FROM THE ARCHIVES: Pope John XXIII
Brown, Robert McAfee
constants in his spiritual journey. The sources on which he regularly drew remained quite traditional ones: the Scriptures, the fathers of the church, the breviary, the liturgy, the lives of the...
...Commonweal too paid tribute to Good Pope John...
...His notes detail the onset of the difficulties, embarrassments, and sufferings of his disease ("How do you feel, Holy Father...
...Against the advice of the "prophets of doom," he returned Catholicism to the world...
...it is difficult for them to believe they have been wrong, or even only half wrong...
...he was asked...
...The "eternal truths" of which Pope John speaks are not the sort that are written as definitions "beyond the firmament...
...He wrote about the council, which he attended as an observer...
...As he remarked, it was the serenity that came from surrender to God's will that gave him the bold freedom to act as he did when his unlikely journey brought him to the papacy...
...they cannot claim the world-view, only the words, of Aristotle...
...Ambition and lust, love and sacrifice, pride and passion recur because man cannot escape his origin, limitations, or history...
...Several times in his writings, Pope John quoted a description of Saint Martin: "He neither feared to die nor refused to live...
...But whatever their glories, and in spite of their contrary assumption, the Latin Scholastics cannot claim Aquinas as their mentor...
...Are they not Romani...
...In 1963, Michael Novak was the author of the novel The Tiber Was Silver and a frequent contributor to Commonweal...
...The sources on which he regularly drew remained quite traditional ones: the Scriptures, the fathers of the church, the breviary, the liturgy, the lives of the saints, the Imitation of Christ, and other spiritual classics...
...At seven on the evening of June 3rd, the Monday after Pentecost, a Mass was celebrated for Pope John in Saint Peter's Square below the apartment where he lay dying...
...Are they not--yes, even--the church...
...The Protestant theologian Karl Barth once remarked, after surveying the history of the Papal See for several centuries, "I cannot hear the voice of the Good Shepherd from this See of Peter...
...For the last fifteen years of his life, the idea that his death could be near is a frequent theme in his notes...
...Thus the use of the words "absolute," "unchanging," "eternal" must be taken in a limited, special sense...
...His spirituality was that of a Christian, of course, but also that of a priest, and his self-examination always kept these two dimensions of his life in close connection: it was as priest, bishop, pope that he was to be a Christian, as a Christian that he was to be a church leader...
...At times it has not been as clear to us as it should have been that the pope was servus servorum Dei, and some popes left an image of human pretension rather than divine condescension...
...But the death of Pope John has been the death of Joseph, our brother, and we feel his loss as the loss of a member of our family...
...Around 7:40 the Ite missa est was chanted and we began to sing "Ubi caritas et amor ibi Deus est...
...John XXIII was no less a man because he was stunningly Christian...
...John Cogley [] Already the legends are beginning to grow, but in the case of the late pope, legend can only diminish, it cannot enhance his charm...
...The important thing is not simply that Giuseppe RoncalCommonweal | 5 August 11,2000li was this warm human being, our brother, but that it was the supreme pontiff of the Roman Catholic church who was this warm human person...
...And when some added, "Here, too, was a Christian," it became exquisitely certain, at least for a while, that there was no contradiction between the two claims...
...Barnums--may in time crush the man...
...When in fact his final illness came (doctors diagnosed his stomach cancer in October 1962, but seem not to have told him), he was ready...
...The emphasis which Aristotle places on the individual person in the Nichomachean Ethics, for example, and the emphasis he places on historical development and "what is" rather than "what ought to be" in his Politics, are clearly present in Pope John's encyclicals...
...From God's point of view, man's nature may lie limpid and apparent, and revelation may help to fix some of these insights for finite men...
...they are not present in the moral handbooks of the Latin Scholastics...
...His favorite saints were Joseph, John the Baptist, John the Evangelist, and Francis de Sales...
...the Latin Scholastics coalesce ethics and canon law, and minimize risk and individuality...
...he was in Rome during Vatican II and published widely about it...
...More than one Protestant noted the paradox of their mourning the death of a pope...
...The following excerpts are selected from several essays published in the issue of June 23, 1963...
...One of the sayings attributed to him by newspapermen is that he told one of their number: "After I am gone, I hope it will be said that Angelo Giuseppe Roncalli was a man...
...You are the vicar of Christ," one of them asserted...
...You kneel only before Christ...
...he was no less a Christian because he was stunningly human...
...The same spiritual orientations appear throughout Roncalli's adult life...
...In the past, the death of a pope has not been a fact about which non-Catholics felt a particular sense of personal involvement...
...At his death a hardboiled generation, friend and enemy, joined together in the simple declaration that here, indeed, was a man...
