CHAPTER THIRTEEN

Peace on Earth (January–April 1963)

The initial session was over and the bishops were back in their dioceses, but on the very first day of the new year of 1963, Pope John XXIII was hard at work reminding them that their labors had only just begun. Awakening at 4:00 A.M. on January 1, John began work on a letter addressed to the “Bishops of the Council.” In-between sessions, he wrote, should be “the apple of your eye,” and even the most “urgent pastoral work” should not supersede it. The bishops must respond quickly to requests to review drafts of council documents and, in general, prepare themselves to hit the ground running in September.

Published on January 6, on the Feast of the Epiphany, the letter was a pep talk of sorts. John extolled the work done in the first session; even with all its flaws, the council had brought light and air on numerous subjects that needed addressing within the Church. Their early work, he told them, had let the world see that the Church was open to change and brotherhood. The Coordinating Commission he had created to help sort out the profusion of draft texts would meet in a few weeks; John let the bishops know he considered it to be the guiding light of the next council session.

He also told the prelates that they should consider themselves prime movers and decision makers. Although the pope needed to approve everything, “it is up to the bishops to supervise, according to the rules, the free development of the council.”

Led by Cardinal Leo Joseph Suenens of Belgium, the Coordinating Commission met from January 21 to 27. Suenens, a progressive who fully supported John’s program, simplified matters by reducing the number of proposed schemata from seventy to twenty and dividing them into internal and external Church issues.

The next council session would tackle universal matters like marriage and the family, social justice, and the community of nations, among other issues. Suenens also wanted more secular experts involved in preparing documents for the September council session. John approved Suenen’s proposal, happy that a crucial outline was in place.

For the last six months of his life, Pope John was concerned with making sure that matters ran smoothly after his death. He also wanted to set the record straight. The day after the last meeting of the Coordinating Commission, he wrote a formal letter to Monsignor Loris Capovilla, his faithful aide—the man who perhaps knew John better than anyone else.

As was often the case, John awoke early. “Dear Monsignor,” the letter begins:

 

At four this morning I was awake and looking over conciliar material when it struck me that it would be good to think of a future “historian” of the great event that is under way, and that he will have to be chosen with care.

I think that the obvious witness and faithful exponent of “Vatican II” is really you, dear monsignor: and in so far as a mandate can come from me—pope of the council, alive or dead—you should be authorized to accept that task as the Lord’s will, and do honor to it, which would also be an honor for holy Church, a pledge of blessings, and a special reward for you on earth and in heaven.

 

John wanted to prepare for a world after his death, when Loris Capovilla might in fact need the imprimatur of the pope to proceed with his labors in the face of those who opposed the pope, and he also wanted someone to record his side of the story when it came to issues beyond the council, for which he foresaw criticism.

One of these issues was John’s continued attempt to free Metropolitan Slipyi from his long captivity behind the Iron Curtain. He had just sent Monsignor Jan Willebrands to Moscow to negotiate Slipyi’s release, knowing full well that conservatives both inside and outside of the Church decried his conversations with the Soviet Union. Among Italian politicians especially, the word was that John was soft on communism.

The pope realized that there were those in the Curia allied with political forces who actively wanted to see him fail. He told a sympathetic editor of a Catholic journal that he needed, in his final days, “to be extremely careful in everything I do to prevent the conclave after my death being a conclave ‘against me,’ because then it might make a choice that would destroy everything I have started out to achieve.”

In February 1963, Metropolitan Slipyi, who had been in the Soviet gulag for eighteen years, was suddenly transferred to the Hotel Moscow, where, to his astonishment, Monsignor Willebrands told him the extraordinary news that he was a free man. The tall, bearded, seventy-one-year-old Slipyi, arrested by the NKVD (the People’s Commissariat for Internal Affairs, a forerunner of the KGB) in 1944 on trumped-up charges of collaborating with the Nazi puppet regime in the Ukraine and the real-life inspiration for Morris West’s bestselling novel The Shoes of the Fishermen, was grateful—until he learned he was not allowed to go to the Ukraine.

