CHAPTER SIX

France and Venice (1945–58)

After saying his farewells in Istanbul in late December, Roncalli flew first to Rome, where he met with Monsignor Domenico Tardini, the acting secretary of the Office of Extraordinary Affairs of the Holy See, the foreign department of the Secretariat of State. Roncalli knew Tardini well. He was a compact, bullet-headed man with tremendous energy, ability, a warm heart, and, according to one biographer, a “caustic sense of humor.”

“Look here, old friend, are you sure that cable I received is not a mistake?” Roncalli asked. “Surely the Holy Father did not intend to appoint me nuncio to France.”

“It’s no mistake,” Tardini replied. “His Holiness makes his own decisions. But you can be sure of one thing: None of us thought he would do this.

“You’re not the only one who’s astonished.” He pointed toward the papal apartments, where Roncalli would soon meet with Pius. “It was all his idea.”

Not exactly reassuring. Pius was warmly gracious to Roncalli when they met on the morning of December 29, making a point of telling him, “I want to make it clear that I was the one who acted in this nomination, thought of it and arranged it all. For that reason you may be sure that the will of God could not be more manifest and encouraging.”

The pontiff made it clear that he would rely on Roncalli’s proven tact and judgment of relationships to help restore the position of the Church in France, though he did not expect the new nuncio to work miracles. “In your position,” the pope said, “you can only do, as they say in France, aussi bien que possible.”

Of course, as with all of Roncalli’s appointments to higher episcopal offices, there were politics at play. In late 1944, France was only a few months removed from Nazi occupation.

Through most of World War II, France had been run by Marshal Philippe Pétain. His Vichy government, which owed its existence to the Nazis, actively collaborated with Germany. It formed its own secret police, known as the Milice, to help suppress the French Resistance, often with brutal results. Members of the force even rounded up Jews. At the same time, the Free French forces, based in England and North Africa prior to the invasion of Normandy, coordinated with the French Resistance to fight the Germans throughout France during the war. To the east, Allies continued to battle a resilient German Army in the Belgium ports.

After the liberation, General Charles de Gaulle, the charismatic leader of the Free French Army, became the provisional leader of France. One of his first acts as president was to imprison and, in some cases, execute former members of Pétain’s Vichy regime who collaborated with the Nazis during occupation. The politics of liberation assumed preeminence in all matters of state for de Gaulle, which initiated a round of gamesmanship with Pius XII. A few months earlier, in August, the Vatican renominated Archbishop Valerio Valeri, nuncio to Pétain’s regime, but the French leader wouldn’t hear of it. Valeri was too closely tied to the discredited Vichy government, although he personally had not collaborated with the Germans. General de Gaulle, the most respected man in the country, maintained that liberated France needed someone new.

At first, Pius refused to budge, sticking to Valeri as his choice for nuncio. He and de Gaulle, two notably stubborn leaders, remained at an impasse throughout the fall and early winter. But then the pope learned that the Soviets had already recognized the de Gaulle government, sending their official ambassador to Paris. Since 1815, following the Congress of Vienna, the papal nuncio had been considered dean of the diplomatic corps, regardless of his length of service. With that honor came the right to offer New Year’s greetings to the French head of state in an official ceremony.

If Pius did not confirm a nuncio by the end of the month, then the Soviet ambassador, as the next most senior official there, would present greetings to de Gaulle. More than anything on earth, the pope abhorred the danger presented by godless communism. It would simply not do to have the Soviets steal a march on the Vatican.

But when Pius’s first choice as a substitute, Archbishop of Argentina Joseph Fietta, declined for reasons of poor health, he needed someone very quickly and picked Roncalli, who had performed well and gained a reputation for equanimity, despite serving in the backwaters of Bulgaria and Turkey and Greece. Roncalli also spoke French, and his relatively liberal leanings would stand him in good stead in a country that was trending to the left politically.

