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Reviewed by:
  • Pope John XXIII: Essential Writings
  • Joseph Komonchak (bio)
Pope John XXIII: Essential Writings. Selected with an introduction by Jean Maalouf. Maryknoll: Orbis Books, 2008. 198 pp. $18.00.

Orbis Books has had the happy idea of publishing a series entitled "Modern Spiritual Masters" and to include among those so acknowledged Pope John XXIII. When he died, he was almost universally mourned, within and without the Catholic Church, as "Good Pope John," a term that might be taken to refer only to his smiling, gentle, approachable, grandfatherly appearance and manner. That would run the danger of trivializing what, as this book amply illustrates, was the outer expression of an inner conviction of what Christian holiness requires, even, perhaps especially, of a pope. Two popes in history have been granted the title "Great," Leo I and Gregory I. Perhaps we could initiate a new line and refer to "Pope John the Good."

Angelo Giuseppe Roncalli (his name is given incorrectly on p. 18) was born in the small town of Sotto il Monte near Bergamo, Italy, on November 25, 1881. The fourth of thirteen children born to a family of poor sharecroppers, he remained rooted in his family and region all his life. He began his seminary studies in Bergamo and completed them with a doctorate in Rome in 1904, the same year he was ordained. For nine years he served as secretary to the bishop of Bergamo, Giacomo Radini-Tedeschi, from whom, he would later say, he learned what it meant to be a bishop. During the same period he also taught in the Bergamo seminary and had to survive a brief and unjust accusation of sympathy with Modernists. After serving as a chaplain in the Italian army during the First World War, he was appointed spiritual director in the seminary.

In 1921 Roncalli was called to Rome to organize an Italian office for the propagation of the faith. Four years later he was ordained an archbishop and sent on what was supposed to be a six-month assignment as apostolic visitor to Bulgaria; it lasted nine years, until in 1934 he was appointed apostolic delegate to Turkey and Greece. These twenty years of difficult diplomatic tasks opened his horizon to the worlds of Orthodoxy and Islam, gave him some opportunity to exercise a pastoral episcopal ministry, and put him in a position, during the Second World War, to come to the assistance of Jewish refugees from Nazism.

At the very end of 1944 he was suddenly catapulted into the most important post in the Vatican's diplomatic service as apostolic nuncio to France. Pope Pius XII told Roncalli that he had himself chosen him for the post in the hope that his gentle manner might accomplish more than a heavy-handed, forceful approach. The nine years of Roncalli's service in Paris were a time of great excitement and turmoil in France, but the chief impression he gave was that of a gregarious chatterbox, combining a peasant's slyness with a diplomat's tact, but showing no great interest in or sympathy for the ideas, movements, and events that would make the Second Vatican Council possible. In 1953 he was made a cardinal and appointed Patriarch of Venice. Seventy-two years old at the time, he might have been expected to end his days there in a pastoral ministry to which he was delighted to return. If he had, he would not be widely remembered today.

But when Pius XII died on October 9, 1958, some began to look to Roncalli as a caretaker pope who might repair the curial machinery, long-neglected by Pius XII, and in a few years might be succeeded by someone more fitting. Roncalli knew he was among the papabili, and even prepared for the possibility of his election. [End Page 106] Elected on the eleventh ballot, he immediately began to benefit from the contrasts with his predecessor that often accompany the election of a new pope. Less than a hundred days into his pontificate he startled most of the world by announcing his intention to convoke an ecumenical council, and for the next four and a half years he presided over a...

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