Saint John XXIII

Angelo Roncalli was the fourth of thirteen children of Lombard sharecroppers, and nothing in his long, unglamorous career suggested the man who would turn the church toward the modern world. He spent a quarter century in diplomatic exile: apostolic visitor to Bulgaria from 1925, delegate to Turkey and Greece from 1934, where during the war he used baptismal certificates and immigration papers to help thousands of Jews escape, then nuncio to a prickly, newly liberated France from the end of 1944. Venice made him a cardinal and patriarch in 1953, at seventy-one, in what looked like a final posting. Elected on the eleventh ballot on 28 October 1958, at seventy-six, he was understood by everyone, perhaps including himself, as a transitional pope after the nineteen years of Pius XII.

Ninety days later, on 25 January 1959, he told seventeen astonished cardinals gathered at Saint Paul Outside the Walls that he intended to summon an ecumenical council. He lived to open it, on 11 October 1962, with a speech that rebuked the "prophets of doom" and asked the church to distinguish the substance of its faith from the language in which it had been expressed. He did not live to see it finished. Between sessions he wrote Pacem in terris (April 1963), the first encyclical addressed to all people of good will rather than to Catholics alone, and during the Cuban missile crisis of October 1962 he broadcast an appeal for peace that Pravda printed on its front page. Stomach cancer, diagnosed in September 1962, killed him on 3 June 1963. Rome called him il papa buono, the good pope; Francis canonized him on 27 April 2014, on the same morning as John Paul II. The council he began, and the argument over what it meant, has shaped every pontificate since.