439 - Journal Of a Soul

Journal Of a Soul
By Pope John XXIII
453 pp. New York, McGraw-Hill, 1965. $7.95.

Pope John died in the season of Pentecost two years ago this June. Well before his death he found time to go through the notebooks that contained his spiritual and ascetic jottings, especially during periodic retreats. The series of notes and recollections extends from his days as a seminarian beginning in 1895 and ends with an entry for September 15, 1962, within a month of the opening of his II Vatican Council. Pope John entrusted the editing of the notebooks to his secretary, Don Loris Capovilla. The original text was to be unaltered except for a few stylistic changes and notations.

As the Pope read over his earliest entries, he remarked to Capovilla: "I was a good boy, innocent, somewhat timid. I wanted to love God at all costs" (p. xvii). Only the last twenty-two pages of the English edition of the journal were composed after the Holy Father knew that henceforth his jottings would be eventually accessible to the reading public. Yet these last pages were written in much the same manner as what preceded and include the homely fact that the master of the sacred palace, at a certain point, began to make daily visits to help the Diarist "practice speaking correct Latin" (p. 322) in case it should be necessary for him to depart from prepared texts in presiding during the impending meetings in the Council. Although from his papal eminence looking back, Pope John could see the strong element of "self-love" in the spiritual struggle recorded, he was also pleased to say emphatically "[M]y soul is in these pages" (ibid.). Indeed, as early as 1902 he had given to the series of diaries their present title, Journal of a Soul.

In permitting the publication of his most private papers, Pope John recognized that the collection of spiritual diaries might be "useful to historians" (p. xvii). Such an intimate document from the pen of a Pope and covering nearly a lifetime is indeed unparalleled. But of external history or even of ordinary biographical detail one has only glimpses except as the devoted editor supplies a chronological frame, identifies a few of the allusions to persons, places, and writings, and then adds to the journal proper four letters and a score of prayers and related pieces. Actually these are not documents that an historian or even a

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biographer would be able to make much of apart from the more official records relating to Angelo Roncalli, successively seminarian, episcopal secretary, military chaplain, papal diplomat, cardinal patriarch, and Pope. For they are, in fact, the record of the inner itinerary of a soul with relatively few references to the ecclesiastical or political countryside through which the would-be holy wayfarer was passing. Moreover, the spiritual exercise, the ascetic discipline, and the recurrent examination of con. science are conventional, no doubt typical of the devout seminarian and priest of his region and period (especially up to Angelo Roncalli's appointment as papal representative in Bulgaria in 1925).

Yet clearly, Pope John was a "saint" both in the Scriptural-providential sense of one in whom a mighty work of God was enacted-as in a David or a Daniel, a Loyola or a Luther-and also in the stricter sense of personal sanctification and devotion-as in a Francis of Assisi or a Francis de Sales. To be sure, the Journal of Angelo Roncalli by itself, as it would be generally agreed, does not have the character, structure, or consistently the substance of a treatise on, or a rehearsal of, the devout life of the kind to be read and then reread for the nurture of one's personal spirituality. But once the reader of the journal gives up the expectation of perusing the Confessions of a modern St. Augustine or of studying the magisterial Introduction to the Devout Life of a papal St. Francis de Sales, then an entirely different kind of humane and religious expectation and even excitement attends the perusal of the yellowed, dog-eared papers strangely transformed into print. For in our hands now are the jottings and occasional musings of a man who throughout his life sought to imitate Christ within the ecclesiastical and devotional patterns and molds about him and who, by "the mysterious decree of Providence" (p. 310), became at length in his community of faith the vicar of "Christ, the Rabbi, the Master, the only true Teacher of all ages and peoples" (p. 311) in an "unfailing pontifical religious monarchy" (p. 256). With mounting fascination, we see how this initially undistinguishable person continues in the same style of self-scrutiny and devout meditation after he becomes Pope.

As we turn the pages of the Journal, it is as though we were witnessing, as in a time-lapse film of successive stages of botanical growth, the swelling and unfolding of the simple mustard seeds of Scriptural parable into that gigantic mustard tree in whose branches the nations and the churches like birds might find their lodging.

