontiff from 1846 to 1878, forbade Catholics to hold national office or even to vote in the face of a resurgent Italian nationalism he deemed inimical to the Church.

This isolationism, however, could not survive the industrial revolution sweeping the world and Italy. Lured by factory jobs, workers left the farms and found their way to urban centers, where they worked grinding hours for pennies and lived in desolate conditions in slums—many such workers’ ghettos were located right in the heart of the shining town of Bergamo. With both unemployment and taxes high, young Italians were leaving the country for France, Latin America, and the United States in record numbers—196,000 in 1888 alone. Both lay Catholics and clergy knew that the Church would now have to minister to a changing world.

In 1891, Leo XIII promulgated his famous encyclical Rerum novarum (The Condition of Labor), which began, “Some remedy must be found, and quickly found, for the misery and wretchedness which press so heavily at this moment on the huge majority of the very poor.”

As the Church and the world began to change, Roncalli changed with it. In this regard, Bergamo was the place to be. Taking Rerum novarum to heart, Catholics, both clergy and laymen, set up soup kitchens, fought for the rights of the working class, and organized unions—by 1895, there would be nearly 100 unions or cooperatives representing 42,000 Catholic laborers and peasants, the very heart and soul of the Catholic Action movement in Italy.

For the time being, this fervor was out of reach for young Roncalli, who found himself struggling with subjects—especially science and mathematics—and with his good-natured inability to stop joking around in class and start paying attention. However, in his first few years in the junior seminary, he excelled at the things that really interested him—theology and history—and his grades improved.

When he entered the senior seminary in 1895, the fourteen-year-old Roncalli began to keep a journal, under the advice of the school’s spiritual director, Canon Luigi Isacchi. The journal, kept in a series of black academic notebooks with stiff covers, was a way to stay in touch with his spiritual goals and to castigate himself when he went off course, as he did—by his own reckoning—with increasing frequency.

He would keep the journal for the rest of his life, ending up with thirty-eight notebooks and folders, which were published after his death in the volume titled Journal of a Soul.

“It seems quite impossible,” he wrote in a typical entry. “The more I make resolves, the less I keep them. This is all I am good for: gossiping away, promising the earth and then? Nothing! If only I knew how to be humble.

“Sometimes I spend far too much time talking with the curate and it might be said of me, ‘When words abound, sin is found.’ Then there is another thing—I am very greedy about fruit. I must beware, I must watch myself.”

Despite its trivial concern with gossip and diets, young Roncalli’s journal carefully records the journey of a man on his way to becoming a priest. The first page of the first journal begins with a quotation from Ecclesiastics 3.27—“It is good for a man to bear the yoke in his youth”—and goes on to list the rules by which he hoped to live, including the time that should be spent each day in praying, attending Mass, meditating, reciting the Rosary, and, especially, in self-examination.

“Make a habit of frequently raising your mind to God,” the young Roncalli writes at the same time as he admonishes himself to never “play or jest” with women, although he confessed that he had “two eyes in my head which want to look at more than they should.”

Roncalli’s early journals are aspirational—they record what he wished to be, and only sometimes was. Much later, reading over his notebooks as pope, he recalled, “I was a good boy, innocent, somewhat timid. . . . I imposed severe sacrifices on myself. I took everything very seriously.”

But he loved Bergamo, and he would look back with great nostalgia and fondness on his eight years in junior and senior seminary there. He took long walks throughout the town, wearing the cassock and round hat of the seminarian. Although, as a pious student, he was not supposed to notice too much (he needed to keep “custody of his eyes,” as the saying went), he saw both the ancient beauty of the town as well as the brawling taverns, the gambling houses, and the terrible poverty.

He did not yet know it, but he was receiving his education as a humanist—or perhaps, what he saw brought his naturally humanistic tendencies to the fore. Roncalli would not be a priest—or later, a pope—isolated from the modern world.

Perhaps not surprisingly—but quite painfully for Roncalli—he began to have problems when he returned home to Sotto il Monte. To his surprise, the elders of the village began to defer to him in embarrassing ways, as if he were already a priest. His cousins addressed him formally (voi) rather than intimately (tu), yet at the same time, it seemed to him, they considered him arrogant.

