CHAPTER FOURTEEN

Finis (May–June 1963)

Aside from the fruits of Vatican II, Pacem in terris was perhaps Pope John XXIII’s greatest contribution to the world. After it was published, he concentrated on the business of living in the shadow of “Sister Death,” as he always called mortality. A sculptor who had done several busts of John was disheartened when he saw the pope on Holy Saturday 1963: “Most of [his face] had fallen, except the big hooked nose and the immense ears which were left to ride above all else like an alarming sentinel, gaunt towers of a crumbling castle.”

Even the pope’s legendary sense of humor was tempered with an acceptance of reality. Shortly after Easter, he received a visit from the parish priest of Sotto il Monte, Father Pietro Bosio, who sought a blessing for a seminary that was to be built near John’s ancestral home. Bosio told the pope that a good many villagers wanted to come and see him, to which John replied, “Well, tell them to come quickly. Are they waiting until I am dead?” Later, he approved a model of the proposed seminary, but then added, “If you hurry up and build it, maybe I will come personally and dedicate it.”

In his journal, he wrote of “unbroken pain that makes me seriously wonder about my chances.”

As he went about his daily business throughout the remainder of April, John balanced life with imminent death. A visit to an orchestra concert on Saturday, April 20, turned what should have been an enjoyable moment into “seventy-five minutes of pain.” When Bishop Pericle Felici, secretary of the council during the first season, visited him, John turned emotional. As Felici recounted:

 

He wanted to make me a gift of his book on Radini-Tedeschi, and read out extracts from it. He said: “My Bishop Radini-Tedeschi would have made a very good secretary of the ecumenical council.” Then with tears in his eyes he evoked the death of “My Bishop.” It was an anticipated account of his own death little more than a month later. . . . When I looked at the dedication, I was moved to see that he had written: Ubi patientia, ibi laetitia. (Where there is patience, there is joy.)

 

While John was quietly going about the business of dying, the earthly realm kept intruding. On April 30, following a national election, the Communists picked up numerous offices, winning about one million more votes than they won in the previous election, five years earlier. John’s critics attributed their gains to his influence—a Milan newspaper retitled his encyclical Falcem in terris (The Sickle on Earth). That night, John suffered a severe internal hemorrhage that required three blood transfusions.

Still, incredibly, the eighty-one-year-old pontiff kept to his schedule; however, saying Mass the next morning, he lost his way in the liturgy, for a period forgetting the words that had come so naturally to him for almost sixty years.

He then met with James McCone, director of the Central Intelligence Agency, who warned about getting too cozy with the Russians. But John wouldn’t have it. “I’m not going [to be] put off my stroke by the unseemly fuss that some people try to impress churchmen with,” he wrote in his journal. “I bless all peoples, and withhold my confidence from none.”

On Friday, May 10, Antonio Segni, president of Italy, presented John with the Balzan Prize in the Sala Regia, the Vatican’s private throne room, rather than in Saint Peter’s, because John didn’t think it was appropriate for a pope to receive an award in a Church. But he was pleased with the prize. “The desire for a just peace,” he remarked, “has entered the hearts and minds of all without distinction.” Later, he received the scroll commemorating the prize in the basilica, using the opportunity to pray for peace. There, he noted: “Peace is the greatest treasure of life in a community, the most luminous point in the history of humanity and Christianity, the object of the trustful expectations of the Church and the people.”

After the reception, when he was carried out in his sedan chair, the sedia gestatoria, he put his head in his hands. The ceremony—his last major address in Saint Peter’s—had exhausted him. That afternoon, he was given a clipping from the Baltimore Sun, which cited “a Vatican staffer well placed to know” who had said, “Recently the pope has been waking up during the night and asking for sedatives.”

As it happens, the Roman pontiff had not asked for sedatives, despite his great pain. After reading the article, the pope merely shook his head and told Capovilla, “File it away. Every detail helps to document situations and the movement of minds.” Yet the pain continued and worsened. The next day, at a reception at the Quirinale Palace, where Segni honored John and American historian Samuel Eliot Morrison for their Balzan Prizes, John barely made it through the ceremony.