Still, as Roncalli boarded Charles de Gaulle’s personal airplane in Rome on the morning of December 30—for de Gaulle was as anxious to get Roncalli to supersede the Soviet ambassador as the pope was—he knew he wasn’t anyone’s first choice. As he would write ruefully to a friend, “When the horses break down, they trot out a donkey.” And to the bishop of Bergamo, his home diocese, he wrote:

 

I seemed to be seized by surprise, like Habakuk, and transported suddenly from Istanbul to Paris by a sort of incantation. Also my interior discipline was turned topsy-turvy . . . the more so since it seemed absolutely incredible to me and certainly I had neither the courage nor the imagination nor the desire for it. I was stupefied.

 

Once in Paris, Roncalli began his whirlwind round of duties on New Year’s Day 1945, when he presented his credentials to de Gaulle and in turn officially recognized the French leader’s new government on behalf of the international diplomatic corps, lavishing compliments on the general and his staff and praising their patriotism. “I think it went off very well,” Roncalli noted in correspondence with a friend, pointing to the evidence of de Gaulle’s gratitude and emotion, despite the president’s impassive outward expression.

It was typical of Roncalli that he made a point of apologizing to the Soviet ambassador for upstaging him; he also made sure to call on the Soviet embassy the very next day. When these diplomatic niceties were over, however, Roncalli got down to the tricky business of serving as papal nuncio in Paris.

The first problem he encountered was the French government’s desire to rid itself of “collaborationist” clergy. De Gaulle presented Roncalli with a list of twenty-five bishops who he said worked with the Nazis. He wanted them recalled to the Vatican. This list included Cardinal Emmanuel Suhard, archbishop of Paris, and numerous other prominent prelates. Examining the charges against them, Roncalli saw no real evidence, just “newspaper clippings and gossip,” as he wrote to the French foreign minister. It was true that the bishops had told their flocks to cooperate with the Vichy government, but this had been the Vatican stance as well. And some of the bishops who had early on preached coexistence with the occupying Nazis had spoken vigorously against them as soon as they realized how perfidious Hitler’s regime really was.

By the time Roncalli got involved, de Gaulle had realized that the removal of so many prelates without hard evidence was going to be impossible. So he told André Latreille, a Catholic historian and “director of cults” in the Interior Ministry, to find “four or five” bishops to expel as examples. Latreille went to visit Roncalli to discuss this matter in February and later painted an interesting picture of the new nuncio in his diary: “[He is] a very lively talker, stout, friendly, words tumble forth from him so that it is hard to get a word in edgeways.”

Despite this cordiality, Roncalli was firm with Latreille. “We have to say exactly what we want, and we have to produce evidence. And we mustn’t expect the new nuncio to become the Torquemada of French bishops.”

To his Vatican superiors, Roncalli suggested that Jules Saliège, the archbishop of Toulouse and a favorite of Resistance forces, be made a cardinal—which he was in the next consistory in February 1946.

“My role in France is like that of Saint Joseph,” he told Jacques Domaine, chief of protocol in the French Foreign Office, “to be guardian over our Lord and to protect him with discretion.”

This is a perfect snapshot of Roncalli’s style—friendly, engaging, compromising, but concerned with fairness. He refused to take part in a witch hunt of prelates. In July 1945, the Vatican quietly removed seven bishops from France, forcing them into retirement, though Cardinal Suhard remained in place. Roncalli was not solely responsible for this smaller number—de Gaulle saw the prudence of backing away from a wholesale removal of clergy—but the new nuncio certainly helped lessen the tension around the affair and toned down the heated rhetoric.

As nuncio, Roncalli lived, as he wrote his family, “in a princely palace with everything one might need, two secretaries, three nuns, three staff, five servants and a splendid car [a Cadillac].” Unlike in Bulgaria, Greece, and Turkey, his job was not to minister to the faithful, who, in any event, were well served in a predominately Catholic country. But it was not like him to spend all of his time in diplomatic meetings. As Monsignor Loris Capovilla, the man who would become his closest aide and confidant, later noted, “As nuncio, Monsignor Roncalli did not shut himself up in an imposing palace at the end of a street in Paris, but went every day in search of a community, or a soul, that for him was France.”

