Pope John XXIII: The Good Pope (3 page)

Having previously worked with Catholic missions, Roncalli was already sensitive to the question of Church-sponsored colonialism. Thus he felt it was important for the Uniates to have their own, indigenous leadership, and he recommended Father Kurtev be appointed a bishop. The Vatican would eventually allow this but only after considerable foot-dragging. Archbishop Roncalli also sought to create a Uniate seminary for the development of a local priesthood, but although he succeeded in purchasing the property for it, he was never allowed to commence building. The Vatican’s failure to support his endeavors both puzzled and hurt him, and he continually struggled with a lack of clarity and direction for his mission in Bulgaria. There remained no clear message from Rome concerning what exactly it was he was supposed to accomplish. He longed to minister directly to the folk of the land, but there was no forum for him to do so.

In all, the ten years in Bulgaria (1925–1934) were often discouraging and lonely for an energetic and dedicated man in his prime, but Archbishop Roncalli endured them with fortitude and good humor. His next appointment was equally obscure: apostolic delegate to Greece and head of the Vatican diplomatic mission to Turkey. Since Greece, too, was predominantly Eastern Orthodox, while Turkey was Muslim or secular, he again presided over many small communities in somewhat hostile settings. Nevertheless, his naturally friendly personality and bountiful good sense won over many friends. Istanbul, where the archbishop resided, did have a large Catholic community so that the archbishop finally had his own cathedral and the opportunity to engage in the pastoral duties he had missed for so long. The communities he served were extremely diverse so that he had to negotiate among churches in communion with Rome but adhering to their own very different traditions.

The secular Turkish government of the time was ruthless in asserting its authority over any survivors of Islamic rule. As such, it also moved to suppress other religions. Clergy were not permitted to wear clerical garb, so the archbishop had to wear regular suits when out and about. Since the government also closed the diocesan newspaper, the archbishop’s attempts to communicate with his audience were somewhat circumscribed. Undaunted, he reached out to the ecumenical patriarch of Orthodoxy even though healing relations was not then on the Vatican agenda. He also established friendly relations with any and all foreign diplomats present in Istanbul. In a foreshadowing of his future moves as pope, he introduced the use of Turkish for all parts of the liturgy that weren’t mandatorily said in Latin. It became necessary for him to defend that practice when he was denounced to the Vatican because of it.

Meanwhile, the political crisis in Europe was escalating with growing rapidity. Pius XI, in failing health, finally grasped the full, horrible meaning of Nazism and in early 1937 issued an encyclical against it,
Mit Brennender Sorge
(
With Consuming Concern
). In this document, he spoke of the Nazis’ utter rejection of peace and their distortion of the treaty with the Vatican. He alluded to the paganism inherent in arrogantly elevating a person (i.e., Hitler) or a people to the level of heaven. He further emphasized the universality of humanity as created by God and the Church’s ultimate rejection of racism. Much of the document was an exhortation to the faithful of the Church to cling heroically to Christian teaching despite the trials they might face in the current and coming circumstances. In a number of public statements, he made clear his opposition to Nazism. Pope Pius proceeded to break with the Italian fascists in 1938, and he is said to have been working on a statement against anti-Semitism at the time of his death, but because of his death, it was never published.

With the outbreak of war, Archbishop Roncalli had the opportunity to undertake far more significant work in Turkey than would otherwise have been the case. Neutral Istanbul, like Bogart’s Casablanca, was a hotbed of intrigue during WWII. In such a setting, Archbishop Roncalli found ways to do his part and more. He was extremely active in saving Jews from the Nazi onslaught, which will be discussed further below. In addition, he established an office for locating prisoners of war, certainly a torment he understood personally because of his family’s experience during WWI. He was further able to achieve a humanitarian lifting of the Allied blockade of Greece so that food shipments could get through during the winter famine of 1941. The latter effort won a tremendous amount of goodwill towards the Catholic nuncio from an Orthodox country that was normally quite chary of the Catholic Church.

