Pope John XXIII: The Good Pope

by Wyatt North

  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.

  With the promulgation of Nostra Aetate, the Church embarked upon the path of “dialogue and collaboration.” It forcefully rejected all forms of bigotry when it stated:

  “‘He who does not love does not know God’ (1 John 4:8). No foundation therefore remains for any theory or practice that leads to discrimination between man and man or people and people, so far as their human dignity and the rights flowing from it are concerned. The Church reproves, as foreign to the mind of Christ, any discrimination against men or harassment of them because of their race, color, condition of life, or religion.”

  Despite the tenacity of Cardinal Bea and the support of Pope Paul VI, the document underwent considerable change before it reached its final formulation. Neither Pope John nor Pope Paul, nor even Cardinal Bea, imposed his will upon a reluctant council. Instead, it must be recalled that more than 2,000 prelates participated, and there was strong desire among a great many of them for reform. Ultimately, however, the wording of Nostra Aetate was produced by committee and modified under strenuous conservative pressure. As powerful a statement as it is, one can only wonder whether it might have had a different form had John lived.

  Nostra Aetate began a process that continues today. Many believe that when the Church engages in triumphalism, it diminishes its core message of Christ’s love and concern for all humanity. According to this view, only by recognizing our common humanity and the full breadth of humanity’s striving after God—even when that striving runs counter to Church doctrine—does the Church remain faithful to the Gospels. Any teachings that run counter to this view are misrepresentations or distortions of the Gospel.

  Still, not all parts of the Church have accepted the ecumenical process, the authority of the popes since Vatican II, or the authority of the Ecumenical Council known as Vatican II. Even so, many who have rejected Vatican II are still viewed as Catholics in good standing.

  Another key area of John’s endeavors was his activism on the world stage. Whereas Pope John held a private audience with the son-in-law of Nikita Khrushchev, he excommunicated Fidel Castro on January 3, 1962, in accordance with a 1949 decree by Pius XII forbidding Catholics from supporting Communist governments. Although Pius made that pronouncement, he himself has been criticized for never having taken the stand of excommunicating the head of the Third Reich. Pope John, on the other hand, boldly asserted his moral authority.

  Additional Measures

  With his forays into prisons and hospitals and late night walks about Rome, Pope John immediately introduced a more open papal style. He took his mission as head of the Diocese of Rome very seriously and was more active and accessible within the diocese than past popes had been. This was in keeping with his affable personality and focus on pastoral responsibilities.

  Setting the tone for the popes who would follow him, he ignored many of the monarchic trappings of the papacy. He rarely wore the tiara and preferred practical shoes to the more usual silk slippers. Vatican officials were no longer required to approach the pope by bowing three times and addressing him on their knees. Nor did they need to leave the room backwards. Pope John roamed the Vatican exploring and making friends with everyone from gardeners to bureaucrats. He used mealtimes as social opportunities to meet with people he needed or wanted to see.

  Under Pope Pius, the number of cardinals had severely dwindled. One of Pope John’s first acts was to annul a regulation dating to Sixtus IV limiting the number of members of the College of Cardinals to seventy. He enlarged it to eighty-seven, which created the largest international representation in history, including the first ever black cardinal, who was named to Dar-es-Salaam, Tanzania. For the first time, cardinals were also appointed in Mexico, Japan, and the Philippines. He consecrated fourteen indigenous bishops for Africa, Asia, and Oceania, affirming his position that colonialism needed to be dismantled and its aftermath addressed and rectified.

  Among his other measures, Pope John elevated the Pontifical Commission for Cinema, Radio, and Television to curial status, approved a new code of rubrics for the Breviary and Missal, created a new Secretariat for Promoting Christian Unity (this was the group headed by Cardinal Bea, which actually had more to do with non-Christian groups than the title would indicate), and appointed the first Vatican representative to the Assembly of the World Council of Churches held in New Delhi in 1961. This new association with the World Council of Churches constituted the Vatican’s first positive recognition of Protestant Christianity and the need to work together cooperatively with non-Catholic Christians.

  Pope John’s Message

  Pope John wrote eight encyclicals, two of which are considered to have been particularly groundbreaking: Mater et Magistra (Mother and Teacher) in 1961 and Pacem en Terris (Peace on Earth), which was promulgated o
nly two months before his death in 1963.

