• Military Menu                       

• Introduction
• Systems
• Facilities
• Agencies
• Industry
• Operations
• Countries
• Hot Documents
• News
• Reports
• Policy
• Budget
• Congress
• Links

• WMD
• Intelligence
• Homeland Security
• Space

Pope John XXIII [1958-1963]

On 27 April 2014, two popes - John the XXIII and John Paul II - were made saints in a ceremony at St. Peter’s Square. The dual canonization is part of the current pope’s program to reconcile liberals and conservatives in the Roman Catholic Church.

On 05 July 2013 the Vatican announced that the late Pope John Paul II would be made a saint of the Roman Catholic Church. This after Pope Francis approved a second miracle attributed to the Polish pontiff. Pope Francis also decided to canonize Pope John XXIII, who led the church until 1963 during a five-year period of reorganization, even though only one miracle rather than the requisite two had been attributed to Pope John XXIII. The move was seen as a balancing act, as the two popes are popular with different wings of the Church. Pope John Paul II appeals to more conservative liturgically oriented Catholics, while Pope John XXIII, who presided over the reformining Vatican II ecuminical council, appeals to more liberal Catholics who are concerned with the social mission of the Church.

After a succession of ever more reactionary Pope Piuses (IX, X, XI and XII), Cardinal Angelo Roncalli was finally elected after an unusually long and apparently stormy conclave, and as Pope John XXIII proceeded to put into operation a policy which, as and when judged by recent papal standards, was extremely radical. This papal turning movement was initially due to personal conviction, and shrewd strategy impelled by the current needs of an age dominated by the "winds of change".

Angelo Giuseppe Roncalli was born in 1881, the third of thirteen children in a peasant family in Sotto il Monte, near Bergamo. He was the fourth in a family of 14. The family worked as sharecroppers. It was a patriarchal family in the sense that the families of two brothers lived together, headed by his great-uncle Zaverio, who had never married and whose wisdom guided the work and other business of the family. Zaverio was Angelo's godfather, and to him he always attributed his first and most fundamental religious education. The religious atmosphere of his family and the fervent life of the parish, under the guidance of Fr Francesco Rebuzzini, provided him with training in the Christian life.

Roncalli was ordained in 1904, and after the Great War he had a variety of assignments. Roncalli got an assignment as delegate to Turkey, a long-neglected outpost. He was there when World War II broke out, and he devoted himself to the care of refugees, especially Jews. He obtained transit visas to Palestine for some; to others he issued baptismal certificates that would enable them to pass as Christians, with the understanding that no baptisms need be performed. Chaim Barlas of the Jewish Agency's Rescue Committee wrote: "to the few heroic deeds which were performed to rescue Jews belong the activities of the apostolic delegate, Monsignor Roncalli, who worked indefatigably on their behalf." Rabbi Isaac Herzog of Jerusalem wrote: "Through [Roncalli] thousands of Jews were rescued."

The end of World War II turned Roncalli's career around. The papal nuncio to France, Valerio Valeri, had collaborated with the Vichy government, and De Gaulle insisted that Valeri must go. The Vatican had to find a suitable replacement, and fast; if they didn't send a new nuncio in time for the traditional New Year's greeting to the President, the greeting would be given by the next-highest ranking ambassador, Aleksandr Bogomilov of the Soviet Union. Suddenly Roncalli's very obscurity was an advantage; no-one knew of anything to object to in him. He was appointed nuncio to France in time to give the New Year's greeting of 1945.

In 1953 Roncalli was made a cardinal and appointed patriarch of Venice. Pope Pius XII died on October 9, 1958, and the conclave began two weeks later. Roncalli was elected on the twelfth ballot. Many believed that John had been elected as a papa di passagio, a transitional pope. He was seventy-seven years old. John XXIII shocked the world by choosing a name that had been avoided since John XXII in the early 14th century. John XXII, an Avignon Pope, preached false doctrines about Purgatory and the Final Judgment. Only the day before he died did he retract his error. From them on, the name John was avoided, but it did not frighten Angelo Roncalli.

His pontificate, which lasted less than five years, presented him to the entire world as an authentic image of the Good Shepherd. Meek and gentle, enterprising and courageous, simple and active, he carried out the Christian duties of the corporal and spiritual works of mercy: visiting the imprisoned and the sick, welcoming those of every nation and faith, bestowing on all his exquisite fatherly care. His social magisterium in the Encyclicals Pacem in terris and Mater et Magistra was deeply appreciated.

Not only in the personal characters and social antecedents of Pope Pius XII (1939-58) and John XXIII (1958-63) were starkly different, (Pius was a Roman aristocrat while John was of humble peasant origin), but even more fundamentally in their respective papal roles and mental outlooks these two Popes were about as diametrically opposed as any two could be within the common tradition of the Papacy. It can be taken for granted that had the Pacelli regime still been in existence under either Pius himself or a likeminded successor, the Vatican Council would never have been held and the ecclesiastical New Deal and New Look of Pope John XXIII would never have been heard of. These, like the Vatican Council itself, were the work of Pope John XXIII, who seemed to have met with bitter opposition from the entourages of his predecessor and from traditionalists like Cardinal Ottaviani in the Roman Curia, when he announced his original program of reform to be implemented by the Second Vatican Council. The two Popes stood at mutually opposing poles of the ecclesiastical universe : Pius as the most die-hard of traditionalists in every sphere; John as the most liberal pope and comprehensive ecclesiastical reformer in the modern annals of Papacy.

One of his first acts was to annul the regulation of Sixtus IV limiting the membership of the College of Cardinals to 70; within the next four years he enlarged it to 87 with the largest international representation in history.

