CHAPTER THREE
Early Priesthood and Rome (1904–15)
On the 15th [of August], the feast of the Assumption,” the newly ordained Father Roncalli wrote in his journal, “I was at Sotto il Monte. I count that day among the happiest of my life, for me, for my relations and benefactors, for everyone.”
The day was as joyous as Pius X had predicted. Roncalli celebrated Mass in the same church he had been baptized in twenty-three years earlier. He preached a sermon on the Assumption of the Virgin Mary. Many of those who had known him since his birth began to weep, at which point Roncalli interjected, “Dear brothers, my dear real brothers, seeing you cry this way unsettles me, although I know they are tears of joy.”
But Roncalli did not stay around Sotto Il Monte for too long. Two weeks later, he left for Roccantica, a town about 50 miles north of Rome, where he spent time with recently ordained priests. In November, he was back at the Apollinare studying canon law and working as a prefect for the incoming freshmen seminarians. He was busy and happy and idealistic, writing in his journal “that in all things there must be humility, great spiritual fervor, mildness and courtesy towards everyone.” But his young priesthood was not without a few glitches. His spiritual adviser, Father Francesco Pitocchi, convinced him to give a talk on the Feast of the Immaculate Conception to the Children of Mary, a group of girls and young women who met in a chapel near Roccantica. Not used to the company of such privileged young women, he wrote out a flowery speech and then grew flustered as he made it:
My talk was a disaster. I mixed up quotations from the Old and the New Testaments. I confused Saint Alphonsus with Saint Bernard. I mistook writings of the Fathers for writings of the prophets. A fiasco. I was so ashamed that afterwards I fell into the arms of Father Francesco and confessed my mortification.
His family, in particular his mother, was another and more serious problem. She wrote to him complaining that he wasn’t sending her any money, that he had stopped caring for her, that he had sent a photograph of himself to the local priest rather than to her. He replied as patiently as he could. He had little money, he told her. As to the picture, he answered, “It is true that I have not yet sent a portrait to my family whereas I have sent it to the parish priest, but this is first of all because you already had it and he hadn’t—and then I didn’t want to distribute too many of my portraits, not being a pope or cardinal or bishop, but a mere humble priest.”
But Roncalli soon faced bigger problems. The rise of Pius X to the papacy had led the Church away from the more liberal policies of Leo XIII and his advisers, including Monsignor Giacomo Maria Radini-Tedeschi, a canon of Saint Peter’s Basilica, whom Roncalli met briefly before earning his scholarship to Rome. In July 1904, to the disappointment of many within the Catholic Church, Pope Pius dissolved the Opera dei Congressi. As chaplain of the organization, which promoted social justice, Radini-Tedeschi called Pius’s actions “the hardest moment of my life.”
In October, Bishop Gaetano Camillo Guindani of Bergamo died, and Pius appointed Radini-Tedeschi to the bishopric—a great honor, but also a way of moving him out of the centers of power in Rome. The bishop-elect needed a secretary and apparently tried out Roncalli and his young Bergamo friend and fellow priest Guglielmo Carozzi for a week each before settling on Roncalli. On January 19, 1905, as Pius ordained Radini-Tedeschi bishop, Roncalli held the Book of Gospels over his shoulders, signifying the burdens his mentor would carry as the new bishop of Bergamo.
Then Bishop Radini-Tedeschi departed for Bergamo, taking his new secretary with him. It was the beginning of an extraordinary relationship between Roncalli and the man he called “my spiritual father” and “the Pole Star of my priesthood.”
Giacomo Maria Radini-Tedeschi was born in 1857 in Piacenza, a farming community about 40 miles south of Bergamo, but his early life was far different from Roncalli’s. His family was an ancient and noble one; he was actually a count, but he surrendered his title when he became a priest.