Given his prior minor postings, Archbishop Roncalli was extremely surprised when at the end of 1944
he was appointed to a vital position: papal nuncio to France, which had just been liberated from Nazi Germany.
The previous nuncio was viewed as a collaborator, having been close to the Vichy head of state, General Philippe Pétain. Consequently, Archbishop Roncalli was entering an extremely sensitive situation in a critical venue. The good-natured Roncalli was deemed the right sort of person to defuse the hostile mood, reestablish the Church’s independence, and negotiate the release of German seminarians being held as prisoners of war. Subsequently, he was named the first permanent Vatican observer to UNESCO, addressing its sixth and seventh general assemblies in 1951 and 1952. In that position, he enthusiastically encouraged cross-cultural dialogue and assistance.

His success with these difficult tasks was rewarded; he was elevated to a cardinal and appointed Patriarch of Venice by Pius XII in January 1953. Cardinal Roncalli was now 71 and settling into a happy old age. He probably expected Venice to be his last post. Instead, he became pope.

The nineteen-year reign of Pius XII was at an end, and Pope John XXIII was elected to his position on October 20, 1958. With WWII barely in the past, Europe was now overshadowed and divided by the Iron Curtain. When Cardinal Roncalli was elected by a conclave of fifty-one cardinals on the twelfth ballot, it was clear to all knowledgeable observers that he was a compromise candidate. What no one expected was that his election would be a watershed moment in the long history of the Church.

Certainly no person knows whether their time ahead will be long or short, but at age 77, the new pope had every reason to wonder if there would be time for him to do more than merely set the course that he desired for the Church. He surprised everyone by taking the name John, the first pope with that name in more than 500 years. The last had been the antipope, John XXIII. This led to some initial confusion about what number would follow his name until he settled the matter. Angelo Roncalli took the name of John in honor of his father Giovanni and in honor of the many churches and cathedrals named after John the Baptist and John the Evangelist, including the small one in which he had been baptized—but he also pointed out that it was a name belonging to many popes with short reigns.

Pope John made it clear in his first public address as pope that he intended to be a pastoral pope. He then lost no time in working to establish an agenda. It came as a shock to those around him that his goal was nothing less than renewal of the Church. Within his first three months as pope, he announced that he would hold a diocesan synod for Rome (the first in the history of Rome was held in 1960), convene an ecumenical council (a general meeting of bishops), and revise the Code of Canon Law. The heart of his plan was a more accessible Church, one in which laypeople would not hold a second-class place.

While his horrified assistants tried to bury the plan for a new ecumenical council in a decade of preparations, the new pope made it happen within months.

And so, on October 11, 1962, more than 2,500 bishops from all over the world met at St. Peter’s, and the Second Vatican Council began. The bishops would meet for the next four years (1962–1965), approximately four months each year, and they would change forever the way the Church operated. Pope John was able to preside over the first session.

Church Councils—and there have been very few in the course of Church history—were usually convened to correct false doctrines that were becoming popular. Pope John made it clear that his was to be a positive Church Council rather than a negative one. He was not interested in merely creating a new statement about Orthodoxy. Instead, his goal was to “open the windows” to the Church to let in fresh air and to allow a “new Pentecost.” He sought, with the guidance of the Holy Spirit, to create an
aggiornamento
, an updating.

For many years predating the reign of Pope John, the Church had been fighting a losing battle against the modern world. Several popes had forcefully positioned themselves as conservative bulwarks against modern thinking. In addition, in his elder years, Pope Pius XII had increasingly isolated himself from the rest of the Curia, issuing orders by telephone but seldom listening to responses from those charged with administering the Church. As a result, there were many leaders within the Church who were more than ready for reform and quite responsive to Pope John’s call for
aggiornamento
.

In seeking Christian unity, he was prepared to acknowledge the Catholic Church’s part in the Christian schism. Accordingly, he invited Eastern Orthodox, Anglican, and Protestant observers to the council.

As part of this process, in 1963 Pope John established the Pontifical Commission for the Revision of the Code of Canon Law.

