Thomas Cahill - Pope John XXIII: A Penguin Life

PENGUIN BOOKS

POPE JOHN XXIII

Thomas Cahill, former director of religious publishing at Doubleday, is the bestselling author of the Hinges of History series, which includes How the Irish Saved Civilization; The Gifts of the Jews; Desire of the Everlasting Hills: The World Before and After Jesus; Sailing the Wine-Dark Sea: Why the Greeks Matter; and Mysteries of the Middle Ages: The Rise of Feminism, Science, and Art from the Cults of Catholic Europe. He and his wife, Susan Cahill, a novelist and anthologist, divide their time between New York and Rome. They have two children, a daughter who is a teacher in Oakland, California, and a son who is a filmmaker in Prague, and three grandchildren.

THOMAS CAHILL

POPE JOHN XXIII

A Penguin Life

A LIPPER / PENGUIN BOOK

PENGUIN BOOKS
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First published in the United States of America by Viking Penguin, a member of Penguin Putnam Inc. 2002
Published in Penguin Books 2008

Copyright Thomas Cahill, 2002
All rights reserved

Grateful acknowledgment is made for permission to reprint excerpts from the following copyrighted works:
Journal of a Soul by Pope John XXIII, translated by Dorothy White.
Copyright 1965, 1980 by Geoffrey Chapman, a division of Cassell Ltd.
Used by permission of Doubleday, a division of Random House, Inc., and Geoffrey Chapman.
Pope John XXIII by Peter Hebblethwaite. Reprinted by permission of Geoffrey Chapman.

THE LIBRARY OF CONGRESS HAS CATALOGED THE HARDCOVER EDITION AS FOLLOWS:
Cahill, Thomas.
Pope John XXIII / Thomas Cahill.
p. cm.(A Penguin life)
Includes bibliographical references.
ISBN: 978-1-1012-0204-3
1. John XXIII, Pope, 18811963. I. Title. II. Penguin lives series.
BX1378.2.C27 2002
282'.092dc21 2001045435

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To Sister Helen Prejean

For the good are always the merry

The Three Secrets of John XXIII

The secret of everything is to let yourself be carried by the Lord and to carry the Lord.

John XXIII at his coronation

The secret of my ministry is in [the] crucifix. Those open arms have been the program of my pontificate: they mean that Christ died for all, for all. No one is excluded from his love, from his forgiveness.

John XXIII on his deathbed

This was the secret of his personality: he loved people more than power.

Yves Congar

CONTENTS

INTRODUCTION

Toward a New Order of Human Relationships

IN THE DAILY EXERCISE of our pastoral ministryand much to our sorrowwe must sometimes listen to those who, consumed with zeal, have scant judgment or balance, said John XXIII to the bishops of the world assembled in Saint Peters Basilica as he opened the precedent-shattering Second Vatican Council (or Vatican II) in 1962. To such ones the modern world is nothing but betrayal and ruin. They claim that this age is far worse than previous ages, and they rant on as if they had learned nothing at all from historyand yet, history is the great Teacher of Life. We feel bound to disagree with these prophets of doom who are forever forecasting calamityas though the worlds end were imminent. Today, rather, Providence is guiding us toward a new order of human relationships, which, thanks to human effort and yet far surpassing human hopes, will bring us to the realization of still higher and undreamed of expectations.

This was uttered with his accustomed warmth and serene joy by a short man with sensuous lips and a hooked nose set in a flat Italian peasants face framed by elephantine ears, a fat old man with twinkling eyes and a seductively resonant voice, robed with such extravagant dignity as to underscore the comedy of his figure. The glimpse he offered of the popes daily trials of patience in the midst of an overheated clerical atmosphere proved too much for his handlers, the little, anonymous men of the Vatican. As John went on to ask his audience for a leap forward ( un balzo in Johns original Italian text) in insight ( penetrazione ) into the Churchs teaching and a new coat of paint ( la formulazione del suo rivestimento ) in which to clothe the old doctrines, the little men made plans to censor the popes text, to clip from the official transcript here and to add there, in order to prevent scandal to the faithful and to gratify their own outraged sensibilities. But the original text, before they could get their hands on it, was, like so many things John said, unlike anything any pope had said before or would say since; and this is because John was unlike any other pope.

We would not remember John at all were it not for the office he occupied in the last five years of his life: bishop of Rome, successor to Peter the Fisherman, the leading figure among Jesuss apostles. From this unique position John was able to cast a pebble into the pond of human experience that has continued to reverberate in ever wider rings. To understand his crucial importance to the worlds one billion Catholics, his remarkable influence on Christians everywhere, and his effect on human hopes and happiness, we must spend some time retracing the long and labyrinthine history of the papacy, which gave him his platform.

PART I

BEFORE JOHN

From Congregation to
Church to Standard of Orthodoxy

VATICAN PROPAGANDA notwithstanding, Peter was never bishop of Rome. In the five narrative books with which the New Testament beginsthe four gospels and the Acts of the ApostlesPeter is given prominence, a prominence that would later be interpreted as his primacy over the other bishops of the primitive Church. But the early Church communities had a congregational structure, like the synagogues from which they sprang. The word bishop ( episkopos , or superintendent, in Greek) was at first interchangeable with the word elder ( presbyteros , from which we derive our word priest ) and did not signify rule over others. After the death of the apostles, who had been the chief witnesses to Jesuss life and teaching, and under the pressure of bizarre heresies and the consequent need to establish a voice of orthodoxy within each community, the Churches of the late first century began to single out an episkopos to take doctrinal charge of each local Church. The Christian community at Rome, however, seems not to have adopted this strategy till toward the middle of the second century. The first man who can be designated bishop of Rome with historical certainty is Anicetus, who stands eleventh in the Vaticans somewhat fanciful list of early popes and who served from 155 to his death c. 166, weakening considerably the claim of Peter, who died a hundred years earlier.