He balked, until Willebrands told him that it was the pope’s personal desire that Slipyi leave prison and come to Italy, even if it meant permanent exile.

Their journey back was like something out of a Cold War spy movie. They took trains through Vienna and Venice, but got off 50 miles north of Rome in order to duck the press. Both John and Nikita Khrushchev wanted to avoid headlines—as Khrushchev told Norman Cousins, the kind that read, “Bishop Tells of Red Torture”—because it would damage both leaders with conservative factions within their bureaucracies. Loris Capovilla met Slipyi in a car, took him to a nearby abbey, and then returned to Rome. It was late, but Capovilla slipped an excited note under the pope’s door:

 

Holy Father! I got back at midnight. Metropolitan Slipyi arrived safely. He is very grateful to your Holiness. He admired your gifts. He said: “If Pope John in his goodness hadn’t brought this off, I wouldn’t have lived much longer.”

 

The next day, February 10, the news appeared in L’Osservatore Romano, but Slipyi’s location was kept a secret, and John announced it during the dedication of a new seminary: “From Eastern Europe there came last night a moving and consoling gift for which I humbly thank the Lord.” In a private audience that evening, the metropolitan knelt before John and thanked him for his release. “You have pulled me out of the well,” he told the pontiff.

They prayed together and Slipyi, who had written courageously during his captivity in essays that had been circulated in samizdat format, gave John a map of all the prison camps in the gulag, a map that John had with him at his death, and on whose margin he wrote, “The heart is closer to those who are further away; prayer hastens to seek out those who have the greatest need to feel and be understood.”

Slipyi’s release was a part of the Soviet “thaw” of the late 1950s and early 1960s, an easing of tensions that Kremlin hard-liners did not appreciate. For Khrushchev to do what he did, John said, constituted “the greatest political heroism,” especially because, as the Soviet premier had feared, newspapers around the world did publish headlines decrying “Red torture.” But it was John’s overwhelming desire—as expressed in his interactions with the Soviets, in his preparations for the council session that would surely occur after his death, and in his encyclical Pacem in terris, still in development—to bring the world together rather than push it further apart.

John’s note about how “the heart is closer to those who are further away” also applied to his own family, whose visits with him had been unavoidably cut short during his papacy. In a letter he wrote to his eldest brother, Zaverio (typing it himself), the pope addressed the family as a whole. Once again mentioning his death, he told the Roncalli clan:

 

Be of good heart! We are in good company. I always keep by my bedside the photograph that gathers all our dead together with the names inscribed on the marble: grandfather Angelo, “Barba” Zaverio, our revered parents, our brother Giovanni, our sisters Teresa, Ancilla, Maria, and Enrica. Oh, what a fine chorus of souls to await us and pray for us! I think of them constantly. To remember them in prayer gives me courage and joy, in the confident hope of joining them all again in the everlasting glory of heaven.

I bless you all, remembering with you all brides who have come to rejoice with the Roncalli family, and those who have left us to increase the happiness of new families, of different names but similar ways of thinking. Oh, the children, the children, what a wealth of children and what a blessing!

 

Almost everything John did during this time had a valedictory air to it.

During the Lenten season he visited parishes throughout Rome, where crowds gathered to see him. People wept and applauded him, realizing that this might be the last time they might get a glimpse of the man they called “good Pope John.” In some quarters, elections were under way, but campaigns were suspended when the pope came through—whatever political differences divided conservatives from liberals, they recognized in John a genuinely holy man, as did his many visitors during this time. He could be a little scattered as well. During an audience with one Protestant minister, he forgot that he was not talking to a priest and urged the man to pray to the Virgin Mary—but these moments of vulnerability only made people love him more.