A firm believer in social justice and Catholicism as a spiritual force that could change the lives of the poor and less fortunate, Radini-Tedeschi rose quickly through Leo XIII’s Church. His new assignment seemingly put an end to his ascendancy, but he accepted his post with a humility that did not go unobserved by his new secretary.
He and Roncalli arrived in Bergamo on April 19, 1905. The pair must have made quite a picture. Radini-Tedeschi—“so tall and noble in person and manner,” as Angelo was later to write—was as thin and ascetic-looking as Roncalli was short and squat. If one were casting a count and a peasant in a play, they would be ideally suited for their roles. The effect was heightened by the fact that the bishop’s carriage fit only one seat, forcing Roncalli to run behind it. “I willingly puffed along,” he later wrote, “but the poor bishop never enjoyed the ride, for he kept worrying about me and looking back to see that I hadn’t collapsed.” The experience led Roncalli, as pope, to add a seat in his official car for his secretary.
Radini-Tedeschi was a brilliant, nervous, autocratic multi-tasker who paid attention to the slightest detail and could occasionally come across as a martinet. Roncalli was a very different personality, but the two men, bonded by their enormous energy, complemented each other. They had barely gotten settled into the episcopal palace in Bergamo when Radini-Tedeschi headed off for the tomb of Saint Charles Borromeo in Milan, and then to the shrine at Lourdes. Roncalli accompanied him. The men would make numerous such pilgrimages together, trips that were invaluable in broadening Roncalli’s outlook on the Church in other parts of the world.
After their initial trip, Radini-Tedeschi and Roncalli—soon to be known as “the Bishop’s shadow”—set about transforming Bergamo. In 1905, there were 430,000 Catholics in the diocese, with 350 parishes, 512 churches, and 2,000 priests, all of which fell under the bishop’s responsibility. And the place, it seemed, was falling apart. The episcopal palace was, according to Roncalli, “an ugly, inconvenient and insanitary building,” so Radini-Tedeschi ordered a new one built and moved into it in 1906. The seminary was without running water or electricity, and Radini-Tedeschi modernized it. The seventeenth-century cathedral was extensively renovated, and new schools and churches were built throughout the diocese. Radini-Tedeschi began a series of pastoral visits to every parish; Roncalli estimated that the bishop had personally given communion to at least a third of all of Bergamo’s Catholics.
Radini-Tedeschi’s energy and attention to detail won over the clerics and laypeople in Bergamo who had assumed Radini-Tedeschi would arrive from Rome with an attitude that their northern diocese was beneath him. For his part, it became clear that, over and above his construction projects, Radini-Tedeschi intended to continue to carry on the principles of Catholic Action that he had so treasured. As Roncalli would later write in his biography of Radini-Tedeschi, “He grieved for the disappearance of [the Opera dei Congressi], but always remained faithful to its ideals . . . [and wanted] to direct its rejuvenated energies into new social organizations required by the new conditions of the times.”
For his part, Roncalli’s education with Radini-Tedeschi taught him that there was a way to apply changes within the Church while preserving older traditions, an important lesson he would apply later during the Second Vatican Council.
Through Radini-Tedeschi, Roncalli met a fascinating group of liberal clergy who sought to fulfill their traditional roles of administering to the faithful while pushing forward the idea of Christ as an instrument of social change. “Prudence,” Radini-Tedeschi told Roncalli, “does not consist of doing nothing. It means to act, and act well.” Radini-Tedeschi organized a travel aid service to help the workers who were forced by the Italian government to immigrate to other countries. He established three organizations to help women: the League of Women Workers, which protected women in the workplace at a time when they had no rights whatsoever; the Association for the Protection of Young Women; and the Casa di Maternita, which aided expectant mothers. (Roncalli served as adviser to these three groups.)
In 1909, when iron workers went on strike in Ranica, a small town outside Bergamo, Radini-Tedeschi made a personal contribution to the workers’ fund, and he and Roncalli visited their homes with food and clothing. As Roncalli later wrote, “The question was not a simple one of wages and personalities, but one of principle: the fundamental right of Christian labor to organize against the powerful organization of capital.”
