Ecumenical Commemoration
Bishop of Rome, Ecumenist, & Reformer of the Church
June 4 · d. 1963
also known as Angelo Giuseppe Roncalli, Pope John XXIII
Angelo Giuseppe Roncalli, John XXIII, was Bishop of Rome from 1958 to 1963 and the pope who summoned the Second Vatican Council. A diplomat's son of the Bergamo peasantry in Italy, elected at seventy-six as a caretaker, he instead opened the Roman church toward the other Christian communions and toward the world. The affection in which he was held has long outlived him, and his impact on simplifying and unifying the Roman church still resonates today. The maxim he commended in his first encyclical was an old one: in essentials, unity; in doubtful matters, liberty; in all things, charity.
Angelo Roncalli was born in 1881 at Sotto il Monte, a farming village under the hills near Bergamo, in the Lombardy of northern Italy. His family were sharecroppers, tenants who worked another man's land, and there were thirteen children. They were poor, and they were devout. Angelo was the fourth child and the first son, and from boyhood he wanted to be a priest.
He was ordained in 1904. Then came the war. When Italy entered the Great War he was called up, and he served in the army as a stretcher-bearer, carrying the wounded, and later as a chaplain among the dying soldiers in the hospitals. He saw a great deal of suffering. It moved him deeply, and he never forgot the deep needs of a world that suffers. An ivory tower could never be his home.
After the war the church sent him out into the world as a diplomat. He went to Bulgaria, then to Turkey and Greece, then to France. These were Orthodox lands and Muslim lands and a France worn down by another war, and everywhere he went he made friends. He was a large, warm, plain-spoken man who liked people and was easy to like. During the Second World War, in Istanbul, he helped Jews fleeing the Nazis to escape, signing papers that carried them to safety. He kept a diary all his life, a small book of resolutions and prayers that was published after he died as Journal of a Soul; in it you can watch a humble man examining his own heart year after year.
In 1953 he was made a cardinal and Patriarch of Venice, and he thought his life's work was nearly done. He was an old man. Then in 1958 the pope died, the cardinals gathered to choose another, and they chose Roncalli. He was seventy-six. Many expected him to do little and to do it quietly, an old shepherd minding the flock until a younger man could take over.
He surprised them all. Within a few months he announced that he would call a great council of the whole church, the first in nearly a hundred years. People asked why. It was said that he walked to a window and opened it, and answered that he wanted to let in some fresh air. He set the council to work in 1962, and on the day it opened he told the bishops gathered in Rome not to listen to the prophets of doom who were always expecting the worst, as if the world were ending. He believed the church had good news to give, and that it should give it gladly.
He did something else that astonished people. He reached out his hand to Christians who were not Roman Catholics, to the Orthodox and to the Protestants and the Anglicans, whom Rome had long kept at arm's length. He invited them to send men to watch the council and pray for it. When the Archbishop of Canterbury came to see him in 1960, the first to do so since the Reformation, John received him as a brother.
He was already ill when the council began. The cancer that would kill him was at work in him. He gave the world one last gift, a letter on peace called Pacem in Terris, "Peace on Earth," written as the nations stood close to nuclear war, and he addressed it not only to Catholics but to every person of good will on the earth. Then, in June of 1963, he died. He had prayed at the end for the council and for the unity of all Christians, the two hopes of his short life. The council he had begun went on without him. The people called him il Papa buono, the Good Pope, and they have called him that ever since; and the window he opened has never quite been shut.
How we know. John XXIII is a figure of the documented twentieth century, and the sources are abundant and close. His own writings survive in full: the encyclicals and the opening address to the Second Vatican Council, issued in the official Latin and in authorized translations and held at the Vatican's own archive; and his lifelong spiritual diary, Journal of a Soul, kept from his seminary years to his last months and published in 1964 with a memoir by his secretary, Loris Capovilla. The acts of the council, the diplomatic record of his nunciatures, and the testimony of those who worked beside him fill out the rest. The difficulty with John XXIII is not scarcity of evidence but the affection that surrounds his memory; the historian's task is to keep the man distinct from the legend that gathered around him almost at once.
Angelo Giuseppe Roncalli was born on 25 November 1881 at Sotto il Monte in the province of Bergamo, the fourth of thirteen children in a family of sharecroppers. He was ordained priest in 1904 and served in the First World War as a sergeant in the medical corps, first as a stretcher-bearer and then as a chaplain. From 1925 he held a long succession of Vatican diplomatic posts: apostolic visitor and then delegate in Bulgaria, delegate to Turkey and Greece, and from 1944 nuncio to France in the unsettled years after the Liberation. In 1953 Pius XII created him cardinal and named him Patriarch of Venice.
He was elected pope on 28 October 1958, at seventy-six, and was widely understood at the time to be a transitional choice. The expectation proved wrong. On 25 January 1959, less than three months into his pontificate, he announced his intention to convoke an ecumenical council, the first since the First Vatican Council of 1869 to 1870. The Second Vatican Council opened on 11 October 1962. His opening address, Gaudet Mater Ecclesia, set its pastoral tone, distinguishing the deposit of faith from the manner of its presentation and declining, in the TPS Press translation, to join those "prophets of doom, who are always forecasting worse disasters".
His ecumenical initiatives were deliberate and structural, not merely personal. In June 1960 he established the Secretariat for Promoting Christian Unity under Cardinal Augustin Bea, and through it invited the other churches and communions to send observers to the council. On 2 December 1960 he received Archbishop Geoffrey Fisher of Canterbury, the first meeting between a pope and an Archbishop of Canterbury since the sixteenth century. His social encyclicals, (1961) and (1963), addressed labor, development, human rights, and peace; the latter, issued on 11 April 1963 as the Cold War stood near its most dangerous point, was the first encyclical a pope addressed not to Catholics alone but to "all men of good will."