On March 1, the pope learned that he would be awarded the Balzan Prize, an international award for people who have made outstanding contributions to humanity. The citation read that the pope was being honored for “his activity in favor of brotherhood between all men and all peoples, and his appeals for good will in his recent diplomatic intervention,” a reference to his role in the Cuban missile crisis.

The award was sniffed at by certain members of the Curia, who, according to one observer, “held it was undignified for a pope to be receiving a prize at all.” Some also felt John was at the center of a growing “cult of personality.” This latter criticism may have been true.

There had seldom, if ever, been a modern pope with a more personal touch than John XXIII. One day, he asked his longtime personal assistant Guido Gusso to bring Gusso’s son to visit him. Like Capovilla, Gusso was one of the few people to interact with John on a daily, intimate basis. He was concerned about the pope. He later remembered that he cried out of sight of the pope as he witnessed the cancer’s quickening progress through the pontiff’s body.

“I lost all interest in food and drink,” he later remembered. “All I could do was smoke cigarettes, four packages a day, so that now I cannot even bear the smell of them. In those seven months that the Holy Father was dying, I lost thirty-five pounds.”

Recognizing Gusso’s discomfort, the pontiff requested the visit. When Gusso brought in three-year-old Giovanni, the boy and the pope had difficulty understanding each other, since the child spoke in the Veneto dialect. However, he did tell the pope he wanted to become a priest, at which the affable pontiff laughed and replied, “You are too handsome. When the time comes, you will want to marry.”

It was a moment Gusso would always treasure. The pope, in a great deal of personal pain himself, had reached out to those who loved him, knowing the memory would be a comfort to them.

Such personal moments, however, took a backseat to international controversies, such as the one concerning Nikita Khrushchev’s son-in-law, Alexis Adzhubei, editor of Izvestia, the Soviet Union’s official newspaper. Adzhubei married Khrushchev’s daughter, Rada, in 1952. Since then, he had gained greatly in power and influence, becoming a member of the Russian premier’s inner circle and a kind of traveling emissary. In fact, President John F. Kennedy granted Adzhubei the first interview an American president had ever granted to a Soviet journalist, a two-hour affair that took place with much fanfare at the Kennedy compound in Hyannis Port in Massachusetts.

On February 28, Adzhubei and Rada came to Rome with the express desire to visit the pope—the journalist said that he had a gift for John from his father-in-law. Since John’s contacts with Russia remained controversial, he decided to ask Cardinal Ottaviani whether he should meet with Adzhubei. Ottaviani advised against it, arguing the Russians would use the visit as propaganda. But John said, “I would be breaking my word and condemning all my previous behavior if I refused to see someone who has courteously and sincerely asked to see me in order to bring a message and a gift.”

But, finally, after about a week of wrangling within the Vatican, Adzhubei agreed to a meeting after John’s general audience at the Vatican with selected journalists. Adzhubei and Rada joined John in the papal library, where he spoke to them in French (which Rada understood well) and then sat down on a couch with the couple on either side of him. The discussion continued with the aid of an interpreter, Father Alexander Koulic, who also kept notes on the visit. Adzhubei asked the pope what the pontiff thought about establishing diplomatic relations with Russia. The pope answered diplomatically, relating the story of Genesis: “The Bible says that God created the world and on the first day he created light. Then creation went on for another six days. But the days of the Bible, as you know, are whole epochs, and these epochs last a very long time.”

The pope told Adzhubei that Russia and the Vatican were on the very first day, as it were, and that things looked promising for the creation of peace, but that it would not do to rush things: “We must go gently, gradually in these matters, preparing minds,” he said. “At present, such a move would be inopportune.” The meeting ended with the couple and the pope exchanging minor gifts. Adzhubei asked if he could publish an account of the meeting, and John replied no, which the Russian journalist accepted in good grace.