Perhaps, from their point of view, he was. In 1893, the family moved to a somewhat larger house, but the overcrowding and the continual squabbling there grated on Roncalli. “These cursed holidays,” he wrote in his journal. “I have had three days of my vacation, and already I am tired of it. At the sight of so much poverty, in the midst of such suspicions, oppressed by so many anxieties, I often sigh and am sometimes driven to tears.”

In June 1898, Roncalli returned home for a visit but grew frustrated by the continual family arguments. He was also upset because he was unable to find ink with which to write. A visiting Franciscan priest stopped by the house and heard tales—from Roncalli cousins, or perhaps from a disgruntled brother or sister—that Roncalli had demanded and received preferential treatment from his mother, getting more food than the rest of the family. The priest promptly took these rumors back to Roncalli’s superiors at the seminary, who sternly rebuked him, forcing him, as he wrote in his journal, “to humble myself against my will.”

Knowing that someone in his family had slandered him did not exactly endear the rest of the Roncallis to Angelo. In September of that year, he returned home again. On Saturday evening, September 24, he paid a visit to Father Rebuzzini, the parish priest who had baptized and, later, taught him. The two exchanged happy greetings, and the next morning, Roncalli saw him at Mass. But later that morning, Father Rebuzzini collapsed and died as he prepared for the liturgy. As Roncalli records in his journal:

 

I did not weep, but inside me I turned to stone. To see him there on the ground, in that state, with his mouth open and red with blood, with his eyes closed, I thought he looked to me—oh, I shall always remember that sight—he looked to me like a statue of the dead Jesus, taken down from the cross. And he spoke to me no more, looked at me no more.

 

Roncalli grieved deeply, writing in his journal, “I am left an orphan to my immense loss. . . . If my father has gone, Jesus is still here and opens his arms to me, inviting me to go to him for consolation.” He was sixteen years old, and already he was proclaiming that his true family was the Church.

Taking with him Father Rebuzzini’s copy of Imitation of Christ by Thomas à Kempis—Roncalli would keep it all his life—he returned to Bergamo. There was, of course, no longer any doubt that Angelo would become a priest. He had been given his first tonsure in 1895 and had just received the minor orders of lector and porter on July 3, 1898. A year later, on June 25, 1899, he received the minor holy orders of acolyte and exorcist. Even his studies had improved, and he was made prefect of his dormitory.

A year after Father Rebuzzini’s death, while visiting a parish near Bergamo, Roncalli made the acquaintance of Monsignor Giacomo Maria Radini-Tedeschi, a canon of Saint Peter’s Basilica in Rome. Radini-Tedeschi was a man of intelligence, power, and sophistication. An intimate of the elderly Pope Leo, he was spoken about as a future papal secretary of state, a liberal whose Opera dei Congressi was the oversight organization for Catholic social action groups that had sprung up across the country. Radini-Tedeschi told the young seminarian that if he ever came to Rome, he could study in his action group, Our Lady’s Club.

Going to the great city of Rome seemed an unlikely occurrence to Roncalli, but then he had a stroke of extremely good fortune. Back in Bergamo, he was invited to sit for an exam for entry into the famed Pontifical Roman Seminary, the Apollinare, on a scholarship from the Flaminio Cerasola Foundation. Roncalli passed the exam and, along with two other Bergamo seminarians, took the overnight train to Rome, arriving at 6:30 A.M. on January 4, 1901.

The Apollinare turned out to be housed in a dark and ancient building located in a maze of twisting streets. Roncalli had a tiny room to himself. Although the mattress was hard, he had his own radiator, as well as electricity and running water, an almost luxurious existence for a young man from the country. “I could never have imagined,” he wrote to his mother, “I would be so fortunate.”

He set out to explore the Eternal City, the birthplace of Western civilization and ancient seat of Saint Peter the Apostle. He had arrived during a Holy Year, when pilgrims had made their way from across the globe to pay homage to ninety-year-old Leo XIII. Visiting the Propaganda Fide, the missionary college, Angelo was impressed as “forty clerics recited their own compositions in 40 different languages. . . . Some were white, some yellow, some red, and some had hands and faces as black as coal.”

