I've been dancing on air since last week, when the
Vatican announced that Pope Francis has declared my hero, Angelo Roncalli - aka
Pope John XXIII - a saint.
Some people are raising their eyebrows because Pope
Francis waived the requirement that a candidate have two confirmed miracles.
But the pope is just following a more ancient tradition, when saints were chosen
by acclamation of the faithful.
And everyone – Catholics and non-Catholics alike –
has always known that if ever a saint walked this earth, Pope John was it. He
doesn't need any more miracles because his whole life was a miracle.
He didn't look very impressive. He looked like a
fat, dumpy Italian housewife.
"His face was like a jigsaw puzzle of borrowed
pieces," wrote religious scholar Peter de Rosa. "But his heart was
one of God's masterpieces."
His predecessor, Pius XII, has been criticized for
his silence during the Holocaust. But there's no mystery about what Roncalli
was doing during the war: He was forging thousands of fake baptismal certificates
for Jewish children to save them from the Nazis.
After the war, the Vatican sent him to France on a
delicate mission: to prevent three French cardinals and 20 bishops from being
put on trial for treason because they had collaborated with the Nazis.
He accomplished his mission with such tact, the
leader of the rabidly anti-clerical Radical party exclaimed, "If all
priests were like Nuncio Roncalli, there would be no anti-clericals left!"
When he was elected pope at age 77, most people
assumed he would be a mere caretaker. It didn't work out that way. He lived
less than five years, but that was long enough to change the church – and the
world - forever.
He was the pope who took the anti-Semitic language
out of the liturgy and the first pope to reach out to the Jewish community. And,
of course, he was the genius who dreamed up the Ecumenical Council, one of the
most revolutionary events in Church history.
Unlike his successors, he didn't think it was his
job to lecture people or root out heresy or issue dire warnings about the
future. He thought his job was to be a good Christian. And that meant carrying
out the injunction of the Gospels: to love everyone.
That included the prisoners in Rome's infamous
Regina Coeli prison, whom he visited shortly after his election, saying,
"You cannot come to see me, so I have come to see you."
And the little boy who wrote to him, saying he
couldn't make up his mind whether to be a pope or a policeman. Pope John wrote
back, "It would be safer for you to train for the police. Anyone can be
pope - as you can see, since I became one."
And, especially, it included people who disagreed
with him: communists, capitalists and church conservatives alike. To all of
them, he was simply The Good Shepherd.
He inherited a Church that was mired in arcane
scholastic disputes and obsessed with the torments of Hell. He left it suffused
with love, charity and service to others, and with its eye turned firmly toward
Heaven.
He may not have been a caretaker, but he took
awfully good care of his Church. He was truly Christ's vicar on earth.
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