Biographer Alden Hatch paints an intriguing picture:

 

His luncheons and dinners soon became famous in Paris, not only for the fare, but for the conversation. With the nuncio leading the talk with his deep knowledge of politics, art, and literature, and, above all, his spiritual inspiration, combined as it too rarely is with wit, the world gathered to feast its ears as well as its mouths. Regulars at Roncalli’s table included many of the men who were shaping the destiny of France. Among them were Bidault, of course, and such other cabinet ministers—past, present, and future—as René Mayer, Edgar Faure, Robert Schuman, René Pléven, Antoine Pinay, men representing almost the whole kaleidoscope of French politics, as well as such great men of letters as François Mauriac. Perhaps Roncalli’s greatest friend was the grand old socialist and anti-clerical, Eduard Herriot. The archbishop’s greatest spiritual triumph, because heaven so rejoices in the return of lost lambs, was when, on his deathbed, this upright defender of secular philosophies asked for and received the sacraments of the Catholic Church.

 

Roncalli’s favorite “infidel” was Naman Menemengioglu, the Turkish ambassador to France. It is difficult to determine the exact Muslim population of France, but it is clear that their number was very small. But that total differs if one considers French Algeria to be an integral part of France, as the postwar governments did until the nation’s independence in 1962. In 1940 there were some 7.6 million people in Algeria, the vast majority of whom were Muslim. Unlike Jews, these Muslims were not persecuted under the Vichy regime, although they were subject to the apartheid-like laws already in effect under prior French rule.

Roncalli preached at parishes all over the country on feast days and special occasions and went out of his way to meet people. He journeyed throughout France, visiting each of the country’s eighty-two dioceses, with the exception of two. In Paris, he walked whenever possible.

Once, according to an oft-told tale, he overheard a worker swearing vehemently in the nuncio’s new apartment. Aides were horrified at the worker’s inventive stream of profanity, but Roncalli walked up to the man and asked, “What is all this, my good man? Why can’t you just say merde like everyone else and get on with your work?”

He also visited French North Africa, driving from Tunisia, through Algeria, then through Morocco to the Pillars of Hercules on the Mediterranean Sea. His French friends said that, like the Roman general Scipio, he should assume the title “Africanus.”

One of the most influential French cardinals, Eugene Tisserant, prefect of the Sacred Congregation of the Oriental Church, became Roncalli’s great friend. He lived in Rome but made many visits to Paris during the nuncio’s term there. They conversed for long hours, with Tisserant sharing Roncalli’s abiding ambition to pave the way for the eventual unification of the Orthodox churches with Rome. In the conclave to come, Tisserant’s support, and that of the other French cardinals, would be critical to the success of the rotund Italian diplomat.

Roncalli’s French was another subject for amusement. In general he spoke it fairly well—although some said with a bit of a guttural accent that made him sound like a Russian—but he knew he was not always on the mark. As he began a sermon in one Paris church, the microphone acted up, emitting loud electronic squeals, so he came down to the floor of the church and said, unamplified, “Dear children, you have heard nothing of what I was saying. That doesn’t matter. It wasn’t very interesting. I don’t speak French very well. My saintly old mother, who was a peasant, didn’t make me learn it early enough.”

In fact, it was his old mentor, Bishop Radini-Tedeschi, who had taught him to speak French, but this type of humor and modesty on the part of Roncalli endeared him to most Frenchmen, as did the fact that he at least tried to speak their language.

Roncalli continued to be preoccupied with his aging. He wrote in his journal, “I must not disguise from myself the truth. I am definitely approaching old age. My mind resents this and almost rebels, for I feel so young, eager, agile and alert. But one look in the mirror disillusions me. I must do more and better, reflecting that perhaps the time still granted to me for living is brief.”

Yet there is the strong sense that Roncalli enjoyed himself on a larger world stage and was growing as a diplomat and prelate. There are glimpses of him in numerous letters and memoirs holding dinner parties in his renovated residence on the Rue Président Wilson, bringing together French politicians, important clerics, foreign diplomats, and the like. People came for the excellent dinners but stayed for Roncalli himself. Robert Schuman, who later became French premier in 1947, commented on Roncalli, “He is the only man in Paris in whose company one feels the physical sensation of peace.”