And that was it—an innocuous exchange. But it once again highlighted the situation John faced within the Holy Office. John had intended that Loris Capovilla should write an account of the meeting and publish it in L’Osservatore Romano, but Ottaviani and the Holy Office put their collective foot down. They would not hear of it. John was so upset at their flagrant act of disobedience that, on March 20, he dictated an extraordinary “note for history”:

 

The absolute clarity of my language, first in public and then in my private library, deserves to be known and not withheld on some pretext. It should be clearly said that the pope has no need to defend himself. . . . When it is known what I said, and what he [Adzhubei] said, I think people will bless the name of Pope John. Everything should be carefully noted down. I deplore and pity those who in these last few days have lent themselves to unspeakable maneuvers.

 

These were harsh words, but the pope was tired of Vatican careerists playing politics. (The immediate concern of Ottaviani and others was that, with Italian elections due to take place at the end of April, the pope would look like he was sympathetic to communism, which in turn might persuade Italian Catholics to vote for communist candidates.) But it was frustrating for John, who had once spoken sarcastically to a friend about the amount of “freedom and sovereignty” a pope truly had.

 

It’s ironic that John would dictate this note just as he was getting ready to send his greatest encyclical letter, Pacem in terris, to press. Eleven days later, on March 31, he signed the first five copies in front of television cameras. It was due to be released on Holy Thursday, April 11, a day that John had specifically chosen. On that day, despite being in a good deal of pain, he spoke to the diplomatic corps:

 

I’m glad that the encyclical has been published today, the day on which the lips of Christ pronounced the words, “Love one another.” For what I wanted to do above all was to issue an appeal to love for the people of this time. Let us recognize the common origin that makes us brothers, and come together!

 

Pacem in terris (Peace on Earth)—John’s eighth and final encyclical—is the most catholic of papal encyclicals, universal in its appeal. It is also the most “secular” and influential, with debate and impacts from it continuing to echo today. The 20,000-word document is bold, comprehensive, and ambitious. Its substance and mandate changed the political discourse of world leaders in its wake. Although popularly known for its three-word Latin title (as are most such documents), the full title reads, “On Establishing Universal Peace in Truth, Justice, Charity [Love] and Liberty.” Its “peace on earth” message derives from the gospel tidings of the nativity. In a stunning departure from all other encyclicals, the pope addresses it not only to bishops and the Church faithful but also to “all men of good will.”

John conceived the idea for Pacem in terris during the Cuban missile crisis, when he helped Khrushchev, through intermediaries, continue negotiations with the United States. To underscore these conciliatory moves, John sent an advance copy of Pacem in terris to Khrushchev in the Kremlin.

One can argue that the pope’s unique background in diplomacy set the stage for such a far-reaching and ecumenical epistle. His previous postings in Bulgaria, Greece, Turkey, and France taught him the language of mutual respect and a vital appreciation and sensitivity toward diverse cultures, especially non-Catholic and even non-Christian and atheist.

Pacem in terris made quite a splash. Even before its debut, word of its contents sparked news stories. Nearly a week before it came out, a story in the New York Times previewed its theme of world peace. When it did come out, it garnered front-page and broadcast attention worldwide. Curiously, the Times seized on one component of the encyclical for page-one headlines, announcing that the pope hoped for a “world nation to guard peace.” Its lead story proclaimed, “Pope John XXIII proposed in an encyclical today the establishment of a world political community or public authority, a kind of super-nation to which all countries should belong. Its aim would be to insure peace.” The story added, “He made it clear that this new world organization should not be in contrast to or competition with the United Nations.” The encyclical itself, however, paid only modest attention to this, in paragraphs 137 and 138.

Picture, if you will, the accompanying stories in the news at the time to understand the gravity of world tensions: A week earlier, in Geneva, the United States and Russia had agreed to a “hot line,” a brand-new term for a communications link to reduce the threat of accidental war. At the same time, the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) powers were attempting to heal rifts over who would carry whose nuclear weapons in Europe. Berlin remained a flash point, with U.S.-Soviet talks at a stalemate. Rumbling in Southeast Asia merely hinted at the protracted and expanded war to come. And social upheaval in the United States was simmering when Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. was arrested at sit-ins in Birmingham, Alabama.

