Ioannes XXIII%2C by De Agostini%2C 1958%E2%80%931963.
(Image by Wikipedia (commons.wikimedia.org), Author: Author Not Given) Details Source DMCA
Duluth, Minnesota (OpEdNews) April 3, 2021: In the spirit of celebrating the Christian holy day of Easter Sunday, I have chosen for the subject of this meditation the overweight Italian Vatican diplomat and cardinal of Venice Angelo Giuseppe Roncalli/ Pope John XXIII (1881-1963; elected pope in 1958).
Pope John XXIII was officially canonized a saint by the doctrinally conservative Argentine Jesuit Pope Francis in 2014, according to the European-educated church historian Prof. Dr. Massimo Faggioli (born in 1970 in Italy) of Villanova University, in his compact 160-page 2014 book John XXIII: The Medicine of Mercy (Collegeville, MN: Liturgical Press, page 8), which I discuss in detail in the second part of this meditation.
Disclosure: I turned fourteen in 1958 when the long-reigning Pope Pius XII (1876-1958; elected pope in 1939) died and the overweight Cardinal Roncalli of Venice was elected pope and took the name John XXIII. In 1962, I turned eighteen, graduated from high school, and started to college. In 1962, the momentous Second Vatican Council (1962-1965) in the Roman Catholic Church, which Pope John XXIII had formally called in 1959, began on October 11, 1962, and the scary Cuban missile crisis also occurred October 14-28, 1962. In 1963, Pope John XXIII was named Time magazine's "Man of the Year 1962" (in its first issue in January 1963), and he subsequently died on June 3, 1963, at the age of eighty-one.
Now, in 1958, President Dwight D. Eisenhower, who had been the supreme allied commander in World War II, was president of the United States. In 1963, when Pope John XXIII died in June, President John F. Kennedy was the president of the United States, the first Roman Catholic president of the United States. Tragically, he was assassinated in Dallas, Texas, on November 22, 1963.
Now, in 1972, the American journalist and longtime editor of the Saturday Review magazine Norman Cousins (1915-1990) published the book The Improbable Triumvirate: John F. Kennedy, Pope John, Nikita Khrushchev (New York: W. W. Norton).
Now, according to Faggioli, "more is known about [Angelo Giuseppe Roncalli/ Pope John XXIII] than any other pope in church history" thanks to the detailed spiritual journal he kept (page 10).
According to Faggioli, "At the end of 1895, at the age of fourteen, [the teenage seminarian Angelo Giuseppe Roncalli] began to write Il Giornale dell'Anima (Journal of a Soul), a journal that he kept his entire life" (page 15), from which Faggioli quotes repeatedly - at times, at length (providing his own English translations).
In 1965, Dorothy White's English translation of selections from Angelo Giuseppe Roncalli/Pope John XXIII's Italian writings, edited by Monsignor Loris Francesco Capovilla, was published as the 450-page book Journal of a Soul (New York: McGraw-Hill).
In a perceptive and timely review titled "Recollections in Tranquillity" (sic) in the Saturday Review, volume 47 (April 10, 1965): pages 37-38 and 61-62, the American Jesuit Renaissance specialist and cultural historian Walter J. Ong (1912-2003; Ph.D. in English, Harvard University, 1955) discusses it in detail.
Like the Tridentine seminarian Roncalli, Ong was also a Tridentine seminarian. In addition, like Roncalli, Ong also was characterized by "tranquil freedom of spirit" (in Ong's words). It takes one to know one. Granted, Father Ong never had a world-historic idea for action comparable to Pope John XXIII's idea for calling an ecumenical council. But Ong was deeply familiar with the practice of the interior sifting process known as the discernment of spirits that the pope engaged in after he first had the bright idea of calling a council.
For Ong's reflections on the interior sifting process known as discernment of spirits, see his 1952 article "'A.M.D.G.' [Abbreviation of the Latin Ad majorem Dei gloriam/ For the greater glory of God]: Dedication or Directive?" in the now-defunct Jesuit-sponsored journal Review for Religious, volume 11, number 5 (September 15, 1952): pages 257-264. (The entire print run of this journal is now available online, if any interested readers want to download Ong's 1952 article.)
Ong's 1952 article is reprinted in volume three of Ong's Faith and Contexts (Atlanta: Scholars Press, 1995, pages 1-8).
Ong also discusses the Jesuit motto Ad majorem Dei gloriam in his streamlined book Hopkins, the Self, and God (Toronto, Buffalo, London: University of Toronto Press, 1986, pages 78-81 and 87), the published version of Ong's 1981 Alexander Lectures at the University of Toronto.
Now, in Faggioli's 160-page 2014 book, he also discusses the Jesuit motto: "The rules for the formation of his [young Roncalli's] habits and mentality came from a Jesuit model, very common to seminary education in the nineteenth century. This [model] would gradually shape the whole structure of [Roncalli's] Il Giornale dell' Anima [Journal of a Soul] from 1896 on, when 'Ad majorem Dei gloriam' appeared as a recurrent theme in the headings or in the body of the spiritual annotations" (page 17).
(Note: You can view every article as one long page if you sign up as an Advocate Member, or higher).
