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"We love the name of John because it reminds us of John the Baptist, precursor of our Lord . . . and the other John, the disciple and evangelist, who said: 'My children, love one another, love one another because this is the grand precept of Christ.' Perhaps we can, taking the name of this first series of holy Popes,* have something of his sanctity and strength of spirit, even—if God wills it—to the spilling of blood."
John XXIII was born in a grey stone farmhouse on a November night in 1881. A couple of hours later, his mother rose from her bed and hurried with her husband and her first son to the little parish church of St. John. The sleepy priest grumbled at the lateness of the hour, but they insisted—"Do you want us to take him all the way home again without baptism?"—and that night Angelo Giuseppe Roncalli became a member of the church he would rule one day.
For 500 years, the Roncallis have been working in the vineyards and wheat fields around the village of Sotto il Monte (Beneath the Mountain), eight miles from the Lombardy town of Bergamo. Like his brothers and sisters, Angelo grew up to the life of a farmer—"At the age of ten." the 86-year-old church bell ringer remembered last week, "that boy worked in the fields with the sobriety of a grown man."
Angelo carried the same sobriety into his work at school; he was only eleven when he decided to be a priest, and though the expense meant a sacrifice for his parents, Angelo went to study at the seminary in Bergamo, the quiet, medieval "town of 100 churches." He won a scholarship to the Pontifical Seminary in Rome, was ordained at 25, and said his first Mass in St. Peter's Basilica.
The Pope's Mirror. "I never aspired to be more than a country priest in my diocese," said Cardinal Roncalli later, but when he returned there it was as secretary to the Bishop of Bergamo, aristocratic Monsignor Giacomo Radini-Tedeschi, to whom he still refers as "my spiritual father." Roncalli's ten years with the bishop gave him some of the polish that later helped make him a successful diplomat, and some of the intellectual zeal that turned him into a teacher and scholar. In addition to his secretarial duties, he organized Catholic Action groups, taught church history and apologetics at the Bergamo seminary.