Not everyone accepted this, naturally—“Less than benevolent reports were dispatched to our superiors in Rome,” Roncalli wrote dryly—but Radini-Tedeschi was able to convince Pope Pius that his work with the strikers was justified. Radini-Tedeschi wrote directly to Pius, who responded, “We cannot disapprove of what you have thought prudent to do, because you are fully acquainted with the place, the persons involved and the circumstances.”
In September 1905, through Radini-Tedeschi, Roncalli met Cardinal Andrea Carlo Ferrari, the archbishop of Milan. Despite their twenty-year difference in age, the two men became fast friends. Ferrari also served as Roncalli’s spiritual adviser. Ferrari was out of favor with Pius X for his liberal views—in fact, one historian has suggested that Pius orchestrated a slanderous campaign against Ferrari, whom Roncalli, as pope, would beatify in 1963. It was typical of both Roncalli and Radini-Tedeschi that, while it was not politically expedient to be a friend of Ferrari, they continued to openly visit and consult him in Milan.
One such visit, in February 1906, bore important fruit. While Radini-Tedeschi and Ferrari discussed a forthcoming clerical meeting, Roncalli browsed idly in the cardinal’s library, which included ancient tomes and dusty parchments. There he found something extraordinary, as he later wrote: “Suddenly I was struck by 39 bound parchment volumes which bore the title: Archivio Spirituale—Bergamo.” What Roncalli had discovered were documents that described the pastoral visits of Saint Charles Borromeo to the Bergamo diocese in 1575, a detailed account of the Church life in the Renaissance.
Determined to edit and publish these documents, he returned to Milan again and again over the course of 1906 to work. In order to aid his secretary, Radini-Tedeschi introduced Roncalli to the prefect of Milan’s Ambrosian Library, Monsignor Achille Ratti, who later became Pope Pius XI. Ratti agreed to help Roncalli prepare the documents for publication. The first volume of Record of the Apostolic Visit of Saint Charles Borromeo to Bergamo, 1575, came out in 1936. The last appeared in 1958. As Roncalli wrote wryly, “As so often happens, so it happened in this case too: A project begins with the naming of committees, but the work has to be done by a single person.”
Roncalli was now gaining a reputation. More and more, he was viewed as an indefatigable activist: “Our fine Don Roncalli has tried to organize even the telephone operators,” a Bergamo businessman noted ruefully. “Would that he were satisfied just to organize the sacristans.”
But he was not. His working education with Radini-Tedeschi was indeed teaching him the importance of prudence, in the true sense of the word: “to act, and to act well.” Radini-Tedeschi encouraged Roncalli to spread his wings. He knew his young charge was no mere secretary, but a man in possession of many talents. Roncalli spent a great deal of time filling in for priests who were absent in their parishes—saying Mass, visiting the sick, hearing confessions, teaching children catechism—so that he could understand the very beating heart of pastoral work.
In 1906, he began teaching church history and apologetics, the defense of the Catholic faith, at the seminary in Bergamo. His students later remembered him hurrying into the classroom, late and out of breath, entertaining them with an anecdote or two, and then displaying an unexpected breadth of knowledge for someone so young. “Always be prepared to answer someone who demands a reason for your faith,” he told his students.
Throughout the ten years he served as Radini-Tedeschi’s secretary, Roncalli continued to travel. Between 1905 and 1913, he and Radini-Tedeschi made five pilgrimages to Lourdes, attended numerous conferences all over Europe, and also made a pilgrimage to the Holy Land in 1906. Roncalli wrote about the latter trip, sending dispatches back to L’Eco di Bergamo that showed a good deal of writing talent. Here he describes an early morning trip across the Lake of Tiberias:
I shall never forget the enchantment, the heart’s ease, the spiritual relish I discovered this morning floating upon these waters. Little by little, as our small boat stood out into the lake, the first light of dawn lent color to the water, the houses and then the surrounding hills. We did not speak, but our hearts were stirred. It was as though we could see Jesus crossing this lake in Peter’s boat. Jesus was before us and we could see him; unworthy though we were, we sailed towards him and our prayer, silent though it was, was eloquent and spontaneous.