This sense of peace sometimes belied the turmoil Roncalli had to deal with in France. In some ways, he was leading the life of a nineteenth-century diplomat while the country changed drastically around him. Socialism, abhorred by Pius XII, was sweeping through Europe. One manifestation of it in France was the priest-workers movement. During the war, when the Nazis marched 800,000 young Frenchmen off to forced labor camps in Germany, Cardinal Suhard secretly assigned twenty-five young priests to go with them, disguised as workers, to minister to them. Most of these priests were discovered, and two were to die in concentration camps. Other priests spent time in concentration camps, working together with other captives of the Nazis. Based on their experiences, with barriers broken down between cleric and laypeople, they felt a truer communion—a more Christ-like connection—could be attained.

At the onset of the German occupation, there had been about 350,000 Jews in France. Many were not ethnically French but were refugees from Germany or other Nazi-controlled regions. While Pétain had quickly introduced anti-Jewish legislation, many ethnically French Jews managed to survive the war. Some historians argue that Vichy protected French Jews, deporting instead the foreigners first; others believe that Vichy realized that Hitler would eventually demand the deportation of all French Jews. About 273,000 of the original 350,000 survived, meaning that some 77,000 were murdered in the Holocaust.

At war’s end, there was little to celebrate, other than survival. Some returning priests (mainly Parisians) sought jobs in factories, mingled freely with workers in cafés and restaurants, and in general refused to live lives circumscribed by the old formalities of the Church. Many French Catholics—including Cardinal Suhard—supported these men. Others were shocked, reporting to Roncalli that there were priests saying Mass in factory clothes and greeting their congregation with a jaunty, “Hi, guys!”

Roncalli himself practiced caution when replying to these complaints. He valued traditional Church life, which included the separation of a priest from his congregation. At the same time, however, one senses that his humanist heart understood what the priest-workers were about. They were not necessarily communists or socialists, though some did lean in this direction. At heart, they sought a truer essence of what it meant to follow the life of Christ, which echoed the spirit and concerns of Radini-Tedeschi’s Catholic Action groups, the anchor of Roncalli’s life and ministry.

Although as pope he would later come out more clearly on the side of the priest-workers—or at least, on the side of the idea behind their movement—Roncalli did not quite make his opinions known at this time. But once again, he was open to change within a framework of tradition. This openness, from a deeply pious and conventional priest devoted to doctrine, became the hallmark of the man—and the pontiff of Vatican II.

 

While nuncio, Archbishop Roncalli resumed his habit of vacationing in Sotto il Monte and continued his role as paterfamilias of the Roncalli clan. He sent Giuseppe, his youngest brother and now a father of ten, money to fix his teeth, since, as he wrote, “I have noticed that all we Roncalli brothers suffer with our teeth. . . . But with poor teeth [Roncalli had his pulled and replaced by dentures in his fifties] a man eats food badly and digests it even worse.” And he followed up, too, writing Giuseppe’s daughter Enrica to make sure her father put his teeth in every morning.

At the same time, he helped out a family cousin with a sick wife; refused to intercede in a minor court affair involving another cousin (although he did send him 20,000 francs); and brought his family a radio, connecting them to the world beyond the mountains.

Despite his protestations of age, intimations of mortality, and self-reproach in his journal (he had, he wrote, “to watch myself closely to overcome my natural sloth”), he was incredibly active. In 1950, having traveled through most of France, he set out on a 6,000-mile automobile trip through Spain and North Africa to visit French Algeria, which was torn by violence and civil war. Upon his return, Pope Pius issued his encyclical Humani generis (Of Mankind), which was critical of neo-modernist theologians who were exploring ideas not sanctioned by the Church. Many of these theologians taught in France.

