St. John XXIII

Angelo Giuseppe Roncalli served as a priest, military chaplain, and papal diplomat before becoming patriarch of Venice and then Pope John XXIII in 1958. His earlier assignments brought him into contact with Eastern Christians and with the political upheavals of twentieth-century Europe. His spiritual journals reveal a disciplined life of prayer.

Born into a large family at Sotto il Monte, Roncalli entered the Bergamo seminary as a boy. After ordination he served as a bishop's secretary and taught seminarians. During the First World War he worked first as a medical orderly and then as a chaplain, encountering suffering well before his later diplomatic responsibilities.

John XXIII convened the Second Vatican Council, which opened on October 11, 1962, and initiated revision of the Church's canon law. His teaching also emphasized peace and human dignity. He died in June 1963 before the council concluded and was canonized in 2014. His feast recalls the council's opening, one of the defining acts of his short pontificate.

His early spiritual notebooks eventually became the Journal of a Soul, a record of examination, prayer, and intention over many decades. That private discipline provides a counterpart to the public initiative of the council. Remembering both helps explain a pope whose relatively brief tenure had effects that continued long after his death.

Roncalli's Bulgarian appointment involved small Catholic communities within a country whose religious life was predominantly Orthodox. The Holy See's biography records his assistance after the 1928 earthquake and acknowledges that his diplomatic work advanced unevenly. Concrete relief and patient relationships were part of that assignment, not merely formal negotiations.

His subsequent service in Turkey and Greece brought sustained contact with Orthodox Christians and Muslims. He also pursued historical scholarship, publishing records of Charles Borromeo's apostolic visitation to Bergamo. The future council pope thus approached renewal with experience of religious difference and close attention to an earlier generation's attempts to reform church life.