Seeing the Holy Land, where Christ lived and walked, was inspiring for Roncalli. It gave him a feeling of the purity and essence of Christianity—a feeling the previous passage distills movingly and poetically: “We sailed towards him.” They approached the living Christ both literally and figuratively.
There was nothing quite so pure about the wars of faith going on in the Church, however. Pope Pius’s 1907 encyclical Pascendi Dominci gregus (Feeding the Lord’s Flock) was a thundering attack on “modernism,” which was then vaguely defined as a rational approach to the Bible, the separation of the Christ of history and the Christ of faith, and the belief that dogma was mutable and could, therefore, change over time.
Pascendi heralded what amounted to a crackdown on modernist or humanist belief within the clergy. Radini-Tedeschi, of course, was a prime proponent of humanism. Councils of vigilance were set up within dioceses to watch for any deviation from Church doctrine. Umberto Benigni, Roncalli’s old professor, was encouraged by the Vatican to set up a secret network of spies and informers. In late 1907, the Vatican let it be known that anyone who disagreed with Pascendi would be excommunicated, something that made Roncalli’s teaching of Church history problematic, given his sympathies.
Between 1907 and Pius X’s death in 1914 there ensued what one bishop privately called a “white terror” in which “the Church [desired] not only to tell us what must be believed, but how we should think.” Roncalli tread cautiously in his lectures, allowing that humanistic thinkers had made certain “errors,” while simultaneously referring to “narrow-minded and ancient formulations that had lost all meaning” that the Church was said—by some, Roncalli was careful to add—to be locked into.
In the meantime, his old world, the world of Sotto il Monte, was fast falling behind. In May 1912, he learned his beloved Uncle Zaverio was ill. Roncalli arrived back home the day before Zaverio died, at the age of eighty-eight. He wrote the memorial card, which seemed to yearn for a simpler time and place when basic virtues were rewarded: “He was the just man of Sacred Scripture. Simple, honest, God fearing, humble of birth, he had a lively and profound sense of Christ. . . . In a century full of agitation he never lost his youthful, fervent and loving devotion to the Sacred Heart of Jesus.”
This period in Roncalli’s life gradually drew to an end, with both painful and welcome consequences. The most painful was the psychic and physical distress of his greatest mentor, Radini-Tedeschi. By the summer of 1914, it had become increasingly evident that he was quite ill. Radini-Tedeschi lay confined to his bed in a villa in the mountains outside Bergamo, gradually losing weight and growing weaker and weaker, even though he was only fifty-seven years old. The bishop was further troubled by the fact that he thought that Pope Pius X had turned against him for good.
Despite his disagreement with the pontiff on these matters, Radini-Tedeschi was an orthodox Catholic cleric for whom it was painful to be at odds with the spiritual leader of the Universal Church. He felt that he had been slandered by the spies and informers who had infiltrated his diocese. A few years before, he had written Pius, telling him, poignantly:
I wish to be a pastor and a father, to try to win the people with affection, with much affection, without giving way to weakness. Perhaps all this, if judged by someone who is not enlightened by the Holy Spirit, or who does not feel the pains of being father to all, might appear to be remissiveness, or excessive goodness, or an inclination to see everything in a rosy color. Rosy views and remissiveness were perhaps those sins, Holy Father, which brought upon me the accusations of being intransigent.
It is not known whether Pope Pius ever responded to this, but Bishop Radini-Tedeschi grew more despondent as he grew more and more ill. His depression was not helped any by the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand and his wife in Sarajevo that June, which moved Europe inexorably toward war. In August, Radini-Tedeschi was taken to Bergamo for an exploratory operation; it turned out he had inoperable cancer of the intestines, which had spread throughout his entire system.