The Anglican Church in North America commemorates John XXIII on 4 June as "Bishop of Rome, Ecumenist, and Reformer of the Church." The placement is itself a small courtesy of the calendar: he died on 3 June, but that day in the ACNA kalendar belongs to the Martyrs of Uganda, so his commemoration moves to the following day. The Roman Catholic Church, by the same logic of an occupied date, keeps his memorial not on the day of his death but on 11 October, the anniversary of the council's opening. That an Anglican calendar should remember a pope at all is the point of the day; he is kept ecumenically, as one whose work made such remembering possible.
He is most often called il Papa buono, the Good Pope, a name the Italian people gave him in his lifetime and have not let go. The affection was earned in small things as much as great ones: his stoutness and his plainness, his habit of slipping out of the Vatican to visit a Roman prison or a children's hospital, his evident delight in people. The most beloved memory of him belongs to the night the council opened, when a crowd filled the square below his window by torchlight and he spoke to them off the cuff under the moon, telling them, when they went home, to give their children a caress and to say it came from the pope. The words exist in several renderings and no single authorized text, but the scene is firmly remembered, and the tenderness in it is the thing the church has kept.
His canonization in 2014 set the seal on that popular devotion. In Roman Catholic iconography he is shown stout and smiling in the papal white, often with the documents of the council, and he is invoked particularly under the cause of Christian unity and of peace, the two labors of his short pontificate. His enduring legacy is the council itself, and beyond it a posture: a church with its windows open, willing to speak to the whole world and to address it as friend.
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Journal of a Soul (Il Giornale dell'Anima)(Italian, 1895-1963; published 1964)
Recommended: Journal of a Soul: The Autobiography of Pope John XXIII (Image Books / Doubleday, 1999)
His lifelong spiritual diary, from seminary to the papacy, with a biographical memoir by his secretary Loris Capovilla; the most intimate primary source for the man.
Public domain: Internet Archive (earlier edition, borrowable scan)
Gaudet Mater Ecclesia (Opening Address to the Second Vatican Council)(Latin, 11 October 1962)
His opening address to the council, the clearest single statement of its pastoral purpose and the source of the "prophets of doom" passage.
Public domain: Vatican.va (official English text)
Pacem in Terris(Latin, 11 April 1963)
His encyclical on peace, written near the height of the Cold War and the first encyclical addressed to "all men of good will" rather than to Catholics alone.
Public domain: Vatican.va (official English text)
Ad Petri Cathedram(Latin, 29 June 1959)
His first encyclical, which commends the unity maxim "in essentials, unity; in doubtful matters, liberty; in all things, charity" as a common saying worthy of approval.
Public domain: Vatican.va (official English text)
The Good Pope: The Making of a Saint and the Remaking of the Church(English, 2012)
Recommended: Greg Tobin, The Good Pope (HarperOne, 2012)
The most accessible believing-register life for the general reader, centered on the council and the man; the book to put in a parishioner's hand first.
Public domain: Internet Archive (borrowable scan)
John XXIII: Pope of the Council (rev. as Pope of the Century)(English, 1984; rev. 2000)
The standard scholarly biography, exhaustively documented from the Italian sources; out of clean print, so listed for borrowing rather than purchase.
Public domain: Internet Archive (search; borrowable scans)
Primary sources. John XXIII's own words are the nearest approach to him, and most are freely available in authorized English at the Vatican's site. The opening address to the council, Gaudet Mater Ecclesia (11 October 1962), is the clearest single statement of his purpose. His first encyclical, Ad Petri Cathedram (1959), commends the unity maxim that became associated with him; the social encyclicals Mater et Magistra (1961) and Pacem in Terris (1963) carry his teaching on labor, rights, and peace.
Recommended modern biography. Greg Tobin, The Good Pope: The Making of a Saint and the Remaking of the Church (HarperOne, 2012), is the most accessible believing-register life for the general reader: warm, readable, and centered on the council and the man rather than on Vatican politics. It is the book to put in a parishioner's hand first.
Further reading. Peter Hebblethwaite's John XXIII: Pope of the Council (1984; revised as Pope of the Century) remains the standard scholarly biography, exhaustively documented from the Italian sources; clean new copies are hard to find, but it can be borrowed through the Internet Archive. For the council itself in his own framing, the documents of the Second Vatican Council are the indispensable context.
Online resources. The Vatican maintains his complete archive of speeches and encyclicals in English. His spiritual diary, Journal of a Soul, can be read in an earlier edition at the Internet Archive, and is in print from Image Books.
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He had been diagnosed with stomach cancer in 1962 and died on 3 June 1963, before the council he had opened could complete its first full year of work. He was canonized by Pope Francis on 27 April 2014, in the same rite as John Paul II; the customary second miracle was waived. His reforming intention is sometimes read in the later church as more radical than the texts themselves support, and sometimes as more cautious; the documents he signed are the firmest ground, and they are all in print.
Almighty God, we give you thanks for the ministry of John XXIII, who labored that the Church of Jesus Christ might be one: Grant that we, instructed by his teaching and example, and knit together in unity by your Spirit, may ever stand firm upon the one foundation, which is Jesus Christ our Lord; who lives and reigns with you, in the unity of the Holy Spirit, one God, now and for ever. Amen.
British (Received Pronunciation): Gaudet Mater Ecclesia /ˈɡaʊ.dɛt ˈmɑː.tər ɛˈkleɪ.zi.ə/; Mater et Magistra /ˈmɑːtər ɛt məˈdʒɪstrə/; Pacem in Terris /ˈpɑːtʃɛm ɪn ˈtɛrɪs/
Readings for an Ecumenist
Ezekiel 34:11–16Psalm 133Ephesians 3:14–21John 17:10–26