NOW HEAR THIS Jewish Christian Muslim and people all over the world. ” It’s coming sooner rather than later by the special favor of Almighty GOD ALLAH JEHOVAH. “
He was 76 years old when they made him Pope. Nobody expected much.
He was the son of sharecroppers from Sotto il Monte, a village so small that half of Italy had never heard of it. One of thirteen children, born November 25, 1881, into a family with no land of their own. His full name was Angelo Giuseppe Roncalli. He grew up in the fields of Bergamo and left for the seminary at twelve.
For the next sixty years, he went where the Church sent him. Soldiers dying in the trenches of World War I – he was there as a chaplain. Bulgaria. Greece. Turkey. France. He listened to everyone. He held the hands of people nobody else was holding. He was not famous. He was not powerful. He was just present.
Then on October 28, 1958, the cardinals in Rome ran out of better options.
They elected Angelo Roncalli as Pope John XXIII. He was 76. Heavyset. Cheerful. Known for telling stories that made people laugh. The Roman gossip sheets called him a “caretaker pope” – a placeholder for a younger man to come. The Vatican, the thinking went, would not change much under this old farmer’s son from Bergamo.
Three months later, he announced the Second Vatican Council.
A council. The FIRST since 1870. The last one had taken 20 years and changed almost nothing. John was calling the Church together to open every window, look at the modern world, and figure out how to speak to it. Cardinals who had spent their careers protecting doctrine stared at him. He looked back and smiled.
Four years of preparation. Thousands of bishops gathering from every corner of the world. And on October 11, 1962, the Council opened.
That night, John XXIII appeared at his study window to speak to the crowd that had gathered in St. Peter’s Square below. He had not prepared anything. He just started talking.
“It could even be said that even the moon hastens close tonight, that from above, it might watch this spectacle that not even St Peter’s Basilica, over its four centuries of history, has ever been able to witness.”
Then he said this: “When you head home, find your children. Hug and kiss your children and tell them: This is the hug and kiss of the Pope.”
The crowd in the square stood in silence.
But here’s what the crowd in the square did not know. The man speaking to them from that window was already dying. The stomach cancer had been there for months. He had been in pain during the preparations. He had pushed through it. He had opened the Council anyway.
He would not live to close it.
The commissions met. The bishops debated. The documents took shape. On April 11, 1963 – with fifty-three days left to live – John XXIII published Pacem in Terris, “Peace on Earth.” It was addressed not just to Catholics but to “all people of goodwill.” The United Nations held a special conference to study it. Time magazine had already named him Man of the Year for 1962. A peasant farmer’s son from a village no one had heard of was speaking to the whole human race.
He signed it from his bed.
By June, he could no longer get up. He knew. And in his final days, with the Council still in session and the work still unfinished, John XXIII said: “This bed is an altar; the altar needs a victim: here I am, ready. I offer my life for the Church, the continuation of the Ecumenical Council, the peace of the world, and Christian unity.”
He died on June 3, 1963. Eighty-one years old.
Today is June 3, 2026. Sixty-three years ago, to the day.
That evening in 1963, as he died in the Apostolic Palace, thousands of Romans and pilgrims flooded into St. Peter’s Square. They could not get inside. They stayed outside in the dark. Cardinal Luigi Traglia walked out and began to celebrate Mass in the open air, in front of the Basilica, while the crowd filled every inch of the square. The end of that Mass coincided with the moment John XXIII died. The whole square was praying in the open air as he went.
He heard them from his room.
The Council he had opened continued for two more years after his death and produced the documents that still govern how the Catholic Church functions today. Pacem in Terris is still assigned in university courses and cited in United Nations resolutions. He was canonized a saint on April 27, 2014. His tomb is in St. Peter’s Basilica, a few feet from the high altar of the church he had opened to the world.
The old farmer’s son from Sotto il Monte. The caretaker pope. The man who called the whole Church to the window and said: go home, find your children, hug them, and tell them the Pope sends his love.
He was not a placeholder. He was what a pope is supposed to be.
LEADERSHIP BY TONY OYATEDOR
Join Mr. Tony Oyatedor Weekly on Adure Radio
DAVE’S SEAFOOD