From the theological and ecclesiastical eminence of the papacy, for which Pope John seemed to be prepared-for "one must always be ready for the Lord's surprise moves" (p. 299)-the Diarist-Wayfarer in "daring simplicity" (p. 299) continued his self-scrutiny, his reflections on impend-

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ing suffering and death, and his meditation on the mystery of the imitation of Christ. In one who was also ecclesiastically the vicar of Christ, every phrase of self-reflection has its poignancy and potency: "Vicar of Christ? … I, the humble child of Battista and Mariana Roncalli, two good Christians to be sure, but so modest and humble! Yet this is what I must be; the Vicar of Christ" (p. 315). Imitation of Christ in his suffering rather than in his pontifical ruling continued to be for the Supreme Pontiff his instinctive explanation of "the purpose and divine vocation" to which he had been summoned (p. 310). He felt that he was "to work and suffer with Christ" for the good of the Church (p. 311). Precisely as Supreme Pontiff he prayed for "[p]erfect readiness to live or die, like St. Peter and St. Paul, and to endure all, even chains, suffering, anathema and martyrdom, for Holy Church and for all souls redeemed by Christ" (p. 307), as though he thought his "evangelical simplicity" might carry him too far!

One can trace through the journal the pious identification of the heart of the Diarist with the suffering and loving Heart of his Saviour. From his boyhood, as the Diarist says near the beginning and again in recollection as Pope, he had been greatly devoted to the cult of the Sacred Heart and the Most Precious Blood, initially under the influence of his great-uncle Zavario (pp. 146-149, 307). Throughout the Journal references abound to the cult: to Longinus whose spear pierced the side of Christ, to St. Augustine and St. Bernard who interpreted this tradition of the exposed heart, and to the Visitandine nun St. Margaret Mary Alacoque and to St. John Eudes who together gave shape to the present-day devotional practices of the cultus. The Diarist, accordingly, links the cultus of the Sacred Heart with devotion to the Blessed Sacrament, which he was after a certain point privileged to keep in his own domicile; and at one point he writes in rapture of the "Sacred Heart, throbbing mysteriously behind the Eucharistic veils" (p. 148). Midway in his spiritual development Angelo Roncalli formulates exactly what this cultus meant to him: "To succeed in my apostolate I will recognize no other school than that of the divine Heart of Jesus: 'Learn from me, for I am gentle and lowly in heart' (Matthew 11: 29)" (p. 194). After he became Pope, he addressed Jesus "whose Vicar on earth I am called" (p. 306): "Hold me closely, and near to your heart, letting mine beat with yours" (P. 311).

Although the extreme language of approximation to Christ in imitative suffering and charity will appear strange to the non-Catholic reader of the Journal, the close relationship between the Diarist's devotion to the Sacred Heart and the intensification of his own ever broadening charity in "holy simplicity and love" (pp. 271, 274, 279, 299) cannot be

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doubted even when, as Pope, he had somehow to blend his wonted imitation of the suffering Christ with the contemplation of his new vicarial role as Supreme Pastor of the flock, pondering the "mystery of intimate love between Jesus and his Vicar" (p. 317).

"The Journal," remarks Guilio Bevilacqua, in a perceptive meditation following the editor's loving preface, "records constant, one might almost say, obstinate growth, in step with the very slow rhythm of nature and grace" (p. xxvi).

Although Pope John was born with an unusual temperament inclined "towards compliance and a readiness to appreciate the good side of people and things, rather than to criticize and pronounce harsh judgments" (p. 271), the ecumenical vision and embrace had to go through successive stages of enlargement. One is once more grateful that the serene confidence in God's workings in him and in his Church was such that the Diarist-Wayfarer felt no hesitation about allowing to be printed all his earlier and more conventional Catholic views about Jews, Moslems, the Protestants, and the Orthodox (pp. 157, 210, 228, 239 ff., 276).

