Feast day: October 11
Pope St. John XXIII
A peasant's son and warm, witty pope who surprised the world by summoning the Second Vatican Council, and whose humanity earned him the name 'the Good Pope.'
Angelo Giuseppe Roncalli was born in 1881 into a large family of poor sharecroppers near Bergamo in northern Italy, and never lost the warmth, humility, and earthy good humor of his peasant roots. Ordained a priest, he served as a stretcher-bearer and chaplain in the First World War, and then spent decades in the Church's diplomatic service in Bulgaria, Turkey, and Greece — quiet posts where, during the Second World War, he is credited with helping to save thousands of Jews by issuing them transit papers.
Made patriarch of Venice and a cardinal late in life, he was elected pope in 1958 at the age of seventy-six. Many expected a brief, uneventful 'caretaker' reign from the genial old man — but he astonished the world. Within months he announced that he would summon an ecumenical council, the first in nearly a century, to renew the Church and, in his famous image, to 'open the windows' and let in fresh air.
The Second Vatican Council, which he opened in 1962, would reshape Catholic life more than any event in centuries. But it was John's own person that captured the world's heart: his simplicity, his jokes, his habit of slipping out to visit prisoners and the sick, his evident goodness. People simply called him 'the Good Pope.'
In 1963, at the height of the Cold War and just after the terror of the Cuban Missile Crisis, he addressed his last great encyclical, 'Pacem in Terris' — 'Peace on Earth' — not only to Catholics but to 'all men of good will,' pleading for peace built on truth, justice, and human dignity. He died of cancer that same year, before the council he had begun could finish, mourned across every boundary of faith and nation. He was canonized in 2014.
Elected at 76 as a supposed caretaker, he instead opened the windows of the Church to the modern world by calling the Second Vatican Council.
“See everything; overlook a great deal; correct a little.”
— Pope St. John XXIII
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