‘See everything, overlook a great deal, correct a little.’ Merciful words, unburdening words; wouldn’t we all like to be seen and ‘corrected’ that way? The speaker, Pope Saint John XXIII, was the embodiment of mercy in the Church in the 20th century.
Born Angelo Roncalli, he was the son of a farmer and one of thirteen children. In 1896, he was enrolled in the secular Franciscan order and took his vows the following year.
In both action and word, Roncalli brimmed with Christ’s mercy. As Apostolic Delegate to Turkey and Greece from 1935 he saved thousands of Jewish refugees fleeing Europe (yes, once the refugees fled from Europe, not to it).
Roncalli was a consistent advocate for the Jews: in 1960, as Pope, he expunged the word ‘perfidious’ from the description of the Jews in Good Friday prayers, and he was posthumously (in 1965) quoted asking forgiveness on behalf of the Church for ‘many, many centuries of blindness’ towards Jewish people.
John XXIII was the first pope since 1870 to make pastoral visits beyond the walls of the Vatican. He visited young polio victims in the Bambino Gesù hospital in Rome, and he astonished prisoners in the Regina Coeli prison by attending them and saying, ‘You couldn’t come to me, so I came to you.’
He enacted the ideal of Jesus: ‘I was sick and you cared for me, I was in prison and you visited me …’ (Matthew 25:36).
He admitted to the inmates of the prison that a relative had once been arrested for poaching, and he made a point of embracing a murderer who did not believe he could be forgiven for his sin.
Pope Saint John’s greatest legacy – apart from his Christian example – was the Second Vatican Council, a gathering of leaders of the church which changed the way the Church communicated its message.
The council made the Mass more intelligible to Catholics by allowing it to be said in the local languages of the world rather than in Latin, and this was merciful. It provided new opportunities for lay people to express their desire to serve in liturgies, and this was merciful.
Most pointedly, it changed the Church’s primary attitude to sin from one of condemnation to one of abundant readiness to forgive; in his opening address to the council, John said of ‘errors’:
‘Nowadays … the spouse of Christ prefers to make use of the medicine of mercy rather than that of severity… (The Church) … desires to show herself to be the loving mother of all, benign, patient, full of mercy.’
He has his detractors. Some might said in emphasising mercy over judgement, Pope John XXIII reduced the fear of God and thus people’s appreciation of His mercy. But mercy begets mercy.
When Pope Saint John XXIII died – and he died only nine months after beginning this revolution in mercy known as Vatican II – amongst the funeral wreaths was one which had been sent by the inmates – including a repentant murderer – of Regina Coeli prison.
St John XXIII, Pope
25 November 1881-3 June 1963
Feast day: 11 October
Patron saint: Papal delegates, Second Vatican Council, Christian unity
Peter Fleming is the author of Would I Like Jesus? (Paulist Press, 2015)