Last Updated:Friday - 09/24/2010

Beatification of Pope John

Of Pope John XXIII, one American cardinal ungraciously remarked, "He's no pope - he should be selling bananas." Pope John didn't look like a pope . . . nor act in the way popes had traditionally acted. Born a simple peasant, he remained a man close to the people and their concerns all his life. It was he who began to discard the inhuman artifice that surrounded the Vatican and the papacy and to make them institutions which could relate to modern people.

In his homily at the Sept. 3 beatification for John XXIII and four others, Pope John Paul II described Pope John as a man who had conquered the world with his simplicity of soul, his wisdom and his direct approach to people. A priest from Burundi in the crowd described him as "a man who listened, a man of the Holy Spirit, a man who trusted in God's work."

Pope John was a great pope because he dared to be different and, most importantly, he dared the Church to be different while remaining faithful to its truest self. One bishop noted that, "for all his gentle kindness, Angelo Roncalli was a tough-minded realist who saw the Christian witness in our day being squeezed to the wall in the arena of public affairs and human society."

Out of that insight Pope John convoked the Second Vatican Council. He wanted the council to enunciate a clearer vision of the Christian in the world - that a Christian is not simply one who prays and bolsters the institutional Church, but that he is a leaven in society and a light to the world.

The council was to bring about aggiornamento - a word sometimes translated as "updating." But it was not an updating in the sense that the Church was trying to catch up or be conformed to the world. The Church, to be sure, needed to become more sensitive to "the signs of the times" but it shouldn't take its values and orientations from a society out of which the transcendent was slowly being squeezed.

In 1961, Pope John warned of "a crisis" because society was being reorganized in a way that tended to exclude God. He saw Vatican II's task as imbuing society with "the vivifying and perennial energies of the Gospel." The way of doing that, he said, was for the council to ensure "that the sacred deposit of Christian doctrine should be guarded and taught ever more efficaciously."

Pope John battled the excessive rigidity within the Church of his day, but held firm to the Church's traditional teachings. He did so with great optimism and trust in the Lord.

In October 1962 he became aware that he was dying. He recalled his own humble work as a stretcher-bearer during the First World War where he had come face-to-face with the horrors of war. Years later, he said, "I shall never be able to forget the screams of an Austrian whose chest was torn apart by a bayonet during the war and who was carried to the hospital at Caporetto where I was an attendant."

The image stayed with him and he issued his encyclical Pacem in Terris (Peace on Earth), a plea for an end to war, in April 1963, less than two months before he died.

Pope John has now been beatified. He was an unlikely pope, but a great one. We look forward to his canonization. His passion for people, openness to the Holy Spirit, rejection of pomp and rigidity, and spirit of hope and optimism show saintliness can be lived by the most humble of people. Pope John was a great lover of the Church. He loved her so much that he took decisive steps that would see her flourish in a rapidly changing world.

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