By Fr Clem Hodge
BLESSED John XXIII, like Pope John Paul I, had been Patriarch of Venice.
Each of these popes had a sense of humour.
Each had a great simplicity.
Each was close to God.
There are myriads of saints in Heaven who will never be canonised.
So why canonise popes and so soon after their death?
Saints in the early Church were often proclaimed by popular acclamation; Blessed John’s canonisation will make official what many already believe.
We remember Blessed John XXIII for his calling the Second Vatican Council; we remember his holiness and we remember his humanity.
I was privileged to be in Rome during his last illness in 1963.
People would gather in St Peter’s Square and looking up to the Pope’s window spend time in silent prayer.
His room was dimly lit until at 7.49pm on June 3, 1963, the light in the window became fully illuminated and the people in the square knew that the Pope was dead.
When Blessed John Paul II was dying, he said to his secretary, “I go to the House of the Father”.
Blessed John XXIII said to his secretary, Monsignor Loris Francesco Capovilla, “My bags are packed”, and “when it is over, go and see your mother”.
Like our present Pope Francis, he spoke from the heart.
Pope Francis has wonderfully remembered Blessed John XXIII in recently making his faithful secretary, Monsignor Capovilla, a cardinal at the age of 98.
In announcing the Vatican Council, Blessed John spoke of “opening the windows” of the Church.
This he did and helped the Church rediscover or bring to focus through the Second Vatican Council some of the basics of our Faith.
The council highlighted the Church as the People of God, the role of the laity that Cardinal Joseph Cardijn had championed earlier and the centrality of the liturgy.
The first document approved by the council was to be the springboard of liturgical renewal. Ecumenism that the council promoted can be seen exemplified in Pope John’s welcome to a Jewish rabbi, “I am your brother, Joseph”.
His encyclical “Pacem in terris” is a “magna carta” of his passion for human rights and world peace.
While Blessed John XXIII called the council, we have to thank the Holy Spirit and the Fathers of the council for its outcome.
Many of the fruits of the council were already embryonic in the years before.
Pope John was the catalyst for a new spring.
Today we take for granted parish councils, lay readers at Mass, ecumenism, and so much more.
Pope Francis reminds us that it is not so much changing things as changing attitudes.
With gratitude I look back to the Church of my younger years; with the same gratitude for the Church of today, I pray the words of Jesus, “That they may be one”.
Fr Clem Hodge is a retired priest of Brisbane archdiocese.
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