As for his dislike of certain kinds of papal diplomacy-"for an ecclesiastic, diplomacy (so-called!) must be imbued with a pastoral spirit" (p. 282; cf. pp. 208 f., 228, 271)-he will not have been sorry for having very early gone on record in favor of a more "evangelical" and a less "triumphalist" approach: "For some time past I have cultivated simplicity, which comes easily to me, cheerfully defying all those clever people who, looking for the qualities required in a diplomat of the Holy See, prefer the outer covering to the sound, ripe fruit beneath. And I keep true to my principle which seems to me to have a place of honour in the Sermon on the Mount: blessed are the poor, the meek, the peacemaker, the merciful, … the suffering and the persecuted" (p. 275).

Pope John may well have taken satisfaction also in his occasional statement as a Diarist about the evils of nationalism, secularism, and war. He had a deep sense of "the terrible sanctions" of history (p. 260). In his meditation near Istanbul in 1940 "on the mourning of the nations" he had observed with fine distinction and awed compassion: "When this law [of life, alike for the souls of men and for nations] is violated, terrible and merciless sanctions come automatically into action. No state can escape. To each its hour. It is willed not by God but by men, nations, and states, through their representatives. Earthquakes, floods, famines and pestilence are applications of the blind laws of nature, blind because nature herself has neither intelligence nor freedom. War instead is desired by men, deliberately, in defiance of the most sacred laws. That is what makes it so evil" (p. 239).

The reader of the Journal is scarcely into the notebooks before he is

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sensible of the extraordinary confidence of the Diarist-Wayfarer in his own worth and the recurrent premonition that some great suffering, some great task lay ahead of him. The Diarist seems to have been uncommonly conscious of death, noting signs of old age decades before the opening of even his more important diplomatic assignments. His interest in food, in newspapers (later, the radio), his fondness for what he repeatedly disparages as idle "chatter" are all traits of the later Pope John which any reader can recognize in their earlier and less august versions! But what stands out as the chief trait of his evolving personality was, as he himself later identified it, self-love and his having always to cope with an instinctive aversion to being esteemed of little worth (pp. 223, 279). Consequently, a major focus in any reading of his journal is the gradual transformation of that self-love into charity and magnanimity and, as it were, the divinely subversive fulfillment of this ambition in his election to the papacy. Purified at length of self-love in utter obedience to the Ruler of the Church and inwardly subdued by the quest for the peace of Christ (cf. p. 206), Roncalli came to recognize that charity, which was for him "the virtue which comes most easily" (p. 305), had always to be clearly distinguished from benignant weakness (pp. 274, 290). Oboedientia et pax was in his episcopal and papal coat of arms; "Watch and pray" became his practical formula for prudent simplicity: "Love prays: the intelligence keeps watch" (p. 310). Although he instinctively recognized that "watchful kindness, patience and forbearance get one along much farther and more quickly than severity and the rod" (p. 287), still he occasionally questioned himself as to whether he was not temperamentally "tempted to indulge" his peaceable instincts in preference for a quiet life "rather than risk making precarious moves" (p. 287).

After his transfer as papal representative from Sofia to a double assignment in Athens and Istanbul, when the Diarist felt that he had surely entered upon the "last, possibly brief period" of his life, he recorded in 1940: "I feel something more mature and authoritative in me in relation to all that interests and surrounds me" (p. 237). The reader senses this, too; and when, much later, about a year in fact before his elevation to the papacy, the Diarist writes that "the Lord Jesus has in store for me, before I die, for my complete mortification and purification . . . some great suffering and affliction of body and spirit," the reader is easily confirmed in his impression that he has been privileged to follow in exceptional proximity the itinerary of the Diarist-Wayfarer being prepared for the day when as Pope he would come to regard the whole world as his family (p. 299), disciplined in utter obedience to the canons of the devout priestly code to be the providential conduit for the infusion into them and into the whole Church of a new spirit. As Pope he was,

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indeed, prepared to go much further and to "apply the balm of sweetness to the wounds of mankind" (p. 308) "in a gesture of universal fatherhood" (p. 302).

George H. Williams
Harvard University
Cambridge, Massachusetts