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Australia and the Popes

Pope John XXIII : 1958-1963

The "caretaker" pope:

The passing of Pope Pius XII on 9th October 1958 was the end of an era. The man who was to succeed him, Angelo Giuseppe Roncalli (25 November 1881 – 3 June 1963), was already an elderly man when he was chosen in the 12th ballot by the conclave on 28th October that year as some kind of "caretaker" or "interim" pontiff. Little did they, or the wider world, appreciate the legacy Pope John XXIII would leave the Church, and the world.

John XXIII was the 261st pope. At nearly 77 years of age, he was the oldest pope elected since 1670, and aside from the 34 day pontificate of Pope John Paul I twenty years later in 1978, John XXIII's reign, at 4.6 years, was the shortest of any pope since 1830. His great legacy to the Church was the Second Vatican Council which he was responsible for calling, but which he did not live to see completed.

The late 1950s, early 1960s in hindsight is seen as a time of enormous cultural and political shifts in the Western world. The post-WWII baby-boomers were completing their schooling and entering adulthood and Western society entered the long period of economic prosperity that continues to the present day with only minor recessional glitches on the curve. Perhaps the greatest legacy of this prosperity has been the access to secondary, tertiary and post-compulsory education the Western world was able to give to the vast masses of its citizens.

The following portrait of Pope John XXIII was written by Dr Marcellino D'Ambrosio for the Crossroads initiative in the United States.

In 1958, a congenial old man, Angelo Roncalli, was elected to the chair of Peter. He was to be a caretaker pope, someone to keep the ship steady while the cardinals identified a more long-term leader. That smiling old man soon stunned the world by calling the first ecumenical council in nearly a hundred years. That was not exactly what the Cardinals had in mind.

But they had chosen a profoundly holy man for the job, someone who’d be declared “Blessed” just a few decades later. One thing about holy people–they are docile to the Holy Spirit. The Spirit blows where he wills, and they follow without hesitation. Don’t choose that sort of person to man the helm if you don’t want to rock the boat.

Source: The Crossroads Initiative/Dr Marcellino D'Ambrosio

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The textual material on these pages was sourced from a large number of places all of which can be found through the links on each page. The material was researched, assembled and produced by Brian Coyne for Catholic Australia. The images used in the Flash animations are in the public domain. Other images used are in the public domain or sourced from the webpages to which they are linked.