A fisherman Pope

Rihard McBrien

The Pope who launched the Second Vatican Council, John XXIII, will be beatified on Sunday 3 September. During his short papacy he drew the whole world to him. This tribute is by the professor of theology at the University of Notre Dame.

WHEN Angelo Roncalli, the rotund, diplomacy-wise Patriarch of Venice, was elected to the papacy on 28 October 1958, a month shy of his seventy-seventh birthday, it was generally expected by seasoned commentators and cardinal-electors alike that he would be a so-called transitional Pope. He was succeeding the patrician and austere Pius XII, who had been in office for nearly 20 years, since before the outbreak of the Second World War. As in so many conclaves following lengthy reigns, most of the cardinals were looking for an opportunity to pause, to regroup, and later to decide - in the pontificate after the next - upon the longer-term course the Church should take. But Angelo Roncalli upset those careful calculations, to the benefit not only of the Catholic Church but of the human community itself.

When asked, upon his election as Pope, what name he wished to be known by, he said he would be John. The cardinals were at first startled because the previous Pope John had been an antipope (a false claimant to the papal throne) during the Great Western Schism in the early fifteenth century. He explained, however, that John was his father's name and that of the parish church where he was baptised. He also pointed out, with characteristic humour, that not only was it the name most frequently used by popes throughout history, but that nearly all of the Johns had brief pontificates. But perhaps the deepest of all reasons for him was that it was the name of the disciple closest to Jesus, the evangelist who exhorted his readers always to love one another.

At his coronation Mass in St Peter's Basilica on 4 November, the senior cardinal- deacon, in keeping with a millennium- long custom, carefully placed an imperial tiara on the new Pope's head, at the same time reciting the ancient formula: «Know that you are the father of princes and kings, pontiff of the whole world and Vicar of Christ on earth.» Given the extraordinarily humble and self-effacing persona that John XXIII would almost immediately disclose to the world, that whole scene, in retrospect, could not have been more incongruous.

From that moment, and much to the consternation of the conservative cardinals around him, he signalled that he would be a very different kind of pope from most of those who had preceded him in the office: a servant rather than a sovereign, a pastor rather than a patrician, a priest rather than a prelate. He sounded the keynote for his pontificate in the homily of the Mass which, contrary to tradition, he delivered himself. He would not be «the father of princes and kings» but a good shepherd, after the pattern of Jesus himself. «There are those», he said, «who expect the pontiff to be a statesman, a diplomat, a scholar, the organiser of the collective life of society, or someone whose mind is attuned to every form of modern knowledge» (in other words, a pope just like his predecessor, Pius XII). Such a profile, John XXIII pointed out, was «not fully in conformity» with the papacy's «true ideal». Nor could those qualities «substitute for being the shepherd of the whole flock». Instead, he continued, «the new Pope, through the events and circumstances of his life, is like the son of Jacob who, meeting his brothers, burst into tears and said, `I am Joseph, your brother'.»

That very scene from the Old Testament (Genesis 45:4) would be dramatically evoked two years later when, during a visit from 130 Jewish leaders from the United States on 17 October 1960, John XXIII burst through the doors of his private office, to the surprise and delight of the awaiting delegation, with the same words, «I am Joseph, your brother». For him there was no hard-and-fast distinction between or among people. All were brothers and sisters in one human family, sons and daughters of the same Father. «We come from the Father, and must return to the Father.»

In that incident, as in everything else he did as Pope, John XXIII acted before all else as the simple, holy priest he had always aspired to become from his childhood days in northern Italy. On his first Christmas as Pope, he revived the custom, which had lapsed during the occupation of Rome by the Italian nationalists in 1870, of visiting the sick, including a hospital for children suffering from polio, where he was greeted like a kindly grandfather. «Viene qui, viene qui, Papa» («Come here, come here»), they shouted to him. The Pope waddled over to the children and embraced each of them. On the next day he went to Regina Coeli prison, where he recalled the jailing of one of his own relatives. «You could not come to visit me,» he told the prisoners, «so I came to see you.»

So peripatetic was his style that some clerical wags in the United States began referring to him as Johnnie Walker. On Holy Thursday, the following spring, he revived the custom of washing the feet of selected members of the congregation and on Good Friday he walked in the procession of the Cross. More than any other pope since the earliest centuries, he recognised that he was, before all else, a pastor, the bishop of Rome. His example undoubtedly influenced John Paul II, who has carried John XXIII's pastoral style to even broader levels of practice.

John XXIII's greatest single achievement was his launching of the Second Vatican Council in 1962, although the idea came to him as an impulse. When he first announced his plan to a group of 17 cardinals at the Basilica of St Paul Outside the Walls in January 1959 he was met with stony silence, what the Italians call a figura di bronzo, or poker-face. One commentator later wrote that the Pope might just as well have been reading out his laundry list. John XXIII was disappointed. He had expected support from his closest collaborators and received none. But no one, not even the more progressive cardinals, had any idea of what he had in mind. The truth is that he still wasn't sure himself. He knew that the Church needed a shaking-up, an aggiornamento («updating») as he called it, but the details were still to be worked out in his mind.

Those details did not really begin to take shape until his celebrated opening speech to the council on 11 October 1962. It would be a council, he insisted, not to censure and condemn heretics and dissenters, but to promote human solidarity. He said that the most effective means of eradicating discord and of promoting harmony, peace and unity, both in the Church and in the world, was through the spreading of «the fullness of Christian charity». He proclaimed his own faith that «in the present order of things, Divine Providence is leading us to a new order of human relations which, by our own efforts and even beyond our very expectations, are directed toward the fulfilment of God's superior and inscrutable designs». Characteristically, for John XXIII those designs embraced all human beings, not just Catholics, or Christians, or even religious people generally. «Everything», he insisted, «even human differences, leads to the greater good of the Church.» We are not born to be museum-keepers, he was fond of pointing out, «but to cultivate a flourishing garden of life».

BY the time the first session of the council ended on 8 December 1962, he had been diagnosed as having terminal stomach cancer. Less than two months before his death he published his most abidingly important encyclical, Pacem in terris («Peace on Earth»), in which he argued that the recognition of human rights and responsibilities is the foundation of world peace. The encyclical served as a kind of last will and testament. No longer constrained by the watchful and suspicious eyes of conservative cardinals, the dying Pope began with a confession of faith in modern science worthy of the innovative Jesuit scientist Teilhard de Chardin. What helps the human person grow, he insisted, is good; what stifles human growth is bad. Every person has the right to worship God as he or she wishes, developing nations have the right to determine their own futures, and all citizens, including racial, ethnic and religious minorities, have the right to participate fully in the political life of their countries. He identified, and strongly affirmed, three distinctive characteristics of the modern age: the growing recognition of the rights and dignity of workers, the growing participation of women in public life (this even before the outset of the women's liberation movement), and the growing interdependence of nations.

As he lay dying in his private Vatican apartment late the next month, the media provided a continual flow of messages from his deathbed - prayers for various segments of the human community, especially those who, like himself, were afflicted with sickness and suffering. When word of his death flashed around the globe on 3 June 1963, the world found itself bound together in unprecedented solidarity. In the bitterly divided city of Belfast, even the Union Jack was lowered to half-mast. The newscaster on WQXR-FM New York sobbed uncontrollably as he announced the Pope's passing. A few months later, an English-language tour group, led by an Italian guide, paused briefly at the Pope's newly constructed tomb in the crypt of St Peter's. Speaking in heavily accented English, she pointed out to her charges, «This is the tomb of Pope John XXIII, the most beloved Pope in all of history.»

The Tablet