The news that Pope Leo has lung cancer awakened my dim memory of the news that Pope John XXIII (Angelo Giuseppi Roncalli) had something wrong with his stomach — in his case, untreatable cancer.
Roncalli was a man of faith. This phrase has been overused to the point where it signifies nohing to most people’s minds. In Roncalli’s case, however, it points to a specific quality of mind. There was very little that he was afraid of.
As a papal nuncio in Bulgaria, he intervened to prevent hundreds of Jews from being shipped to concentration
camps.
Only a pope who was unafraid of failure could have convened an ecumenical council.
His fearlessness could manifest itself as unflappability. Once when he was attending a state dinner in Paris as papal nuncio, a certain member of the French government — call him Monsieur X – tried to embarass him by passing around the table a pornographic postcard showing a naked woman. When the postcard reached Roncalli, he glanced at it and said “Madame X, I presume?”
“Do they realize what they have done?” said the owner of the guest house where Hannah Arendt was staying at the time of the conclave that elected Johna XXIII. “They have made a Christian Pope! Do they not know who he is?” Arendt would later devote a chapter to John XXIII in a book titled “Men in Dark Times”.
One of his first acts as pope was to raise the pay of the underpàid custodial staff of the Vatican. “Justice first,” he said to cardinals who protested that the money was needed for the church’s missions.
One day when he was in the study of his Vatican apartment, the voices of working men on the floor below came up to him through the heating shaft, which they were repairing. The men had encounteted a problem and were taking the Lord’s name in vain. The Pope went downstairs to find out what the problem was.
“I understand that you men have a problem,” he told the startled working men.
“Yes, your Holiness,” one of the wotking men said. “This new section of the shaft doesn’t fit the old section.”
“If you use the gifts that God has given you, I am sure you will make it fit. But until then, could you not take the name of our Lord in vain? Just say ‘Oh shit!’ like the rest of us here.'””
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He was appalled by the possibility of nuclear war. His encyclical “Pacem in Terris” was a condemnation of the rivalries that brought the world close to it.
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The generation of Catholics who remember Angelo Giuseppi Roncalli’s brief pontificate (1958 – 1963) is rappidly dying off, and the young priests emerging from the seminaries today seem to draw more inspiratipn from the
orthodoxies of John Paul II than from the example fearlessness set by John XXIII.
He had as little fear of death as of anything else. As he lay dying, he said Every day is a good day to be born, every day is a good day to die.”