...Like Saint Lawrence on the grill," he replied), until on May 31, 1963, his secretary, Monsignor Loris Capovilla, fulfilled a promise he had made long before and told him: "Holy Father, I am now performing the same duty that you performed for Monsignor Radini at the end of his life...
...It is even difficult for them to accept the possibility of another point of view than their own...
...Thus Pope John's list of natural rights was not evident, in theory or in practice, when the gospels were first preached, nor, indeed, in the thirteenth or even in the nineteenth century...
...And what a man he was...
...He cast the church free from the island of Latin Scholasticism on which she has for some centuries been marooned, and launched her once more on the currents of human history with hope, with courage, with joy, with the exhilaration proper to those who see in the darkness the star of eternal life...
...Robert McAfee Brown ! The papacy has always been an area of the life of Roman Catholicism from which non-Catholics have felt more than ordinarily separated...
...In 1963, Robert McAfee Brown was professor of religion at Stanford, and wrote a regular column for Commonweal...
...He prayed that he would be able to endure pain...
...He received a group of Roman Catholics who immediately knelt in his presence...
...he was a former executive editor of Commonweal and a regular columnist...
...He urged them to rise, but they stayed on their knees...
...FROM THE ARCHIVES Pope John XXIII The death of Pope John XXIII on June 3,1963, brought forth encomiums from every corner of the world...
...But from an empirical human point of view, men learn the natural law only gradually and according to the lessons of history...
...and the differences are hard to characterize in a single descriptive phrase...
...There have been periods in papal history when it seemed to us that the splendor of the Holy See was a bit tarnished in comparison to the simplicity of the Holy Family...
...Universal grief was a first testimony in the process that this year will pass a major milestone when Pope John Paul II beatifies John XXIII and confirms the gospel peace and freedom that characterized that serene man and defined his bold ministry...
...They are, rather, the sort of verity William Faulkner spoke of in his memorable acceptance speech on receiving the Nobel Prize: founded not in definitions but in that physical and emotional and only partly rational organism, man in history...
...The press was informed and, as older people will remember, it seemed that the whole world gathered in a vigil around his deathbed...
...Above in his room, where the hymn could be heard, John XXIII trembled for an instant and peacefully died...
...Pope John succeeded in returning the church to this ancient perspective...
...Michael Novak [] Pope John's program, like the council's thus far, was different in style from Latin Scholasticism...
...Understandably, those accustomed to viewing the world in the manner of Latin Scholastics are outraged at having their viewpoint about "the essence" of things seriously impugned...
...For during the pontificate of John XXIII we have heard the voice of the Good Shepherd, solicitous not only for those inside, but for those outside the sheepfold as well...
...The days that followed were a remarkable tribute to the person and the work of Pope John...
...But we who have been fortunate enough to live during his short pontificate can never forget the reality...
...In his person the human qualities shone forth with such fine Franciscan splendor that all men, whatever their religious faith or secular belief, were pleased, indeed anxious, to claim kinship with him...
...We may live to see the day when that solid peasant body will be melted down to fashionable proportions and the winningly homely features will be prettified or "ennobled" in plaster statues...
...the Lord is calling you...
...Part of the reason for this may be that, with whatever other gifts they had, recent incumbents of the papal chair have not given the impression of outgoing warmth in personal relations...
...I was in that crowd...
...The "Saint"--the creature of the ecclesiastical P.T...
...Aristotle (and Aquinas after him) refused to turn ethics into a logical or legal system, and insisted on the element of risk in moral decision...
...Commonweal | 6 August 11, 2000...
...The very qualities of humanity and humility that so endeared Pope John to the non-Catholic world are illustrated by another audience shortly after his pontificate began...
...That Pope John was able to overcome, and indeed to destroy, this image of austerity and aloofness in a space of less than five years, is one of those facts of history that could never have been predicted in advance...
...In 1963, John Cogley (1916-76) was at the Center for the Study of Democratic Institutions...
...He currently holds the George Frederick Jewett Chair of Public Policy at the American Enterprise Institute...
...The hour has come...
...So doing, he made it possible for Catholics to speak of good news to their companions who do not see, and to learn from those who do not see the humility of the human situation...
...It is in this sense only that there is a "natural law," progressively made clear in history, never quite complete, always affected by the continuing dialogue between God and his people down the generations...
...Half-full as the Mass began, the square was crowded by the time it ended...
...That remark now sounds curiously dated, as Karl Barth would probably be the first to acknowledge...
...To which Pope John responded, "You do not kneel before the vicar of Christ...
...The sentence conveys what is called "holy indifference," an attitude of utter openness to the will of God...
...No less familiar, at least to older Catholics, were the practices to which he remained faithful: the rosary and other popular devotions, weekly confession, annual retreats, the corporal and spiritual works of mercy...
Vol. 127 • August 2000 • No. 14
