Saint John XXIII

Angelo Giuseppe Roncalli was born in Sotto il Monte, in the province of Bergamo, on November 25, 1881, the fourth of thirteen children in a family of sharecroppers. He wrote in his diary that at home, when someone showed up, they added water to the soup. He was a military chaplain and a medical sergeant in the Great War, and that experience — the hospitals, the boys dying — never left him. Then he was a diplomat for twenty years in uncomfortable posts: Bulgaria, Turkey, Greece. In Istanbul, during the war, he signed transit papers for thousands of Jews in flight and got them into their hands: he never spoke of it. He was patriarch of Venice, and in 1958, at seventy-seven, he was elected pope. Everyone expected a short, caretaker pontificate. After three months he announced the Second Vatican Council. No one had asked for it, and the Curia did everything it could to slow it down. In 1963 he wrote Pacem in terris, the first encyclical addressed not only to Catholics but “to all men of good will,” a few months after the Cuban Missile Crisis, during which he had worked quietly as a mediator between Kennedy and Khrushchev. They called him the Good Pope. He died on June 3, 1963, with the Council still in session. His memorial is October 11, the day the Council opened. If your name is Angelo, today is your name day.