The encyclical represented a kind of crackdown; these Catholic priests, teachers, and philosophers (who went unnamed, but everyone, including them, knew who they were) were drifting away from orthodoxy. When Church doctrine needed to be clarified, Pius said, it was clarified by encyclicals such as the Humani generis, which “pass judgment on a matter up to that time under dispute, [and then] it is obvious that the matter . . . cannot be any longer considered a question open to discussion.”

The proponents of la théologie nouvelle, the “new theology”—who included Jesuits who admired the existential philosophy of Father Teilhard de Chardin, and others, mainly Dominicans, who believed in the importance of historicity (as much as divine intervention) in the lives of Church fathers—were hit hard by this. Many were forbidden to teach and were cycled to dead-end jobs within their religious orders. Pius XII’s encyclical represented a conservative backlash akin to that of Pius XI. Interestingly, Roncalli was silent on this matter. Although, as pope, he would tolerate radical theologians (“Without a touch of holy madness,” he later said, “the Church cannot grow”), he was much more interested in basic matters of faith—such as charity, tolerance, peace, and love of one’s fellows—that touched the lives of everyday men and women.

Still, he did not like to see honest debate repressed, and, as pontiff, he would bring some of these same disgraced scholars back to play important roles in Vatican II.

Along with everything else he was doing, Roncalli became the official Vatican observer to the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO), which was headquartered in Paris—and which he conditionally embraced. Nonetheless, Roncalli was not blind nor naïve: from the first, he recognized the danger that UNESCO would tend to propagate a mass materialistic culture rather than encourage the precious individual spiritual and artistic values of its many nations. Addressing the general conference of the organization in July 1951, he told the delegates, “UNESCO is a great burning furnace, the sparks from which will everywhere kindle . . . widespread cooperation in the interests of justice, liberty and peace for all the peoples of the earth, without distinction of race, language or religion. . . .” The delegates were surprised and pleased that Roncalli did not take a more dogmatic Catholic view; his ecumenical views were already coming to the fore.

He expressed his thoughts in this maxim: “To look at each other without mistrust; to come close to each other without fear; to help each other without surrender.”

Author Alden Hatch, in A Man Named John, again provides a snapshot of the colorful impression this unique practitioner of diplomacy made on the world stage among his international confreres:

 

Soon his rotund figure in its swinging, tent-like cape became as familiar in the chilly halls and conference rooms on the Avenue Klèber as it was in the bookstalls on the quays or the salons of the Rue du Faubourge Saint Honoré. His ability to speak languages such as Bulgarian, Turkish, modern Greek and even a little Russian endeared him to the delegates from those countries. Indeed, there is a photograph of him in amiable conversation with his great opponent, Soviet Ambassador Bogomolov, showing that even there he sought “what unites rather than what divides.”

 

In November 1952, Roncalli received a letter from Monsignor Giovanni Battista Montini, a good friend who served as sustituto, or acting secretary of state for Ordinary (that is, internal Church) Affairs within the Secretariat of State, the Holy Father’s right hand. (Montini would later succeed Roncalli as pope, taking the name Paul VI.) His letter asked in great confidence if Roncalli would consider succeeding the current patriarch of Venice, Carlo Agostini, who was gravely ill. It would mean a cardinal’s red biretta for Roncalli and a return to his beloved Italy. Roncalli was instructed to tell no one. He recorded in his journal, “I prayed, thought about it, and answered Oboedienta et pax [Obedience and peace].”

Then, later in November, he was informed that the pope would “elevate him to the sacred purple” (an archaic reference to the princely rank of cardinal) in January. Hearing that his sister Ancilla was mortally ill, he raced to her bedside in Sotto il Monte to comfort her, but she rallied and in fact would live nearly another year. On December 29, he opened the morning paper to learn that Patriarch Agostini had died at age sixty-four. “With this death,” he wrote in his journal, “the new direction of my life . . . begins.”

 

Invested as a cardinal at the consistory on January 12, the seventy-one-year-old Roncalli arrived in Venice to a tumultuous welcome on a sun-drenched March 15, 1953. For Roncalli, a lover of tradition and ceremony, it was heaven. The citizens turned out on the banks of the canals in huge numbers; Roncalli, wearing scarlet robes and a short ermine cape, rode in the lead vessel of a flotilla of gondolas and motor boats, waving and smiling at the cheering faces all around him. In his sermon at the ancient Saint Mark’s Basilica, he told the assembled crowd, “I commend to your kindness someone who simply wants to be your brother.”

