John XXIII

Biography

Angelo Giuseppe Roncalli was born in 1881 in Sotto il Monte, near Bergamo, one of thirteen children of a sharecropping family. He studied for the priesthood in Bergamo and Rome, completed a doctorate in theology, and was ordained in 1904. From 1905 he was secretary to the Bishop of Bergamo, Giacomo Radini-Tedeschi, and in the First World War he served in the Italian army as a medical orderly and chaplain.

In 1925 he was made an archbishop and sent to Bulgaria as the Holy See's apostolic visitor, later delegate. From 1934 he was apostolic delegate to Turkey and Greece, where during the Second World War he helped Jewish refugees escape Nazi persecution. He was nuncio to France from late 1944, and in 1953 Pius XII made him a cardinal and Patriarch of Venice.

Elected pope on 28 October 1958 at the age of 76, he was expected to be a caretaker but instead called the Second Vatican Council, which opened in October 1962. He enlarged and internationalised the College of Cardinals, reached out to other Christian churches and to the communist states of Eastern Europe, and offered to mediate between Kennedy and Khrushchev during the Cuban Missile Crisis.

He died of stomach cancer on 3 June 1963, before the council ended. Remembered as 'the Good Pope', he was beatified in 2000 and canonised in 2014.