If you had asked me last week, as did my colleagues at Saint Stephen’s, who or what I was writing on for the June 5 Friday Reflection, I would have said, without hesitation, the 260th Bishop of Rome and Pope of the Universal Catholic Church, whose feast day is Thursday, June 4. But things didn’t quite turn out that way.

Angelo Giuseppe Roncalli was elected Pope in October 1958, took the name John XXIII, and was described by one of the faithful this way: “My God, he’s so fat.” This was the Pope who was almost 77 years old when he was elected and, at his death, was 81. This was the Pope who, in less than five years, turned the Roman Catholic Church upside down and inside out. This was the Pope who said that it was time to bring the Church into the real world because he knew that if he didn’t do this, the Church would become more and more separated from the world and thus, more irrelevant. Some would say that John XXIII had to drag the church into reform and renewal. But all he did, as he said, was open some windows and call for aggiornamento (bringing things up to date).  This was the Pope who practiced authentic leadership and is a model for leadership in our time of chaos that is now. His immediate successor, Giovannai Battista Montini (Pope Paul VI), described John XXIII this way: “This holy old boy doesn’t realize what a hornet’s nest he’s stirring up.” (G. Weigel, First Things, June-July 2001). But John XXIII did know what he was stirring up and once John laid out his vision, Montini was as shocked as everyone else. 

When John XXIII was elected Pope in 1958, Dwight Eisenhower was half-way through his second term as president. Four years earlier, in June of 1954, had come the end of Joseph McCarthy’s ugly tyranny over the United States and its citizens. The “end” was the confrontation at Senate hearings between U.S. Army attorney, Joseph Welch and his nemesis, Senator Joseph McCarthy, the capstone of which was the long remembered question: “Until this moment, Senator, I never really gauged your cruelty or your recklessness…You have done enough. Have you no decency?” Up to this time, McCarthy had complete freedom to do and say whatever he wanted under the disguise of “ridding the country of Communist infiltration.” …In a July 30, 2019 “Response to President Trump,” the Episcopal Bishop of Washington DC, Mariann Budde and colleagues from the National Cathedral released a statement about the “racialized rhetoric” of President Trump and had this to say about Joseph McCarthy in a not-so-veiled reference to President Trump: ”[McCarthy] stoked the fears of an anxious nation with lies; destroyed the careers of countless Americans; and bullied into submissive silence anyone who dared criticize him.” (Washington National Cathedral, Have We No Decency? A Response to President Trump, July 30, 2019.)  

Does this sound familiar? It should. In any number of ways, Joseph McCarthy and Donald Trump are linked because Roy Cohen, McCarthy’s senate aide, advisor, and lawyer, mentored Donald Trump. Trump learned most every indecent and inhumane, cruel and manipulative, corrupt, immoral and unethical practice from Roy Cohen, including the fine art of deception and dissembling. Racism, sexism and narcissism are part of the mix. Donald Trump’s ugly scene with a Bible in front of Saint John’s Episcopal Church in Washington this week is the full embodiment of the person we knew him to be when he was elected in 2016.

And if we draw a line from Joseph McCarthy to Donald Trump with Roy Cohen in the middle, the years from 1954 to 2020 have brought progress surely in technology and science and in some ways in race relations, for example, but they have also brought us political disarray, several wars, violence of all kinds, stunning economic inequality, new levels of immorality, intensified consumerism, the violation of the earth and the air, racial and sexual discrimination, not to mention all kinds of bigotry, and, especially in these last four years, Xenophobia. Public education has eroded in quality and, some would say, in fairness, especially with the unfair access to resources and up-to-date facilities. Literacy (especially ethical and moral literacy) was overtaken by illiteracy, and, more and more, so much of what we do and see is grounded in ignorance. As much as we can say that all these diminishments took a long time to take shape, it is not as if we did not see them coming; and maybe, in our own actions or inactions, we even helped them along. And, together with the coronavirus, the crushing economic failures, the inadequacy of our health care system including medical insurance, the different forms of oppression imposed by the ruling political party and its president, and the number of murders committed by those whose job it is to protect everyone, the events of the last week have shown us that where we are now is even worse than we could have imagined.

So where and how does the “Good Pope” John XXIII come into the picture, especially since he sends us back to 1958? Where he comes into the picture is as a model of enlightened and courageous leadership with a clear sense of a world-wide institution, centuries old, that was desperately in need of renewal and transformation. This is the Pope whose leadership was grounded in what he believed about the Gospel’s recognition of equality and the dignity of every person, and who implored us to recognize that “We were all made in God’s image, and thus, we are all Godly alike.”

The public statements of many of our colleagues in the Episcopal Church over the last several days have shown us the power of using Gospel language to neutralize the “racialized rhetoric” of the President. This “calling out” is a very important step for our Church, and we should acknowledge, celebrate and build on it.

The story of Saint John XXIII is not about what he did in his full life, but about what he did in his last four years and seven months. Because he was elected to be a “place holder” for the next young, vigorous and more “Pope-like” candidate, expectations were very low. In fact, it was understood that John XXIII would leave everything in place, as they had been for at least four centuries. However, instead of serving as the “chair warmer” he was elected to be, this “holy old boy” called an Ecumenical Council, i.e. the Second Vatican Council.

The two immediate predecessors to Vatican II were (1) the First Vatican Council in 1869, and (2) the Council of Trent in 1545. The results of these Councils could be seen not as reforming, but as clarifying and affirming the Church as it was.  With the wisdom and grace of the Holy Spirit, with his remarkable instincts and qualities of leadership, and with his extraordinary gift for seeing things as they really were, John XXIII knew that Vatican II needed to be a world-wide ecumenical gathering, the goal of which  was to reform and, as it turned out, revolutionize the Roman Catholic Church. 

Let me use Saint Pope John XXIII’s own words to complete the picture I have attempted to present here. These are words from his best known Encyclical (Papal Letter), Pacem in Terris, published in April of 1963, two months before his death:

Man has the right to live. He has the right to bodily integrity and to the means necessary for the proper development of life, particularly food, clothing, shelter, medical care, rest, and finally, the necessary social services. In consequence, he has the right to be looked after in the event of ill health; disability stemming from his work; widowhood; old age; enforced unemployment; or whenever through no fault of his own he is deprived of the means of livelihood.

For us, as individual Christians in a community of believers, we should add a coda, as Presiding Bishop Michael Curry has urged us to do: [The Lord has told us], O mortal, what is good:  and what does the Lord require of [us] but to do justice, and to love kindness, and to walk humbly with [our] God?  (Micah 6: verse 8)

In these last treacherous and murderous days, we have been reminded of Martin Luther King’s declaration that a “riot is the language of the unheard.” The language of the unheard this week was loud and intense and compelling and surely has helped us know more clearly what we are called to do, every day, even if our leaders in Washington continue to fail, to anger and yes, to embarrass us. And today, in this reflection, we have Pope Saint John XXIII and the Prophet Micah to thank for reminding us of what it means to be truly human and to live our Christian lives responsibly.

Together, let us pray that we are all up to this call.

Amen.

—Father Peter Kountz