Roncalli painted a colorful picture of his teachers at the college, as well. There was Don Francesco Pitocchi, a priest with a rare disease that prevented him from lifting his head from his chest—yet, as Roncalli wrote, “He read our eyes; he read our hearts,” and he acted as a profound spiritual adviser to the young seminarians. Roncalli’s professor of Catholic Church history, Monsignor Umberto Benigni, published a Church newspaper and would often whisper to the seminarians summaries of the day’s news, since they were forbidden to read newspapers themselves. Benigni, unfortunately, would later become an archconservative with anti-Semitic views, but at the time, Roncalli considered him a powerful teacher of history, a subject that had always fascinated the young seminarian—and would continue to occupy his thoughts in future years.

Another character was the bursar, Don Ignazio Garroni, from whom the penniless Roncalli was forced to borrow small sums of money. Garroni often strode through the dining hall during meals, urging the seminarians to “Eat less, eat less!” There was even a priest who claimed to be able to levitate.

Roncalli learned something from all his teachers, including Father Eugenio Pacelli, the tall, ascetic young lecturer in canon law who would later become Pope Pius XII. In June 1901, Roncalli won honors in theology and a prize for a paper he wrote in Hebrew. He had become so fluent in Latin that he was able to delve into medieval manuscripts at will. Life in Rome agreed with young Roncalli—but then his world came crashing down. The Italian government, still anticlerical, drafted him and many of his classmates into the army, refusing to make an exception for seminarians.

On November 30, 1901, he reported to Bergamo as a private in the 73rd Infantry Regiment, the Lombardy Brigade, for twelve months of service. Thus began what he later called his “year of Babylonian captivity.”

Having his studies interrupted was part of what made the army so painful for Roncalli; the other part, as a fairly tender twenty-one-year-old who had been sheltered in seminaries since the age of twelve, was seeing how vulgar and sexually active his fellow soldiers were. “The army,” he wrote in his journal, “is a running fountain of pollution.”

But, in fact, Roncalli didn’t do badly for himself, even in this culture. As a mountain boy used to walking, long marches held no fear for him, and he excelled, somewhat unexpectedly, on the rifle range. Before his year was up, he was promoted to corporal, and then sergeant, and returned to the Apollinare with real-world experience that would stand him in good stead when World War I broke out.

Pope Leo XIII died on July 20, 1903. He had reigned for twenty-five years, the second-longest-serving pontiff in history (until John Paul II a century later) and the only pope Roncalli had ever known. Leo had been a formidable force for progressive change within the Church. The favorite to replace him was Cardinal Mariano Rampolla del Tindaro, forty-nine, the Vatican secretary of state who would likely carry on Leo’s liberal policies. In fact Rampolla led in the early voting at the conclave, but when the white smoke poured out of the chimney above the Sistine Chapel, the new pope was Cardinal Giuseppe Melchior Sarto, the patriarch of Venice. Why the sudden reversal?

Emperor Franz Joseph of Austria-Hungary vetoed Rampolla’s candidacy in the last exercise of the jus exclusivae, or right of exclusion, traditionally claimed by Spain, France, and Austria since the sixteenth century, during which the secular rulers could eliminate papal candidates they found unpalatable.

Sarto, the newfound darling of the large bloc of conservatives, took the name Pius X. His election would have a profound influence on Roncalli’s future. (And Roncalli would be the second of three patriarchs of Venice elevated to the papacy in the twentieth century.)

 

Roncalli was ordained a deacon on December 18, 1903. He graduated from the Pontifical Roman Seminary eight months later, in July 1904. On the morning of August 10, 1904, he was ordained a priest by Bishop Giuseppe Caeppetelli, the titular patriarch of Constantinople, in the church of Santa Maria in Rome’s Piazza del Popolo. His parents and his Uncle Zaverio were unable to be there to see him reach this treasured goal—they couldn’t afford the price of a train ride—but he wrote them immediately, filled with gratitude, and thanked them.

The next morning, Father Roncalli celebrated his first Mass in the crypt of Saint Peter’s (where he would be buried some sixty years later, before his body was moved “upstairs”) and then was brought to an audience with the new pope by Father Domenico Spolverini, the vice rector of the Apollinare. Father Spolverini told Pius, “Your Holiness, here is a young priest of Bergamo, who has just celebrated his first Mass.” After congratulating him, Pius asked the youthful Roncalli—still three months shy of his twenty-third birthday, the canonical age for ordination—when he would be back home.

“For the Feast of the Assumption [August 15],” Roncalli replied.

“Ah, what a feast that will be, up there in your little hamlet,” Pius X replied. “And how those fine Bergamesque bells will peal out on that day!”

And so they would.