Massimo Faggioli - John XXIII: The Medicine of Mercy

Introduction

Making Popes Saints

The year 2014 marks an important date in the history of the Catholic Church and of the papacy with the canonizati on by Pope Francis of two of his closest predecessors on th e chair of Peter: John XXIII (19581963) and John Paul II (1 9782005). John XXIII, the pope who called Vatican II in 1959, and John Paul II, who was a bishop at Vatican II, are proclaimed saints of the Catholic Church on the same day and during the fiftieth anniversary celebration of Vatican II (20122015). For both popes, the final decision regarding their canonization follows what church historian Enrico Galavotti, in his masterful book on the Roncalli trial, called the shadow canonization effect

As a Catholic and a historian, Angelo Giuseppe Roncalli took seriously the role of the saints and popes, particularly the popes of modern church history who had been proclaimed saints, such as Pius X (canonized by Pius XII in 1954). Both Pius X and John XXIII belong to a sense of Catholicism that accepts the idea of a pope being proclaimed a saint, which has not always been typical of the Catholic Church. Paradoxically, it was only after the pontificate of Pius X, the pope who in 1907 launched the purge against theological modernism, that this modern phenomenon has become part of the theological and public understanding of the papacy.

At the end of 2013, 81 of the 263 predecessors of Pope Benedict XVI were regarded by the church as saints. Of these 81 popes, 47 of them were among the first 48 successors of Peter; half of these 47 popes/saints were martyrs and died before the year 500.

The change in practice for canonization and beatification relates to the theological and cultural changes involving the Roman papacythe mystique of the papacy. For the first time in history, there was the beatification of a pope, John Paul II, by Joseph Ratzinger/Benedict XVI, his immediate successor (and his theologian-in-chief in the Roman Curia for twenty-five years).

Almost twenty-five years ago in his description of the saints-making machine, Kenneth Woodward argued that papal causes present special problems. First, papal causes are only introduced by another pope. Second, the published writings of a pope are not subject to the usual preliminary scrutiny by theological censors. Third, popes generate much more written material that postulators are expected to examine, but which they examine only in parteven in complicated cases like Pius XIIs. Fourth, unlike most saints, popes tend to make many enemies.... Thus no papal cause, especially that of a controversial figure like John or Pius, is apt to move quickly as long as any of his opponents remain alive and influential in the church. Fifth, a pope must be judged not only on his personal holiness but also on his stewardship as supreme teacher and head of the church, as the manual published by Benedict XIV (17401758), De canonizatione sanctorum , explained clearly.

Woodwards description of possible problems says much about Saint John XXIII. On October 28, 1963, at the Second Vatican Council, prominent cardinals such as Giacomo L ercaro, cardinal of Bologna, and Leo Jozef Suenens, cardina l of Mechelen-Bruxelles, famously proposed John XXIII, the pope who called Vatican II and who died during the first intersession of the council in June 1963, for an ancient conciliar canonization.

They were using John [XXIII] to get at Pius [XII], as Fr. Paolo Molinari, postulator to the cause of Pius XII, put it. the process for John XXIII advanced for many reasons. The collapse of Soviet communism in 19891991 put an end to the conspiracy-minded speculations about the communist sympathies of John XXIII for the Soviet Union. A second e lement was the impatience of John Paul II with the canonica l procedures in general; a third element, especially important, was the development of the reception of Vatican II. During the pontificate of John Paul II, Vatican II rose to the status of a providential event. John Paul II, the last pope who had been a council father, defined Vatican II as a compass for the Catholic Church.

Making John XXIII a Saint

It is important to examine the canonization of John XXIII, the pope who convened Vatican II, in the context of the church at the beginning of the twenty-first century. On the one hand, the canonization became part of the debate on Vatican II, and it survived the attempt of some in the church to minimize Vatican II and to indict the pope who called it. nevertheless, Benedict XVI did not choose to promote the canonization of his predecessor ex certa scientia , which is exactly what Pope Francis decided to do for John XXIII with his decision announced on July 5, 2013.

Within the context of these new trends, the canonization of a pope is an eminent act of church politics (and not only for the Catholic Church if we think about the canonization in the year 2000 by the Orthodox Church of the Romanov family, killed by the Bolsheviks in 1918), more than the beatification or canonization of normal saints. The double beatification of Pius IX and John XXIII in 2000 was undoubtedly aimed at balancing different interpretations of the relationship between Vatican II and the change in the church during the twentieth century. It took ninety-three years to beatify Pius IX, thirty-five for John XXIII, and only six for John Paul II. It took longer for John XXIII, despite the fact that many council fathers wanted to canonize him at Vatican II following an ancient procedure.

The beatification and canonization of a pope by another pope is the ultimate phase in a long history of the centralization of the politics of sainthood in Rome. It is the final moment of a history that began in the eleventh century from a situation in which the consensus of locally elected bishops was necessary for establishing the sainthood of a pope, to the situation of today where the consensus of the pope is the only necessary element for making both bishops and saints. With the joint canonization of John XXIII and John Paul II in 2014, Pope Francis elevated two of his close predecessors. One of the challenges for Catholicism is to reconcile this tendency of proclaiming popes saints with Pope Franciss clear view of the papacy as a humble ministry serving the church. But it is also clear that the pair of John XXIII and John Paul II canonized by Pope Francis is significantly different from the pair of John XXIII and Pius IX beatified in 2000 by John Paul IIand much different from the other pair in the pipeline of the saint factory in the early 2000s, John XXIII and Pius XII.

In the spring of 2011, when Benedict XVI announced the beatification of John Paul II, the journal Foreign Policy published an article on the miracle required for a beatification, with the subtitle Some Theology, a Little Science, and a Whole Lot of Politics.

The situation of John XXIII is different from any other pope beatified and canonized: The fame of sanctity of Roncalli resembles that of Wojtyla for its timeliness, but not for its content.

The fame of sainthood for John XXIII has not been damaged these last fifty years because more is known about him than any other pope in church history. Through his private journal, which has been used for this biographical study, the daily life path of Angelo Giuseppe Roncalli/John XXIII has been rebuilt with a degree of accuracy and depth that is not available for any other pope.

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