Remembering 'The Good Pope': 9-22/23-12
September 22, 2012
As the 50th anniversary of the Oct. 11, 1962, opening of the Second Vatican Council approaches, you will find lots of books, articles, blog postings and more analyzing what Vatican II meant for the Catholic Church and for the world.
My first blog posting on the subject appeared here a few weeks ago. Today I want to look more closely at the pope who called that historic session into being, John XXIII (pictured below). To do that, I recommend to you a new book by Vatican observer Greg Tobin, The Good Pope: The Making of a Saint and the Remaking of the Church. The book will be published on Tuesday.
It is a compelling read about a widely beloved and compelling man, an Italian born Angelo Roncalli.
Yes, there are now are -- and even at the time were -- critics of Vatican II, people who didn't want the church to change to be more accommodating of its millions of members who did not understand the language of the Mass as it was celebrated in Latin. In the end, such people -- who had and still have other objections -- oppose modernity, but modernity has run them over on its way to post-modernity.
Even popes -- such as John Paul II and Benedict XVI -- who have reputations as theological conservatives have had to accept and even affirm much of what came out of Vatican II, even if they have done what they could to de-emphasize and roll back the Vatican II reforms (and they have tried to do exactly that at times).
The driving force behind Vatican II, the man who embodied its spirit even before he ordered it to convene, was a winsome heart who loved the church deeply but loved God even more.
Tobin's admiring portrait of Roncalli's life shows us a true son of the church who understood that the institution he loved was in danger of becoming so rigid and irrelevant that its power to help transform lives would have been sapped had it stayed on that path.
Tobin puts it this way:
. . .it was not at all clear that the Second Ecumenical Council of the Vatican would ever really happen. It was seen as a historical gamble, and bets were still being placed on the table. Nonetheless, John had forged ahead and required of his brother bishops and his curial mandarins that they come along with him. He moved the Church in ways still felt today, five decades later -- and if he had not, it is impossible to know what the state of that Church and our world might be, nor how a billion souls would be nourished with a Word that claims eternal potency and absolute truth.
What was behind John's success? Again, Tobin:
In a role unique to the modern papacy, though he never led a parish church nor was he renowned for his academic prowess, John melded the temperament of a true pastor with the intellectual activity of a natural theologian. . .In his manners, which reflected the temper of his soul, this pontiff of 1,680 days inspired others to dream, to talk, to act, to be Catholic in whatever state of life they might find themselves. . .If John had not acted. . .the Catholic Church might have become calcified.
Partly because I lived through it, I was much more aware of Roncalli's time as pope than of boyhood or his early career as a diplomat for the church. So I found Tobin's recounting of that part of his life intriguing. And it didn't surprise me to learn that Roncalli did whatever he could to save Jews in the Holocaust and, thus, his reputation on that score is much different from that of Pope Pius XII, who reigned during World War II and who has received much criticism (some of it undeserved) for not doing nearly enough to help rescue the Jews from the Nazis' murderous machinery.
To many of us outside the Catholic Church it seems as if the church could use a pope with the temperament, instincts and warm-heartedness of John XXIII. Whatever their assets, JP-II and B-16 were not and have not been such popes. For the sake of the church universal, all Christians would do well to pray that Catholicism finds its next Roncalli.
* * *
MORMONISM AND MISSOURI
The St. Louis Post-Dispatch has done this interesting piece about Mormonism and its past and present in Missouri. It offers some good perspective and helps us understand how this most American of religions is playing out today in one of the states central to its creation. But it makes me wonder whether Mormonism will continue to get this much play in the media if Mitt Romney loses.
Comments