Back at home, while watching coverage of the event on television, he told Loris Capovilla, “A few hours ago I was being feted and complimented, and now I’m here alone with my pain. But that’s all right. The first duty of a pope is to pray and suffer.”

The reception was his last public appearance. John continued to suffer, and he continued to work. By mid-May, the pain had become so great, he told Capovilla, that he felt “like Saint Lawrence on the grid-iron.” He was now sleepless much of the night. He celebrated his last Mass on May 17. Three days later, he met with Cardinal Stefan Wyszynski of Poland, who suggested the pope receive him in the papal bedroom. “We haven’t come to that yet,” John said. Afterward Wyszynski told him he would see him in September, at the second session of the council.

“In September you will either find me here, or another,” John responded, smiling. “You know, in one month they can do it all—the funeral of one pope, the election of another.” That afternoon he experienced several small hemorrhages and received two blood transfusions. The next day, after another sleepless night, he took Holy Communion at six in the morning and expressed to those present a sentiment that was increasingly common to him in his last days: “I’m ready to go. I’ve said all my breviary and the whole Rosary. I’ve prayed for the children, for the sick, for the sinners. . . . Will things be done differently when I’m gone? That’s none of my business.”

And yet he did not die.

One of his doctors, Antonio Gasbarrini, said that he had “a constitution of iron.” On May 22, he fainted in his quarters while dressing. He was scheduled to visit the Benedictine Abbey at Monte Casino the following day, but his handlers told him he was far too weak to travel, despite his protestations. Capovilla told him that there would be little anyone could do if he hemorrhaged there, to which the pope replied with some excitement: “I’d go to bed. I’d go to a cell in the Abbey. Think of it: to die at Monte Casino, the cradle of monasticism!”

Although the Vatican continued to send out news releases about his “gastric troubles,” most people understood the pope was dying. The world prayed for him.

On Monday, May 27, his nephew, Monsignor Giovanni Battista Roncalli, came to visit so that, through him, John could tell all of his extended family how much he loved them. Battista was also entrusted with telling the family about his last will and testament, in which he writes, “Born poor, but of humble and respected folk, I am particularly happy to die poor, having distributed, according to the various needs and circumstances of my simple and modest life in service of the poor and of the holy Church which has nurtured me, whatever came into my hands.” Therefore, to his family, he “can leave only a great and special blessing.”

Despite what was obviously intended to be a last conversation with his nephew, John told him before he left, “So you come here today and find me in my bed. . . . But let’s hope I’ll get over it soon and be able to get back to work on the council.”

The following day, May 28, L’Osservatore Romano finally printed the truth about the pope’s condition, admitting that he had cancer rather than “a distress of the stomach.” The close observer knew by that time that the Holy Father had only days remaining in his life.

On the morning of Thursday, May 30, John was seized by sharp and violent abdominal pains, most likely the result of a perforated intestine caused by the tumor. For the first time, John was given sedatives. Peritonitis was sure to set in. The next day, John’s two primary physicians, Dr. Antonio Gasbarrini and Dr. Piero Mazzoni, confirmed there was nothing they could do. The dutiful, distraught Loris Capovilla took it upon himself to tell John.

Approaching the pope’s bedside, trying not to cry, he said, “Holy Father, I’m keeping my promise: I have to do for you what you did for Monsignor Radini at the end of his life. The time has come. The Lord calls you.”

“It would be good to have the doctors’ verdict,” John answered calmly.

“Their verdict,” Capovilla replied, “is that it’s the end. The tumor has done its work.”

“So, as with Monsignor Radini . . . there will be an operation?”

“It’s too late,” Capovilla answered. “The cancer has at last overcome your long resistance.”

And at this point, the devoted secretary broke down weeping, his face buried in the bedspread. But John simply said, “Help me die as a bishop or a pope would.”

 

To die as a bishop or a pope would, with due ceremony and solemnity.

