Charlie Pierce: The Pope is a Quiet Revolutionary

Fifty years ago this past June, Pope John XXIII died in the Vatican after reigning for nearly five years. During that time he opened the Second Vatican Council, which turned the Roman Catholic Church on its head, but he also changed the face of the church from the frozen bureaucratic mask of Pius XII to a warm, inclusive peasant’s smile. Next April, he will be declared a saint alongside John Paul II, in a development seen by some of the more cynical faithful as a way to launder the canonization of the latter, a theological reactionary whose long reign undid so much of what John XXIII accomplished. John Paul II is known to his admirers as “John Paul the Great.” John XXIII has never been called anything but Il Papa Buono: The Good Pope. This is not an inconsiderable distinction.

He was not in any way simple. He was a shrewd administrator. He could not have wrangled the Second Vatican Council into existence the way he did if he were simply a jumped-up country pastor. He was in all things the best kind of revolutionary—canny, politically deft enough to demand only what he knew he could get, and perfectly willing to be thought a fool as long as he knew he was two jumps ahead of the game. It is also significant that his feast day is not celebrated on his birthday but rather on October 11, the day on which the council opened. On that evening in 1962, responding to the call of the crowd gathered in Saint Peter’s Square for the opening of the council, John XXIII appeared in a window of the Apostolic Palace and gave what is called in Italy, Discorso della Luna: “The Speech of the Moon.” This is part of what he said:

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There are echoes of these words in what Pope Francis has been saying since he was elected to the papacy. There is an argument to be made that the best thing a pope can do—in fact, that the only truly holy thing a pope can do—is put a human face on a gigantic institution encrusted with comic-opera medieval grandeur and shot through with connivance and deceit. As Garry Wills points out (often), there is no pope in the Gospels. Jesus did not make priests, let alone found a church. He would not understand in any way the proud triumphalism that so many people find an essential part of their attraction to the church. He would not have understood the desire to cover up crimes against children—in fact, in Matthew 18:6, he was rather specific about punishing people who commit crimes against children—but I think he would have understood a pope who went out and found himself a deal on a good used car.

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