The encyclical itself comprised five main parts: order between men; relations between individuals and the public authorities; relations between states; relationship of men and of political communities with the world community; and pastoral exhortations. It logically and methodically built a case for world peace, beginning with order in the universe and order within human beings created in the image of a loving and peaceful God. As with all encyclicals, it buttressed its arguments with scriptural citations, references to Church scholars, and references to remarks of previous pontiffs, as well as John’s own previous words.

Its introductory language hearkened back to the U.S. Declaration of Independence, the French Declaration of the Rights of Man from the Age of Enlightenment (so often criticized by Church authorities), and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights of the United Nations. Previous popes (even Leo XIII) had steered clear of such language. John, however, embraced the concepts of human rights and articulated such in understandable terms, not the usual coded, lofty language of pontifical pronouncements.

He noted that peace can never be attained “except by the diligent observance of the divinely established order.”

Among the rights he enumerated were freedom of speech and access to information, the rights of families, the right to private property, and the rights of workers to earn a living wage (which did echo Leo XIII’s Rerum novarum). But his discussion of rights was always balanced by a discussion of social obligations geared toward the common good.

He may be considered prescient in his view of women, highlighting their importance to the family and in the economic sphere. Foreshadowing feminist positions that would become more commonplace within the coming decade, he wrote:

 

The part that women are now playing in political life is everywhere evident. This is a development that is perhaps of swifter growth among Christian nations, but it is also happening extensively, if more slowly, among nations that are heirs to different traditions and imbued with a different culture. Women are gaining an increasing awareness of their natural dignity. Far from being content with a purely passive role or allowing themselves to be regarded as a kind of instrument, they are demanding both in domestic and in public life the rights and duties which belong to them as human persons.

 

Among his bolder propositions was his declaration that each state must have a public constitution to define the roles of political leaders in their relations with citizens. He called for the elimination of racial discrimination and the need for more advanced nations to make greater contributions toward developing nations. To drive home the importance of social justice among nations, John used a pithy epigram of Saint Augustine: “Take away justice, and what are kingdoms but mighty bands of robbers?”

Pacem in terris made a number of powerful personal appeals—for the protection of minority populations and refugees, for instance. But John saved his most impassioned pleas for nuclear disarmament. He belittled the squandering of resources on the arms race and even obliquely touched upon the unknown environmental impacts of nuclear testing. Recognizing the need for spiritual transformation at the heart of peace, he said that disarmament must “reach men’s souls.”

In one passage, John spoke prophetically of the emergence of the sort of global economy we witness today. “National economies,” he wrote,

 

are gradually becoming so interdependent that a kind of world economy is being born. . . . Each country’s social progress, order, security and peace are necessarily linked with the social progress, order, security and peace of every other country. It is clear that no state can fittingly pursue its own interests in isolation from the rest, nor, under such circumstances, can it develop itself as it should. The prosperity and progress of any State is in part consequence, and in part cause, of the prosperity and progress of all other states.

 

In words that could apply to the Internet, he noted the “profound influence” of science and technology:

 

This progress is a spur to men all over the world to extend their collaboration and association with one another in these days when material resources, travel from one country to another, and technical information have so vastly increased. This has led to a phenomenal growth in relationships between individuals, families and intermediate associations belonging to the various nations, and between the public authorities of the various political communities.

 

This was not the first time John acknowledged the power and veracity of mass communication—and its utility in spreading the gospel. More would come from the council.

The pope’s heralded suggestion for a “supernation” stemmed from his finding that sincere efforts toward peace were not enough; radical systemic changes were needed. His proposal for a new form of public authority was not a rebuff to the United Nations—far from it, since he offered fulsome praise for that organization—but a plea for nations to work toward the common good to avert catastrophe, as they had during the Cuban missile crisis.