History, “the great teacher of life,” would provide John with a way toward his death. The pontiff told Capovilla to gather everyone around him, and soon the room was filled with his doctors and nurses; his housekeepers, nuns from Bergamo; and clergy, including Bishop Angelo Dell’Acqua and Cardinal Antonio Samorè, representatives of the Secretariat of State). John was able to sit up in bed and receive the Eucharist from Monsignor Alfredo Cavagana. As part of the last rites, Bishop Peter Canisius van Lierde, the papal sacristan, started to anoint John with oil, but the pope stopped him so that he could speak:

 

The secret of my ministry is that crucifix you see opposite my bed. It’s there so that I can see it in my first waking moments and before going to sleep. It’s there, also, so that I can talk to it during the long evening hours. Look at it, see it as I see it. Those open arms have been the program of my pontificate: they say that Christ died for all, for all. No one is excluded from his love, from his forgiveness. . . .

 

Moving most of those present to tears, John thanked God for being born into a “Christian family, modest and poor.” He listed those who had influenced his early life, from his old parish priest, Father Francesco Rebuzzini, to Bishop Giacomo Radini-Tedeschi and Cardinal Andrea Carlo Ferrari. One can imagine scenes from his life flooding back to John as he lay in bed—the hilly village of Sotto il Monte, swept by the tramontano; his early experiences in the tiny school; life with his large, boisterous family, especially his mother, Marianna; his early days in Bergamo; and finally his papacy in Rome.

So many of the people he met and loved along the way were inspirations, he told the somber group around his bedside. They “helped me and loved me. I had lots of encouragement.” He offered an apology to anyone he might have offended and then told the assembled, “My time on earth is drawing to a close. But Christ lives on and the Church continues his work. Souls, souls.”

Van Lierde then began to anoint the pope with the final sacrament, touching each of the five senses, but he was so emotional that he forgot the proper order. John calmly reminded him—eyes, ears, nose, mouth, hands, and feet. After this, John was able to speak personally with everyone present—about twenty people. By this time it was 4:30 in the afternoon, and now members of the Curia came through, with John bidding each one good-bye. He told one, “In my opinion, my successor will be Montini. The votes of the sacred college will converge on him.”

By early that evening, the audiences were over and John was left alone with Capovilla. He spoke to him with great affection and sincerity, as if they were comrades who had survived a war together. “We’ve worked together and served the Church without stopping to pick up and throw aside the stones that have sometimes blocked our path. You’ve put up with my defects and I’ve put up with yours. We’ll always be friends. . . . I’ll protect you from heaven. . . . When this is over get some rest and go and see your mother.”

The pain grew sharper, and John was put under sedation. While he slept, his brothers Zaverio, Alfredo, and Giuseppe, accompanied by their sister Assunta, came in and knelt by the pope’s bed to pray. They were joined by the pope’s nephews, Monsignor Battista Roncalli and Zaverio Roncalli. Midnight struck. It was June 1. A huge crowd began gathering in the square outside the window. Father Capovilla said Mass for those in the room. As Battista later wrote, the family was very aware that it was not just their Angelo dying, but the pope of the Universal Church:

 

The first thing they were told was that they must not weep. If it turned out they could not hold back their tears, they were to leave. These four poor old souls were trembling and still upset from their airplane trip, which was the first for any of them. There was only a dim light in the room. We are all standing back because we were given the impression that the pope was having great difficulty breathing, that he needed air, and that if we stood too close we would deprive him of it.

 

At about three o’clock that morning, the pope regained consciousness and seemed to rally. He was able to sit up, take a cup of coffee, and speak conversationally to his family. “I’m still here when yesterday I thought I was gone,” he told them. “I don’t know what’s going to happen. I could get better. We’re made to live. . . . If I get worse, what a disappointment for you.” He dozed off, but woke up again within an hour, asking his brothers and sister, “Do you remember how I never thought of anything else in life but being a priest? I embrace you and bless you.”