  Mater et Magistra was issued in 1961 to commemorate the anniversary of Pope Leo XIII’s Rerum Novarum (On Capital and Labor), which upheld the dignity and rights of workers. The young Angelo had first arrived at the seminary in Bergamo in the year following the 1891 issuance of Leo’s encyclical, and in that city he had witnessed firsthand the progressive Catholic social action that ensued: soup kitchens, demonstrations, and the organization of Catholic unions and credit associations. Now Pope John built upon Leo’s support of workers by declaring the Catholic Church’s interest in the earthly existence of humanity as a whole, the “exigencies of man’s daily life, with his livelihood and education, and his general, temporal welfare and prosperity.”

  Pacem in Terris advocated human freedom and dignity as the basis for world order and peace.

  Pope John might have been less optimistic had he known how intransigent so many social and global problems would prove to be. Today we also know that the earth’s capacity for self-renewal is far from infinite. It is important to recognize that at the time John was writing, there was not yet an organized environmental movement; Rachel Carson’s seminal work, Silent Spring, was first published in 1962. The crisis of global overpopulation by humans was not yet fully appreciated. Moreover, the experiment known as the welfare state was only beginning to be launched. Pope John believed in addressing practical situations in realistic terms. Had he lived for another few decades, his views might have been different.

  Pope John and the Liturgy

  Although he supported the use of vernacular in some circumstances, Pope John ardently defended the virtues of Latin as a native treasure of the Latin Church. He extolled its linguistic precision as the perfect vehicle for logical thought, and he somewhat naively wanted it preserved as the means of communication between the international components of the Church. He insisted that it be the language of Vatican II, but the reality was that many of the prelates present simply could not communicate effectively in Latin.

  Pope John and Women

  At the time he was secretary to Bishop Radini-Tadeschi, Father Angelo was afforded the opportunity to work with several women’s groups. Monsignor Radini created three organizations to aid women: the League of Women Workers, the Association for the Protection of Young Women, and the Casa di Maternità. Father Angelo was made an advisor to these women’s groups. He also became president of the women’s section of Catholic Action in the diocese.

  It is probably not fair to expect from a man of Pope John’s vintage too much more than was typical of his contemporaries. Having said that, his kindness and good sense led him to sometimes surprising remarks.

  In an important letter directed to women religious, he reinforced their roles as either contemplative or active Sisters (“Letter of Pope John XXIII ‘Il Tempe Massimo’ to Women Religious,” July 2, 1962). He was quite emphatic about maintaining the traditional values of poverty, chastity, and obedience and the redemptive function of prayer for the Church as a whole. Still, he opened for them the door to the life of the mind. He warned them not to close themselves to modern scientific discoveries, social and political movements, or cultural conventions, because these matters were important even to cloistered religious.

  He further encouraged active religious women to obtain the education and degrees necessary to aid them in their work. It must be remembered that higher education for women at the beginning of the 1960s was by no means a given. Nevertheless, he viewed their work as being within the traditional confines of “education, charity, and social service.”

  Pope John and the Jews

  One of Pope John’s most honorable achievements is his undoing of nearly 2,000 years of what French-Jewish historian Jules Isaac (who had lost his own wife and daughter in Auschwitz) called “the teaching of contempt” by the Church.

  It is not known why Angelo Roncalli felt such a kinship with the Jewish people and was so willing to act on their behalf, but it was a measure of the greatness of his heart that he did. In his youth at the seminary in Rome, he won an award for excellence in Hebrew language studies. Later, at his various professional posts, he made many Jewish friends. During his brief time as pope, he granted approximately 120 private audiences to Jewish persons and groups. Both before and after becoming pope, he arguably did more to save Jewish lives and improve relations with the Jewish people than any Catholic in history.

  The full extent of his life-saving activity during the Holocaust may never be known. While his appointment to Turkey and Greece was frustrating in many ways, it positioned him to become an activist in rescue efforts during WWII. Using his many contacts, there is no question that he saved the lives of many tens of thousands of Jews. Certainly, he was entirely forthright in stating his views at the time.

  When the devoutly Catholic German ambassador, Franz von Papen, suggested to him that the anti-Communist Pope Pius XII should publicly support Germany’s invasion of the Soviet Union, the archbishop bluntly responded, “And what shall I tell the Holy Father about the thousands of Jews who have died in Germany and Poland at the hands of your countrymen?” Later, when von Papen stood trial at Nuremburg, the archbishop communicated to the tribunal that von Papen had helped him save 24,000 Jews, presumably by looking the other way.