Venice was a brilliant city with an extraordinary history. Settled by Romans fleeing barbarian invasions as the Roman Empire crumbled, it was a city floating on water, once a great seaport and bastion of art and music. But now many of its palaces were old and shoddy, and its young people were leaving to seek work elsewhere. It had become a scenic tourist destination—home to famous music, art, and movie festivals—but Roncalli discovered that among his flock of 400,000 there was widespread unemployment.

Shortly after becoming patriarch, Roncalli wrote in his journal, he discovered “two painful problems . . . amidst all the splendor of ecclesiastical state, and the veneration shown me as Cardinal and Patriarch: the scantiness of my revenue and the throng of poor folk with their requests for employment and financial help.” At the same time, he remained astonished at how far he had risen: “The arc of my humble life, honored far beyond my deserts by the Holy See, rose in my native village and now curves over the domes and pinnacles of Saint Mark’s.”

Saying that he was “like the mother of a poor family who is entrusted with so many children,” Roncalli set to work. He made his drafty living quarters as habitable as possible and found the people he needed to help him—nuns to look after his household; a young layman named Guido Gussi, who became his personal butler; and a thin young priest named Loris Capovilla, who became his most trusted aide and, later, his literary executor. He sold the patriarch’s summer palace to pay for a new seminary and used personal funds to support charities for the poor.

As in Paris, he did not shut himself away in his magnificent marble residence. Instead, he spent a good deal of time in public, where he enjoyed traveling on the vaporetto, the water bus, rather than in the Fiat provided him by the diocese. Because the Vatican wanted to make sure that the Communist or Socialist political parties were beaten back by the Christian Democrats, he could not avoid getting involved in local politics.

Cardinal Roncalli’s routine, such as it was, took him to every parish church within his patriarchate—most more than once—and on pilgrimages beyond its borders. Even at home in Venice, the religious ceremonies and duties were so numerous and varied that he had little time of his own.

His predecessor, Patriarch Carlo Agostino, had worked incredibly hard, driving himself by sheer willpower—indeed, pretty much driving himself to his own death. As a result, he had been irritable, giving off an impression of arrogance and lack of patience. Roncalli, with his powerful peasant constitution, always seemed unhurried and patient. He once said, “There’s nothing wrong with my liver and nothing wrong with my nerves, so I enjoy meeting people.” The Venetians enjoyed meeting him, too. They jokingly called him “the calm after the storm,” and they saw a great deal of him.

Despite his surroundings in the episcopal palace of a near-prince—with its ornate halls and salons, the exquisite chapel with its cinquecento embellishments, his study with silk-covered walls, heavy carved furniture, and more than 400 books (which he delighted in showing to visitors)—he maintained the personal simplicity and modesty that had marked him from his days as a seminarian in a simple cell with a stark desk and a handful of textbooks.

In November 1953, to Roncalli’s great sorrow, his sister Ancilla died. He went back to Sotto il Monte for the funeral, accompanied by his aide, Loris Capovilla. It was a chill autumn day, not unlike the autumn day he was born, with the tramontano blowing dead leaves through the simple village graveyard. His sister had spent much of her life in his service; before the coffin was closed, he kissed her on the forehead, remarking to Capovilla, “That’s the second time I’ve done that—the first was when I knew she was dying.” On the train ride back to Venice, Capovilla, sitting next to Roncalli, heard him mutter to himself, “Guai a noi se fosse tutta un illusione.” (Woe to us if it’s all an illusion.) It was an enigmatic comment: Was the patriarch of Venice wondering if God himself was a human construct? Roncalli may have been feeling some guilt over his sister’s long life in his service, without children or family of her own, or he may have been once again feeling intimations of mortality.