The outcome, which occurred after John’s death, was sixteen documents: three declarations, four constitutions, and nine decrees. In the end, traditionalists were able to modify many of the progressive changes Pope John had desired. Nevertheless, the liturgy was thoroughly revised, there was a new emphasis on ecumenism, and the Church was now fully engaged with the modern world.

Ever since the final seizure of the Papal States and the capture of Rome by the newly unified Kingdom of Italy in 1870, the movement of popes had been severely circumscribed. Popes from Pius IX (known as Pio Nino) onward were known as prisoners in the Vatican because they refused to leave the premises, intending to make clear to all that they rejected the Italian government’s authority. The Italian government, for its part, asserted that authority by placing Italian troops in front of St. Peter’s Basilica. Even though Pius XI finally agreed to terms with the secular Italian state in the Lateran Treaty of 1929, which created the state of Vatican City and provided a monetary settlement for the ceded papal lands, he seldom ventured out. His successor, Pius XII, was far too protective of his papal dignity ever to mingle with the general populace—even his closest associates had to approach him on their knees. Lay workers in the Vatican were advised to make themselves scarce if he appeared.

Yet on Christmas Day 1958 Pope John stepped forth from the Vatican and became the first pope since 1870 to make pastoral visits in his own diocese of Rome. He visited two hospitals followed on the next day by a visit to a prison. There, he told the hardened but now weeping inmates that he was their brother, and he embraced a murderer. In addition, he gave the first papal press conference. Unused to such access, the public was both greatly surprised and greatly pleased. With such high visibility, the new pope very quickly began to endear himself to both Catholics and non-Catholics. Through making regular forays into poverty-stricken neighborhoods to speak with the people, he came to be popularly known as “the good pope.”

Early in 1959 he ordered the words “unbelieving” and “perfidious,” which were used with reference to Jews and Muslims, to be deleted from the Good Friday liturgy. Additional outreach followed. A pope had not met with the Archbishop of Canterbury for 400 years, ever since Elizabeth I had been excommunicated. Pope John met in the Vatican with the current Archbishop of Canterbury, the Most Rev. Geoffrey Francis Fisher, for approximately an hour on December 2, 1960. Then, for the first time in history, a Shinto high priest was received by a pope.

Cardinal Augustin Bea became the pope’s point man for building bridges with non-Catholic communities. In January 1962 Augustin Cardinal Bea met with representatives of sixteen different religions in an unprecedented effort to overcome past hostilities. This was just one portent of the coming statement on ecumenical relations that would later emerge from Vatican II,
Nostra Aetate, Declaration on the Relation of the Church to Non-Christian Religions
, which was proclaimed by Pope Paul VI on October 28, 1965.

Although it reached its final form after the death of Pope John,
Nostra Aetate
largely accorded with the tone and process John had begun. When John died so soon into the Vatican II process, the world waited and wondered whether Vatican II would continue. His successor, Pope Paul VI, quickly reconvened the assembly and made it clear that the work was to proceed in its previously established spirit.

Nostra Aetate
inaugurated a sea change in the Vatican’s approach to the world because it acknowledged the sincerity and validity of other religions’ quests for the divine. In keeping with Pope John’s own approach, it sought commonality among the peoples of the world rather than emphasizing their differences and disputes. As Christianity’s closest sibling and rival, Judaism received the most attention (more below), but Hinduism, Buddhism, and Islam also received special mention. Instead of simplistically condemning Hinduism as paganism or polytheism,
Nostra Aetate
took the more sophisticated step of recognizing Hinduism’s “spiritual effort [to] contemplate the divine mystery and express it through an inexhaustible abundance of myths and through searching philosophical inquiry.” Buddhism received appreciation for realizing the “radical insufficiency of this changeable world” and for its devout desire for illumination. Muslims were addressed “with esteem.” Their devotion to God was applauded, along with the points of contact or proximity they held with Catholicism. Rather than apologizing for past Church behavior or seeking such an apology from Muslims,
Nostra Aetate
suggested that it would be more profitable if both parties were to forget past battles and move forward in a better spirit.