In the closing pastoral exhortations of Pacem, John passionately entreated his brothers and sisters to turn toward peace. No less than five times he addressed people beyond the Church, citing the longings in the hearts of “all men of good will.” He underscored the spiritual basis of peace in a passage reminiscent of a popular Catholic hymn: “The world will never be the dwelling place of peace, till peace has found a home in the heart of each and every man, until every man preserves in himself the order ordained by God to be preserved.”

For the most part, world leaders received Pacem in terris warmly. Breaking a precedent of silence toward papal encyclicals, the U.S. State Department said, “No country could be more responsive than the U.S. to its profound appeal to, and reassertion of, the dignity of the individual and man’s right to peace, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.” In fact, one American diplomat in Rome reportedly exclaimed, “It embodies everything the U.S. has been working for. We couldn’t agree with it more.”

On the other side of the political spectrum, the Soviet news agency TASS issued a brief summary of the encyclical, highlighting the pope’s call for disarmament and attention to workers’ rights, participation of women in public life, and equality of races and nationalities. Moscow’s Izvestia newspaper made it clear the Kremlin viewed it favorably.

Communist leaders in Italy, Belgium, France, and Poland hailed it. A chorus of positive responses came from diverse quarters, including UN Secretary General U Thant and government leaders in France, Germany, England, and other countries.

In the United States, Protestant, Orthodox, and Jewish leaders were moved by the pope’s broad appeal, as were civil rights groups. An official of the National Council of Churches termed Pacem in terris “a magnificent statement of world responsibility.”

The head of the National Conference of Christians and Jews received it as a “masterpiece” and said it “will be widely understood as an emphatic rebuke to isolationists, narrow nationalists, racists and those who rely on mass retaliation.” An executive of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People called the encyclical “an unequivocal answer to those bigots and false prophets who like to justify racial segregation and other injustices by quoting the Bible out of context.”

In theological circles, the prominent Jesuit theologian John Courtney Murray noted that freedom was added to the traditional papal pillars of truth, justice, and charity as the structural supports of peace. He saw Pacem as a shining example of John’s aggiornamento and suggested the pope’s endorsement of modern written constitutions was a papal first. Murray was careful to emphasize the pope’s rejection of a Marxist view of history, which portrays human beings as determined by historical forces.

Pacem in terris still sparks admiration and commentary a half-century later. Was it naïve? Idealistic? Pioneering? The debate continues, falling along partisan lines. However, there is no doubt it was a turning point in papal discourse with the world.

Marking the encyclical’s thirtieth anniversary in 1993, National Catholic Reporter columnist Thomas E. Blackburn lamented that conflicts in Bosnia underlined the challenges of minority populations and that disparities in wealth among nations were only haltingly addressed by the North American Free Trade Agreement. “Good Pope John believed that everybody could understand the principles when they were laid out for them. So he addressed people of goodwill, rather than the enforcement arms of the church. He preached, and he got a response from the wide audience. The text from which he spoke holds up better than either of the two great political-economic systems to which he preached.”

In 2003, on the fortieth anniversary of the encyclical, war was being waged in Iraq. New York Times columnist Peter Steinfels used the occasion to question “the total pattern of American policy.” With that in mind, it is fair to ask, Was Pacem in terris praised but ignored by warring nations? Was it overly optimistic, as theologians Reinhold Niebuhr and Paul Tillich asserted? What are the fruits of the various Pacem in terris peace institutes and retreat centers that have sprung up in New York, Delaware, and Minnesota?

Perhaps the most enduring legacy of the epochal encyclical is that it changed the conversation. It took the pope off his throne—at least for a significant moment in time. He engaged the world in gentle, impassioned, fatherly dialogue, understandable to superpowers and to peasants alike. His cry for true and sustainable peace based on the gospel precepts of charity, justice, and truth, with duties flowing from rights, is seen today as a given in most civilized circles. But its application in a real and changeable and too often violent world remains as elusive as ever.