John saw a few more people during the course of the day as a crowd continued to gather on Saint Peter’s Square and the world waited in vigil. During the night of June 2–3, John fell back into unconsciousness. In Milan, 20,000 young people flocked to the cathedral to pray. Cardinal Montini met with them. People needed to “gather up his inheritance and his final message of peace,” the cardinal said. “Perhaps never before in our time has a human word—the word of a master, a leader, a prophet, a pope—rung out so loudly and won such affection throughout the whole world.”

On Sunday, June 2, John awoke before noon with a fever of 104 degrees. He told Dr. Mazzoni, “I am suffering with love, but with pain, too, so much pain.” Trying to find a parting gift for Mazzoni, he finally handed him his fountain pen. “Take it,” he told the doctor. “It’s nearly new.” Seeing his nephew Zaverio standing at the foot of the bed, he told him gently to move: “Out of the way, you’re hiding the crucifix from me.”

In his bedroom, during the final hours, many crowded around the dying pontiff:

 

Tisserant, Masella, and Cicoganani; John’s three brothers and his sister; three of his nephews, Giovanni Battista, Zaverio, and Flavio; four of his nieces, two of whom, Angela and Anna, were nuns; his two faithful valets, Guido and Giampalo Gussi; the three doctors, Cavagna and van Lierde, the sacristan; Federico Belotti, his principal nurse; the five nuns of the household; the devoted Capovilla and, in the shadows, Montini.

 

By nine that night, the pain had gotten a good deal worse, and John was given sedatives again. The prayers for the dying were started, but the pope continued to breathe, though not without the aid of oxygen. On Monday morning at 3:00 John awoke and said twice, very firmly, the words of Saint Peter: “Lord, you know that I love you.” These were his last clear words. He slept, tossing and turning, for the rest of the day, but by early evening he had fallen into deep unconsciousness.

It was a warm spring evening outside on Saint Peter’s Square. Cardinal Luigi Taglia, vicar of Rome, said Mass for John in front of a crowd of thousands. The liturgy could be clearly heard inside John’s bedroom, where Capovilla, his family, and the doctors and the household staff continued to gather. They said the prayers for the dying, which rose and intermingled with the words of the sacred rite. Just before eight o’clock, Cardinal Taglia uttered the traditional sentence that ended the service: “Ite, missa est.” (Go, the Mass is ended.) Just at that moment, John took his last breath.

Those in the room with John knelt and prayed and then sang hymns—the Te Deum and the Magnificat. As tradition dictated—and tradition was something John loved—the dead pope’s brow was tapped firmly, to make sure he was really dead. Then the shutters to the “window of the Angelus”—the window where popes appear to pray the Angelus—were opened. Light flooded out and those on the square knew that John was dead. To the world at large, the Vatican press office issued a statement: “He suffers no more.”

 

Although the whole world had followed John through his illness and death, his dying had remained a relatively private affair. This was in part because, on September 2, 1962, he had signed a personal statute entitled Summi Pontificis electio, which decried certain “facts and customs recently introduced.” This was a reference to photographs taken after the death of Pope Pius XII, as he lay in his bed with medical devices attached to his body. John had decreed that no photographs or film or voice recordings were to be made in his apartment after his death, except for one official photograph, for historical purposes.

But John’s funeral and burial were public. On June 4, his body was carried through Saint Peter’s Square and placed in the basilica, where for two days thousands filed past his bier in an unending line. On June 6, he was interred in the crypt below Saint Peter’s. Those who loved him—and they numbered in the millions—were happy that he was out of pain and had gone for his audience with the Lord. He had not been a man who wanted to die, but he was ready to, as he told Dr. Mazzoni near the end: “Don’t look so worried. My bags are packed and I’m ready to go.” He had been pope for just under five years—up to that point, the shortest papal reign since Pius VIII—but he had accomplished an extraordinary amount.