Pope John XXIII announced on January 25, 1959, that he would call a general, or "ecumenical," council of the Roman Catholic Church. There were many cardinals, he said, who were "better fitted" than he to become pope. But, he added, if God wished him to be chosen, it was surely in order that he might bring about the union of the churches. In announcing the council, Pope John remarked that after two months or so of his pontificate, people were beginning to wonder what would be its character. It is clear that he wishes to be remembered as the Pope of the Council - the first, be it noted, since the promulgation of the doctrine of papal infallibility in 1870.

the Council opened on 11 October 1962, preceded by a pilgrimage of John XXIII to Loreto and Assisi. The journey marked the first time since 1870 that a Pope had left the Vatican to go on a pilgrimage.

With the accession of Pope John XXIII, a remarkable metamorphosis had overtaken the Roman Catholic Church and its Vatican leadership. Whereas in earlier ages, and very particularly since the Protestant Reformation, Rome prided herself upon her exclusiveness and took up a uniformly hostile attitude towards every other form of Christianity, by the 1960s the emphasis was primarily laid upon unity; upon Christian reunion.

The gap between Roman Catholics and other Christians is wide and deep. The Eastern Orthodox churches and the Roman Catholic Church have been separate since 1054. The massive separation of Protestant churches from Rome began with the sixteenth-century Reformation. The chasm was enlarged by the First Vatican Council of 1869-70, when it defined and promulgated the doctrine of papal infallibility.

Protestantism was no longer the major enemy of Rome - outside Belfast at any rate. That position had been taken up by atheism or, more precisely, by the scientific revolution which in the field of philosophy expressed itself as atheism - that is, by the exclusion of the supernatural from a universe autonomous and explicitly self-sufficient. It was against this world view - one infinitely more alien and dangerous than even the most iconoclastic forms of Protestantism ever were - that Rome was regrouping her forces and seeking new allies even among her former enemies.

The Vatican appeared to be exactly following the advice traditionally given by one of its former missionaries, who used to advise his pagan converts to worship everything that they had previously burnt, and to burn everything they had previously worshipped. The scientific revolution which had transformed human society more completely within a single lifetime than it had been previously transformed since the days of the Pharaohs, would appear to spell the inevitable doom of the whole concept of the supernatural, and therewith of its most impressive embodiment in human history, the Roman Catholic Church.

Since the accession of Pope John in 1958, Communist-Catholic collaboration seemed to have made quite considerable progress. Certainly Lenin would turn in his grave were he aware of the apparently official endorsement of de Chardin in the USSR. Just as presumably say, Pius XII, that fanatically pro-Fascist pope, would also indulge in post mortem gyrations were he to learn that French Communists are officially invited to lecture in Catholic universities like Louvain.

The successor of Pius XII, Pope John XXIII, recognized the necessity of making the distinction between socialism as a theoretical doctrine and as a historically existing socio-political system. That principle of John XXIII's granted the opportunity to the Vatican to develop a more flexible political line with respect to the socialist countries, although in essence the Vatican maintained its anticommunist positions. The first official document to confirm that principle was the partial agreement that was signed between the Vatican and the Hungarian People's Republic on 15 September 1964. That agreement obliged the Hungarian bishops to swear an oath of allegiance to the Hungarian People's Republic, to promote its development, and to respect the laws existing there; the Vatican also gave its consent to astipulation that the new bishops would not be appointed without the preliminary coordination with the government of Hungary.

In the same year of 1964 the Vatican began negotiations with Yugoslavia, which were completed with the signing on 25 June 1966 of a Protocol by representatives of the Vatican and the government of Yugoslavia. In that document the Vatican formally admitted that in a socialist state the activity of the Catholic Church must be confined to religious limits and that the priests must not abuse their reli-gious function for purposes that might be of a political nature. The Vatican was obliged to take steps stipulated by Catholic law (up to and including excommunication) against those Catholic priests whose actions could harm the Yugoslav state. However, as was correctly noted by the foreign progressive press, the Vatican reluctantly recognized the new state, social, and cultural realities of postwar Europe.

It also, without any particular joy, had to keep in mind the realratio of the political and military forces in Europe and the prospects thatwere opening up before the old continent in the immediate and the more remoteperiod. With unconcealable annoyance certain Catholic newspapers wrote about the reasons why the Vatican had been forced to reconsider its traditional position with respect to the socialist countries. "The storm of World War II," an Italian Christian Democratic newspaper, for example, wrote, "the political and social upheavals that followed it, and the arising in Eastern Europe of revolutionary, atheistic states which are ideologically hostile to Christianity, deprived the church not only of its wealth, but also of its social role. After 1944-1945 the old world crumbled and its restoration is inconceivable. It is precisely the recognition of this new situation, which precludes the possibility of bringing back the past, that forms the basis of the Vatican's Eastern policy and itsmeasures that are aimed at normalizing the relations between church and state"

The "new orientation" in religious policy initiated by Pope John XXIII, successor to Pius XII - an orientation which the Western press heralded as being more "progressive" and consisting of non-interventionin "world" problems - subsequently proved to be just as reactionary. John XXIII had hardly entered his new post when he began attacking the "materialist and atheist camp," as well as the countries which were struggling for national independence. Following the anti Communist line of Pius XII, in April 1959 John XXIII gave a new example of "new orientation" of the Catholic Church by publishing the inquisitional decree which under the threat of excommunication forbade Catholics to support the Communist Party, as well as those organizations and political parties which, even though Christian, might uphold in one way or another the political actions of the Communists.

Pope John XXIII died June 3, 1963. He was succeeded by Cardinal Montini, who took the name Paul VI and supervised the completion of the Second Vatican Council, in 1965.