Saint John XXIII

Saint John XXIII, born Angelo Giuseppe Roncalli, was pope from 1958 to 1963. He convened the Second Vatican Council, and in the encyclical Pacem in terris he wrote about peace among nations. His memorial falls on October 11, the anniversary of the opening of the Council in 1962.

He was born on November 25, 1881, in Sotto il Monte near Bergamo, the fourth of thirteen children. His family farmed other people’s land for a share of the crop and lived in poverty. He himself recalled that they were poor but content, and that there was always a place at the table for a beggar who knocked at the door. As a fourteen-year-old seminarian in Bergamo he began keeping spiritual notes, later published as Journal of a Soul. He belonged to the Secular Franciscan Order. He completed his studies in Rome, where he was ordained a priest in 1904.

For nine years he was secretary to Bishop Giacomo Radini Tedeschi of Bergamo and taught history and patrology at the seminary. In the First World War he served as a medic and then as a chaplain in military hospitals. In 1925 he was ordained a bishop, with the motto “Oboedientia et pax,” and went to Bulgaria as apostolic visitor. From 1935 he was apostolic delegate in Turkey and Greece. During the Second World War he helped save many Jews, using among other means the transit visas of the Apostolic Delegation.

At the end of 1944 he became nuncio in Paris, and in 1953 cardinal and Patriarch of Venice. He was elected pope on October 28, 1958. He was then 76, and many thought of him as a transitional pope, yet on January 25, 1959, in the Basilica of Saint Paul Outside the Walls, he announced that he would convene an ecumenical council. On the evening of the day it opened, he told those taking part in a torchlight procession that even the moon had hurried to watch the spectacle, and asked them to give their children a caress from the pope when they got home.

In the encyclical Mater et magistra of 1961, on the anniversary of Leo XIII’s Rerum novarum, he developed the Church’s social teaching. In Pacem in terris of 1963, addressed also to all people of good will, he presented human dignity and freedom as the foundation of peace in the world. In the fall of 1962, during the Cuban Missile Crisis, he used his authority to urge both sides toward a peaceful solution. He was called the pope of goodness.

He opened the Council already gravely ill with cancer. He died in Rome on the evening of June 3, 1963, the day after Pentecost. John Paul II beatified him on September 3, 2000, and Pope Francis declared him a saint on April 27, 2014, together with John Paul II, calling him the pope of openness to the Holy Spirit. That same year his memorial was inscribed in the General Roman Calendar.