Pope John Xxiii - Rilegato

Cahill, Thomas

Rilegato

ISBN 10: 0670030570 ISBN 13: 9780670030576

Casa editrice: Viking Pr, 2002

Riassunto

The author's trademark blend of profound insight and extensive knowledge provides a fascinating history of the Catholic Church and the papacy by focusing on Angelo Giuseppe Roncalli as Pope John XXIII, who awed the world with the seminal and unprecedented change he brought about due to his concern for humankind. 35,000 first printing.

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L'autore

Thomas Cahill, former director of religious publishing at Doubleday, is the bestselling author of the Hinges of History series, which includes How the Irish Saved Civilization, The Gifts of the Jews, and Desire of the Everlasting Hills: The World Before and After Jesus.

Estratto. © Riproduzione autorizzata. Diritti riservati.

INTRODUCTION

"Toward a New Order of Human Relationships"

"IN THE DAILY EXERCISE of our pastoral ministry-and much to our sorrow-we must sometimes listen to those who, consumed with zeal, have scant judgment or balance," said John XXIII to the bishops of the world assembled in Saint Peter's Basilica as he opened the precedent-shattering Second Vatican Council (or Vatican II) in 1962. "To such ones the modern world is nothing but betrayal and ruin. They claim that this age is far worse than previous ages, and they rant on as if they had learned nothing at all from history-and yet, history is the great Teacher of Life....We feel bound to disagree with these prophets of doom who are forever forecasting calamity-as though the world's end were imminent. Today, rather, Providence is guiding us toward a new order of human relationships, which, thanks to human effort and yet far surpassing human hopes, will bring us to the realization of still higher and undreamed of expectations."

This was uttered with his accustomed warmth and serene joy by a short man with sensuous lips and a hooked nose set in a flat Italian peasant's face framed by elephantine ears, a fat old man with twinkling eyes and a seductively resonant voice, robed with such extravagant dignity as to underscore the comedy of his figure. The glimpse he offered of the pope's daily trials of patience in the midst of an overheated clerical atmosphere proved too much for his handlers, the little, anonymous men of the Vatican. As John went on to ask his audience for "a leap forward" (un balzo in John's original Italian text) in insight (penetrazione) into the Church's teaching and a new coat of paint (la formulazione del suo rivestimento) in which to clothe the old doctrines, the little men made plans to censor the pope's text, to clip from the official transcript here and to add there, in order to prevent scandal to the faithful and to gratify their own outraged sensibilities. But the original text, before they could get their hands on it, was, like so many things John said, unlike anything any pope had said before or would say since; and this is because John was unlike any other pope.

We would not remember John at all were it not for the office he occupied in the last five years of his life: bishop of Rome, successor to Peter the Fisherman, the leading figure among Jesus's apostles. From this unique position John was able to cast a pebble into the pond of human experience that has continued to reverberate in ever wider rings. To understand his crucial importance to the world's one billion Catholics, his remarkable influence on Christians everywhere, and his effect on human hopes and happiness, we must spend some time retracing the long and labyrinthine history of the papacy, which gave him his platform.

PART I

BEFORE JOHN

From Congregation to Church to
Standard of Orthodoxy

VATICAN PROPAGANDA notwithstanding, Peter was never "bishop of Rome." In the five narrative books with which the New Testament begins-the four gospels and the Acts of the Apostles-Peter is given prominence, a prominence that would later be interpreted as his "primacy" over the other bishops of the primitive Church. But the early Church communities had a congregational structure, like the synagogues from which they sprang. The word bishop (episkopos, or superintendent, in Greek) was at first interchangeable with the word elder (presbyteros, from which we derive our word priest) and did not signify rule over others. After the death of the apostles, who had been the chief witnesses to Jesus's life and teaching, and under the pressure of bizarre heresies and the consequent need to establish a voice of orthodoxy within each community, the Churches of the late first century began to single out an episkopos to take doctrinal charge of each local Church. The Christian community at Rome, however, seems not to have adopted this strategy till toward the middle of the second century. The first man who can be designated "bishop of Rome" with historical certainty is Anicetus, who stands eleventh in the Vatican's somewhat fanciful list of early "popes" and who served from 155 to his death c. 166, weakening considerably the "claim" of Peter, who died a hundred years earlier.

But Peter did die at Rome, crucified during the first widespread persecution of Christians-under the emperor Nero-and his bones surely lie beneath the high altar of Saint Peter's Basilica, beside which John XXIII stood to deliver his address of welcome to the council fathers. Rome's possession of these bones, along with those of the other great martyr of the primitive Church, Paul-a rabbi converted to the new form of Judaism that would become Christianity and a missionary of such overreaching devotion that he was belatedly given the title "apostle"-would become in the generation after Anicetus the foundation of the Roman Church's universal prominence.