Capovilla, who knew Roncalli quite well, wasn’t sure what the patriarch meant. The comment revealed, he later wrote, “a disconcerting aspect of genuine humanity in my patriarch.” If it was all an illusion, Roncalli had spent fifty years in its service, for the following August he celebrated a half-century as a priest.

His nephew Battista, a somewhat hapless young priest, organized a celebration for Roncalli back in Sotto il Monte, but when Roncalli heard from Capovilla that Battista planned something elaborate, he wrote him a furious letter: “I do not want, I do not desire that anything more should be done than in previous years,” he told his nephew. “Why do you have to offend me and make me suffer? Are you trying to stop me from coming at all?”

It was an uncharacteristically ill-tempered letter from Roncalli, but it had been a tough year for him. Two months after Ancilla’s death, his sister Teresa died suddenly, and another sister, Maria, contracted the cancer that would kill her in early 1955. Another reason that he did not want elaborate ceremonies is that he was aware that his name was being mentioned in certain circles as a possibility to become the next pope. As cool and diplomatic as he was, the patriarch always kept his ear to the ground on such matters. After all, he would likely be an elector himself in the next conclave.

Pius XII nearly died in 1954; although he recovered, the state of his health continued to be uncertain. Both flattered by and fearful of the idea that he might one day become the Roman pontiff, Roncalli was horrified that people might think he was putting on airs at his golden jubilee celebration.

However, concern over what people thought typically didn’t get in the way of Roncalli’s own political opinions. As the papal secretary, Monsignor Gino Spaento, later pointed out, “No one should be deceived by the patriarch’s simplicity into thinking him a simpleton. His simple manner is the result of his holiness, but he is a very complex and profound personality, keen, alert and anything but stupid.”

In matters of principle and Catholic doctrine, Roncalli was immovable. The Vatican required him to publicly condemn an “opening to the Left” on the part of the Christian Democratic Party in 1956 as “a most serious doctrinal error and a flagrant violation of Catholic discipline,” but when a Socialist congress was held in Venice in early 1957, Roncalli went on record hoping that the Socialists would “do everything possible to improve living conditions and social well-being.” It just was not in his nature to turn away those whom he felt might do some good; besides, he did have ulterior motives.

As he told a Venice newspaper at the time, “No one should be disturbed by my initiative. One day all those people [the Socialists] will come to church again.” Though he abhorred the socialist philosophy, he loved Socialists as fellow men created in the image and likeness of God.

 

Perhaps the happiest time in his life was Roncalli’s term as patriarch of this ancient See. In those years he was finally able to realize his long-held desire to be, above all, a priest and minister of souls. The administration of a diocese and the thousands of demands on his time and attention were, to him, secondary to the primary task of tending to the spiritual needs of the people, “into which he flung himself with all the energy and ardor of his nature. He was, in fact, joyfully fulfilling a spiritual need of his own.”

Although Roncalli avoided the subject publicly, he knew that Pope Pius XII had never quite recovered from his illness in 1954. As the summer of 1958 drew to a close, the pontiff fell quite ill again. In October, Venice was host to a medical convention, and the Vatican contacted Roncalli for help in finding an international specialist in internal disorders who was attending the convention. Later, the Vatican Secretariat of State privately notified the College of Cardinals—there were fifty-three cardinals in all throughout the world—that His Holiness was close to death.

On October 6, Pius suffered a stroke, then, two days later, another one. Early in the morning of October 9, he died of a heart attack at the age of eighty-two. When the news of Pius’s death came, Roncalli wrote in his journal, “Sister death came quickly and swiftly fulfilled her office. Three days [of illness] were enough. . . . One of my favorite phrases brings me comfort: ‘We are not honored as museum keepers, but to cultivate a flourishing garden of life and to prepare a glorious future.’ The pope is dead, long live the pope!”

On October 11, Roncalli offered a high requiem Mass for the departed pontiff and on October 12 headed off to Rome on the 9:40 train, bringing with him the cappa magna, the ceremonial red cape cardinals wore in those days for the sole purpose of welcoming a new supreme pontiff to his unique vale of tears.