Whatever the ultimate effect of Vatican II—and its virtues and demerits are still being debated today—John himself was an extraordinary man and pope. Many thought him a saint. At the second session of the council, his close friend, Belgian Cardinal Leo Suenens, thought that John should be canonized right then and there, by acclamation, as had been done in the early years of the Church. He and several bishops circulated a petition that read, in part:

 

From Pope John the world has learned that it is not so alienated from the Church after all, nor is the Church from the world. Maybe now the world expects us to declare that we do not consider Pope John a dreamer, or as one who had rashly overturned everything that, with long and patient effort, we will have to put back in order . . . but on the contrary, that we see him as a true Christian, indeed a saintly one, a man filled with love for the world and for all mankind.

 

However, the Curia intervened. It would not do to make John a saint by acclamation—this would make his predecessor, Pius XII, look bad by comparison. The Vatican Congregation for the Cause of Saints also firmly disagreed, since the petition would in effect take power out of their hands—they were the ones who picked saints, after all. And so the saint-by-acclamation movement died a relatively quick death. John was beatified, however, by Pope John Paul II in 2000 (John Paul himself, on a considerably faster track, was declared Blessed in 2011); it remains to be seen whether the Church will grant him sainthood. Most of those who knew him well thought that he was a saint, in the sense of his being a holy man who worked tirelessly to improve the lives of others and who believed firmly in salvation through Jesus Christ.

Each candidate for sainthood is assigned a postulator—someone who conducts investigations into the life of the would-be saint in order to ascertain whether he or she is worthy. Father Luca M. De Rosa, an Italian Franciscan, is postulator for John’s cause. “Believers but also nonbelievers” admire him, says De Rosa. “They continue to admire Angelo Roncalli’s goodness and mildness, his zeal for truth, peace and understanding between peoples, his anxiety to be God’s messenger and a servant of humanity. . . . His life story makes people want to live better. . . .”

It was a benediction that John would have loved.

 

At the consistory of December 15, 1958, the first cardinal John named was Giovanni Battista Montini, the archbishop of Milan, former influential curial official under Pius XII, and a personal friend of John’s for more than thirty years.

Then, on September 5, 1962, a month before opening the Vatican Council, he published the motu proprio, Summi Pontificis electio, which would serve as the rules for the next conclave. The pontiff made several minor changes to Pius XII’s constitution, under which he had been elected, including elimination of the provision that two-thirds plus one votes are required for the canonical election of the pope. Also, each cardinal elector was to be accompanied by only one conclavist (assistant), and all would be clerics. There would be no valets or other laity housed within the conclave itself, other than the staff who would provide the medical, nutritional, and security support needed.

In the end, the committee charged with organizing the conclave approved 80 electors, 82 conclavists, and 119 staff members. Fifty-four votes were required for election. It turned into a classic battle of the curial conservative-traditionalists (who were opposed to the liberalizing movement of the council) and the liberal or progressive majority (though it would be a struggle to garner two-thirds behind one candidate, as always, because conservatives controlled more than one-third of the total votes).

Montini of Milan, age sixty-five, was the clear favorite going into the balloting. After the first ballot, he led with a plurality of twenty-eight votes. On Thursday, June 20, everyone knew that he was John’s choice as a successor, but Church law and tradition forbade the pope from dictating his successor.

In all, it took less than the month John had predicted to elect a new pope. On the following day, Friday, June 21, Montini was elected on the sixth ballot. Just over three weeks after John’s burial, Cardinal Montini stepped out onto the balcony as the newly chosen Pope Paul VI, to the thundering applause of the huge crowd gathered in Saint Peter’s Square. He was, in effect, John’s handpicked successor, and despite rumors that he had been “very pale, almost speechless” when he found out he had achieved the necessary votes in the conclave, he started out vigorously and was firm in his support of John’s council, setting the opening date of the second session for September 29, 1963.

“We wish our thoughts also to go to those of our brethren who are not Catholics,” he told a group of American Catholic pilgrims on June 25. “On them and their dear ones, we evoke the abundance of heavenly grace.” Even the name Montini chose—Paul, the apostle to the gentiles—was evocative of the ecumenical spirit that had so imbued John and his council, which was to finally end after its fourth session in 1965.