  Sadly, Archbishop Roncalli’s repeated requests for Vatican intercession and his recommendations for Vatican action in very specific, concrete situations when action might have made a world of difference usually fell on deaf ears. On one occasion, however, he seems to have been successful in prompting the Vatican to action. Having met with the Chief Rabbi of Jerusalem, Isaac Herzog, concerning the tens of thousands of Jews stranded in Transnistria (having been deported from other nearby regions), he was able to convince the Vatican to intercede with the fascist Romanian government, which was occupying the district, on their behalf. There is little indication that it helped; most of the Jews trapped in the region would perish.

  Nonetheless, the archbishop’s own personal interventions were more consistently successful. When Jewish refugees first began arriving in Istanbul, they sought an audience with the archbishop, seeking his assistance. Although he had heard reports through the clerical grapevine, it was in this way that he became directly aware of what was happening under Nazi and fascist rule. When necessary, he now provided clothing and money to refugees in transit, but he had a greater impact in a different way. Working with Chaim Birlas, head of the Palestine Jewish Agency’s Rescue Committee, he sent large quantities of Vatican visas and so-called immigration certificates issued by the Jewish Agency to Romania and Hungary.

  He was helped in this endeavor by the papal nuncio in Budapest, Angelo Ratti, who in turn was working with Swedish diplomat Raoul Wallenberg. The documents lacked real legal authority, but they looked official and helped many to escape to then-British Palestine. There may even have been false baptismal certificates issued; at least, a legend has grown up to that effect. The documents were transported using diplomatic couriers, Vatican representatives, and the Sisters of Our Lady of Zion. It is believed that the number of adults and children saved in this way may have amounted to tens of thousands.

  The archbishop’s prior contacts in Bulgaria also came into play when he made a request to King Boris of Bulgaria, who was allied with the Axis powers, to allow the Red Cross to save thousands of Slovakian Jews in Bulgarian-occupied lands. Boris supported the deportation of Jews from Bulgarian-occupied lands in Greek and Yugoslav territories and from Bulgaria itself, but a rising tide of protests in Bulgaria, including from the Metropolitan of the Bulgarian Orthodox Church, caused some delays and a change in tactics.

  Few people in that terrible time did as much to save Jewish lives as the gentle, affable, and largely ignored Archbishop Roncalli. He called the murder of Jews during the war “six million crucifixions.” Still, he did not seek public commendation for his efforts and is thus best known for what followed.

  For two millennia the Church had done much to ensure t
hat Jews suffered and then attributed this suffering to God’s just retribution. The imagery of “abject Judea” was rife within pre-modern Europe. For a Church steeped in triumphalism, the reemergence of Israel as a political entity was an awkward fact that was best ignored.

  Now, however, Pope John signaled a thawing of relations between the Vatican and the Jewish people, and he did so very early in his tenure. Israeli President Yitzchak Ben Zvi was included among the heads of state to whom papal letters of accession were sent by this newly elected pope. This is in marked contrast to John’s friend and successor, Paul VI, who, when making a pilgrimage to the Holy Land in 1964, would refuse to address the Israeli president (Zalman Shazar) by his title.

  With the revelations about the fate of Europe’s Jews that came in the wake of WWII, there were sporadic, localized attempts by Church figures to address the Church’s role through its teaching of contempt. In 1949 Pius XII had in a limited way addressed the use of pro perfidis Judaeis in the Good Friday prayer for the Jews by allowing the phrase to be translated in its actual meaning of “unfaithful” or “unbelieving” instead of the even more insidious translation of “perfidious,” which was how it had usually been translated. John XXIII very quickly, in 1959, eliminated the word altogether along with harsh statements in two other prayers: the Act of Consecration to the Sacred Heart and the baptism of converts ritual. In place of the long-standing but dubious invocation to pray for the perfidis Judaeis, he instituted a genuinely benevolent petition asking that Jews remain faithful to their covenant and continue to love God’s name. He further ordered an end to pilgrimage to a shrine in Daggendorf, Bavaria, where thousands converged annually to celebrate the 1338 massacre of the town's Jewish community.