Radini-Tedeschi was brought back to his mountain villa to die. The bishop, as Roncalli later described in his biography of him, grew despondent, weeping uncontrollably and bemoaning the fact that he had not helped enough people. “I am a bishop,” he told his secretary. “I am a bishop with great power to do good, and I have not done enough. And now God is to judge me.”
On August 20, 1914, Pope Pius died in Rome of a heart attack, in great measure brought on by his horror at the war that had already begun. Two days later, on the evening of August 22, Roncalli prayed next to an increasingly feeble Radini-Tedeschi. Thinking the bishop had fallen into unconsciousness, he stopped.
“Courage, my dear Don Angelo,” Radini-Tedeschi told his secretary. “It goes well. Continue, for I understand every word you say.”
Just before midnight, he died.
In the weeks following the death of his beloved mentor, Roncalli felt adrift in the world. He was thirty-three years old and had spent his entire young priesthood in the service of his bishop. The gathering war clouds had burst over Europe, unleashing a bloody rain.
Pope Pius X was dead, and the fifty-seven cardinals (of sixty-five eligible electors) formally met in conclave to elect his successor on August 31, with voting beginning the next day. On the third day, after eight ballots, the cardinals were deadlocked, with Giacomo della Chiesa, the archbishop of Bologna and former official of the Secretariat of State, leading but not yet able to achieve the two-thirds majority required for election. Della Chiesa, a close friend of Radini-Tedeschi and an admirer of Pope Leo X, was fifty-nine years old and newly elevated to the red hat. The “conservatives” were united behind Domenico Serafini, age sixty-four, assessor of the Holy Office (the powerful doctrinal congregation), who had, like the front-runner, been named a cardinal by Pius X in the consistory of May 25, 1914.
On the morning of September 3, 1914, the deadlock was broken, and after two more scrutinies, or votes, the Bolognan was elected and took the name Benedict XV. At least he was a man whose leanings were more sympathetic to Roncalli’s own, something that young Roncalli found heartening.
Shortly after Radini-Tedeschi’s funeral, Roncalli moved out of the Bergamo episcopal palace and took up residence in an apartment with his old seminary classmate Guglielmo Carozzi. He continued to teach, to work with the women’s groups that Radini-Tedeschi had established and that Roncalli helped oversee, and to edit the parchment manuscripts of Charles Borromeo. It was a time of questioning for him. In late September, he went on a weeklong retreat with the Priests of the Sacred Heart and spent time reflecting on his life in his journals:
O God, your purposes are unfathomable! Immediately after [the tenth anniversary of Roncalli’s ordination, on August 10] . . . you called my revered Bishop to share your heavenly joy, and here I am in an entirely new situation. . . .
I will endeavor not to feel any anxiety about my future. I was born poor and I must and will die poor, sure that at the right time Divine Providence, as in the past, will provide what is needed, sending me what I require and even more.
As Roncalli continued with his writing and teaching duties in Bergamo, however, historic events were catching up to him. Although there was a strong sentiment within many Italians that their country should stay out of the war, the Italian government was offered secret inducements by the Allies if it would abandon its treaty partnership with Austria-Hungary and Germany and enter the fighting. This it decided to do, with disastrous consequences. On May 23, 1915, Italy declared war on Austria-Hungary, with whom it shared a border.
Even before that, Roncalli and thousands of Italian men received call-up notices. On the evening of May 23, Angelo seized by both fear and faith, wrote in his journal:
Tomorrow I leave to take up my military service in the Medical Corps. Where will they send me? To the front, perhaps? Shall I ever return to Bergamo, or has the Lord decreed that my last hour shall be on the battlefield? I know nothing; all I want is the will of God in all things and at all times, and to work for his glory in total self-sacrifice. In this way, and in this way only, can I be true to my vocation and show in my actions my real love for my country, and the souls of my fellows.