identifying “the true source of Pope John’s goodness, the peace which he spread”. There was probably a need to have the confirmation of those words which leapt before the eyes; not only seeing again the sequence of significant gestures often seen on the small screen (the real ones from documentaries, the romantic ones in fiction); not only rereading the encyclicals or the speeches and official messages; but, above all written on thousands of pages by Roncalli – diaries, letters, sermons, private notes – in which he wrote vivid reflections on the image of the “Pastor”.
Pastoral was the guiding line of his highest ministry, pastoral the Council which he desired, pastoral the sense of each role in the stages of his life. “The older I get with the passing years and experience, the more I recognise that the sure way to my personal sanctification and for the greatest success of my service in the Holy See rests on the vigilant effort to reduce everything, principles, leanings, positions and affairs, to the maximum of simplicity and calm; (…) and to go directly to what is truth, justice and charity, above all charity. Every other system of doing is nothing but a pose and a search for personal affirmation, which quickly betrays and becomes cumbersome and ridiculous”. And again: “All the sages throughout the ages, all the astute on this earth, also those in the Vatican diplomacy, who make a wretched figure, are placed in the light of simplicity and grace which emanates from this great and fundamental teaching from Jesus and his saints! This is the surest expedient which confounds the wisdom of the world”. This was during a November retreat in 1948 when the nuncio Roncalli arrived in Paris after his experience in Bulgaria and on the banks of the Bosphorus.
His was a “diplomacy of the heart” with many results which he knew how to achieve like the rapprochement between the catholic community of oriental and orthodox rites in the ten years passed in the “land of the rose” (complete with thorns) where, between 1925 and 1934, his testimony never left space for proselytism; therefore ten years later, when he was an apostolic delegate in Istanbul, in the Turkey which was in the grip of repercussions from the laicistic revolution imposed by Atatűrk, but also in nearby Greece which played every card for the mingling between national identity and the orthodox church, he was generous to those Jews who were escaping from Nazism, to the equally persecuted Armenians, to the Hellenic population who suffered famine in the second world war. A pioneering “ecumenism” was his during those years, attentive to spiritual and material needs, never separated from deep studies and direct knowledge as well as religious traditions, also in the laicisation processes.
With a revealing awareness in the sermon of the last Pentecost in Istanbul on 28th May 1944: “We love to detach ourselves from those who do not profess our faith: orthodox brothers, protestants, Israelites, Muslims, believers or non-believers of other religions: our church, the traditional and liturgical form of our cult (…) My dear brothers and children: I have to tell you that in the light of the Gospel and catholic principles, this is a false logic. Jesus came to break down those barriers: he died to proclaim universal brotherhood; the central point of his teaching is charity, that is love which unites all men to him as the first of the brothers, and unites him with us to the Father”.
Here again is the Pastor. Or better “the father and pastor” who returned to Italy at the beginning of 1953 as the Patriarch of Venice. Arriving in the lagoon, leaving behind him a long commitment as mediator repairing the French lacerations from the war (one remembers the well known episode of the collaborator bishops), he reveals his thoughts in the Journal of a soul: “It is interesting that Providence has led me here again, where my priestly vocation took its first steps, that is in pastoral service. In truth I have always maintained that for an ecclesiastic, so called diplomacy should be steeped in the pastoral spirit; the contrary would count for nothing and become ridiculous as a saintly mission”.
And the illustrious Venetian opened up his idea that the Church should be like a garden and not like a museum: a period which alternated between seasons lived in the “time of the Lord”, by the wish to “launch a good movement for the study and reading of the Bible”, but also with the inevitable dealing with social problems, secularisation processes, pluralistic tensions and instances of independence in the catholic laity, changes in the customs of the laity and clergy, ideas that required his pronouncements, aligned with the Rome directive. That eternal city which greeted him on the death of Pius XII and saw him come out from the 1958 conclave with the name of John XXIII, taking on “the honour and weight of the papacy, with the joy of being able to say nothing had been done to elicit it”. And now sees the canonisation of him, who never forgot he was above all the bishop of Rome – a beloved city, which he visited from the historic centre to the suburbs “questioning souls” – and ready to repeat to the Secretary of State Tardini: “I propose myself to give emphasis to the first service to which the Lord has called me. The fact is I am the Pope quatenus episcopus Romae”. From this point he would have embraced with his gaze not only the capital city or Italy, but a world still split into two, together with the faces of many churches, calling them all to the meeting. With the Vatican Ecumenical Council II, dialogue also with the East, encyclicals like Mater et Magistra or Pacem in Terris: able to gather together what united rather than that which divided. This was the Angelo Roncalli who wrote: “As everywhere they call me Sainted Father, as if it were my first title, I must and wish to be one in all truth”.
Translation by Antoinette Canini
© All rights reserved
© RIPRODUZIONE RISERVATA