The Simplicity and Courage of Saint John XXIII

Today is the celebration of the saint who was Pope when I was born in 1963. In part, my parents named me “John” in his honor (as well as my grandfather and Saint John the Baptist), so with his canonization in 2014 I acquired “another patron saint.” (My son John Paul and my daughter Teresa similarly acquired “retroactive patrons” when St John Paul II and St “Mother” Teresa of Kolkata were canonized.)

St John XXIII’s celebration is today, not because it is the anniversary of his death, but because on October 11, 1962 he officially opened the Second Vatican Council. His papacy only lasted five years, but it was momentous for the Church and the world. The 1960s saw the rapid emergence of “the new epoch” of unprecedented global interconnectedness and interdependence driven by the gigantic scope of technological power with all its vast possibilities and dangers. This world was (is) more desperately in need of God, but also more enthralled than ever with ideologies of allegedly “scientific” materialism and human self-sufficiency.

John XXIII attributed the idea of the Council to an inspiration of the Holy Spirit, and he surprised everyone by announcing it in the first months of his papacy—on the Feast of the Conversion of Saint Paul, January 25, 1959. In addition to opening the first session of the Council and shaping its fundamental orientation, John XXIII wrote two landmark encyclicals (Mater et Magistra and Pacem in Terris) developing Catholic social teaching in light of worldwide challenges that remain with us today:

“Man is not just a material organism. He consists also of spirit; he is endowed with reason and freedom. He demands, therefore, a moral and religious order; and it is this order—and not considerations of a purely extraneous, material order—which has the greatest validity in the solution of problems relating to his life as an individual and as a member of society, and problems concerning individual states and their inter-relations.

“It has been claimed that in an era of scientific and technical triumphs such as ours man can well afford to rely on his own powers, and construct a very good civilization without God. But the truth is that these very advances in science and technology frequently involve the whole human race in such difficulties as can only be solved in the light of a sincere faith in God, the Creator and Ruler of man and his world.”

~Mater et Magistra 208-209 [May 1961]