St. John XXIII (Oct. 11th)
October 9 - St. John Leonardi, priest
October 11 - St. John XXIII, Pope
I’ve decided to devote this week’s reflection to St. John XXIII.
Angelo Giuseppe Roncalli, the future Pope John XXIII and Saint John XXIII was born in 1881 into a poor sharing cropping family living in the town of Sotto il Monte, in the Province of Bergamo in the Region of Lombardy in Northern Italy,
That he came from a poor family itself is significant, because in previous centuries from the Middle Ages to the Renaissance to the Enlightenment to the beginning of the Modern Era, priests tended to come from middle class families, and bishops, let alone Cardinals and Popes tended to come from upper-class noble families.
On the one hand, massive improvements in the education of common people across the Catholic world in the 19th century allowed their children to begin to enter into higher levels of society than before. On the other hand, the diminishment of the stature of the Church and for that matter the nobility across the world, made “becoming a bishop or cardinal” less of a prize to ambitious young men (and their families) of some means.
I take this to be good generally a good thing, as today’s bishops, certainly in the United States tend to come from nice pious families for whom their faith was important, families that one would recognize in the pews, rather than families scheming to become “great” in their communities or beyond.
The families of all three of the bishops of the diocese of Orange where I currently serve would be completely recognizable and relatable to most parishioners today. That would not be the case in the Catholic world a century or two ago.
So the future Saint John XXIII came from a family and from circumstances that most Catholics in the pews would have been able to relate to.
That is immediately something positive. Yet it is clear that while the future John XXIII came from humble origins, he also never forgot them, and acted according to them.
I write this because the future John XXIII made numerous significant decisions that impacted the future of the Church in a (in my mind clearly) positive way. Yet they were decisions that he made, both in light of the Gospel and in light of his own experience, and he could have chosen to do differently.
One of the decisions that he made that has since unburdened the Church of centuries of previous sin was that during the World War II while serving in various posts in Eastern Europe - Bulgaria, Romania, as well as Palestine, he _chose_ to help the persecuted Jewish community during the Holocaust.
In a sense, he didn’t have to do this. There were plenty of Catholic prelates across Europe and the world who did not.
But seeing an awful situation in his midst, he _chose_ to use the power that he had, as papal legate and nuncio in that part of the world, to save the Jews that he could, and he found that he could save a lot (thousands) of them. “Yes, we can …”
Later as Pope, during the Second Vatican Council (I’ll spend more time with the Council below), John XXIII _insisted_ that out of it would come a reconciliation with the Jewish Community, a gesture toward reconciliation that was extended further to all religions in one of the Council’s final documents Nostra Aetate.
Subsequent Popes have taken this matter much further. The future St. John Paul II, he did something that no previous Pope (including St. John XXIII) in nearly 2000 years: He traveled the two miles from the Vatican to the main synagogue in Rome – both arguably “on the Tiber” the main synagogue being in what had been the heart of the medieval Jewish ghetto of Rome, across the Tiber from the Trastevere quarter of Rome (which had been the first Christian quarter of Rome) – and paid the chief rabbi and the Jewish community a visit.
In the 1990s, the Catholic “Sant’Egedio Community” would annually join the Jewish community in following the footsteps of this simple gesture of peace from the Church of Santa Maria Trastervere to the Main Synagogue in Rome to remember this defining gesture of peace.
With regard to the Second Vatican Council, the future Saint John XXIII was actually elected “late in life.” One Servite who I knew well when I joined the Order, was studying in Rome in the Seminary when the future Saint John XXIII had been elected. And he remembered that many were disappointed at the time, noting that the popular wisdom was that John XXIII was going to be “only a transitional Pope.”
Indeed, John XXIII could have spent his papacy, eating good food, handing out the occasional honors to worthy individuals, and _perhaps_ as the Popes before him had previously done, help to prepare things “for a future Council” that the whole Church was expecting to take place sometime in the (near?) future.
Instead, the future John XXIII convened the promised Council, knowing that he would probably not live to see its end, and he did not. But yes, he opened the doors and the windows, and the Second Vatican Council began.
Finally, during the Cuban Missile Crisis, the closest that the world came to nuclear war, John XXIII played a key role in its _peaceful_ resolution. He demanded that the world’s leaders “heed the _universal desire_ of the world’s common people for peace.”
The future Saint John XXIII didn’t have to do any of this. However, using the gifts and opportunities that he was given, he chose to act, intervene in this world, and certainly left it a better place.
We can put our lives under a bushel basket. Thanks be to God that Saint John XXIII didn’t do that with his.
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