By the time of Ireneus of Lyons, who wrote in the last quarter of the second century, Rome had become the pilgrimage center of the Christian world on account of its shrines to the two martyred apostles, who were now imagined to have founded the Roman Church by shedding their blood (though there were Christian communities at Rome prior to their arrival there), and Rome's bishop was seen-at least by some-as final arbiter in disputes throughout the Christian world. For Ireneus, as no doubt for many others, the Church of Rome was already "the great and illustrious Church," and "every [other] Church-that is, the faithful everywhere-must resort to this Church on account of its pre-eminent authority, in which the apostolic tradition has been preserved without interruption."

Thus, within 150 years of Jesus's crucifixion, within 75 years of the last of the New Testament writings, there was a well-attested tradition that the Church of Rome in the person of its bishop was the most reliable bulwark against doctrinal error and the last court of appeal in any matter that could not be settled locally. If the "Petrine succession"-the monarchical succession of the long line of popes from the apostle Peter-is little more than wish fulfillment, it must be admitted that the roots of the Roman bishopric are ancient and most venerable, springing from the soil of the post-apostolic age, the age in which the Church as a whole took on a form of organization it would preserve to our day.

After Anicetus, a Syrian, there came to the bishop's chair one Soter (c. 166-c. 174), a Latin-speaking Christian and probably a Roman aristocrat, then Eleutherius (c. 174-c. 189), a Greek, then Victor (189-98), an African, all pointing up the cosmopolitan, multicultural quality of the Roman Church, which enabled it to express an earnest ecumenical concern for all Christians, wherever they were. "[We] greet you...with deepest concern, keep[ing] watch over all who call on the Name of the Lord," a letter to the North African Churches put it, a letter written by a committee of Roman Christians during a vacancy in the episcopacy caused by the brutal imprisonment and death of bishop Fabian (235-36) during the persecution of the emperor Decius.

Though in this early period the Roman Church was often seen as the common standard of orthodoxy, its orthodoxy was too flexible for many less elastic Christians. The bishop of Rome was often criticized for being too easygoing toward heretics and too forgiving toward sinners. Though Victor made a great fuss trying to get all the Churches to observe Easter on the same date, even briefly excommunicating the Asian Churches that kept their own separate tradition, bishop Callistus (c. 217-222), far more typical of the Roman bishopric in this period, sent his more rigid contemporaries into tizzies by ordaining men who had been married more than once, allowing marriages between partners of different social classes, and welcoming everyone to the Eucharist, even those who had lapsed during persecution. His critics favored purer priests, segregation by economic class, and lifelong penance for public sin. If it is easy for us to see that Callistus was closer in spirit to the views of Jesus, his critics saw no such thing, any more than the critics of John XXIII would acknowledge that he was simply following the Gospel and they were not.

For all the honor and status accorded Rome in the Church's early centuries, it was never imagined as unique among Churches, only primus inter pares, first in honor among equals. Other Churches, especially those with ancient bishoprics (like Antioch, Ephesus, Corinth, Alexandria, and Carthage), behaved more or less as Rome did, sending letters of encouragement and admonishment to younger, less distinguished Churches, offering monetary support, excommunicating when necessary. Bishops of the older metropolitan Churches tended to be addressed as "papa" (or pope), a title that in the Western Church was used as a form of address to all bishops-and in parts of the East to all priests-and would not be reserved to the bishop of Rome till well into the eleventh century. But all the bishops were seen as successors to Jesus's apostles, sharing apostolic responsibility for all the Churches and sharing also the apostolic power, which was unitary and indivisible, because it descended ultimately from Jesus, the Way.

Nor was criticism a one-way street that could be employed only by a greater Church against a lesser. In the midst of a raging controversy about whether it was necessary to rebaptize penitents who had lapsed during persecution, the African Churches, gathered under their unrelenting metropolitan bishop Cyprian, "the pope of Carthage," condemned the more flexible position of Stephen, bishop of Rome, in three overwrought synods, accusing Stephen of "set[ting] himself up as a bishop of bishops" and "exercis[ing] the powers of a tyrant to force his colleagues into obedience." Stephen replied serenely that he was Peter, the living representative of the first Peter, to whom Jesus had promised: "You are Peter [Rock in the Greek of the New Testament] and upon this Rock will I build my Church." Here we have, midway through the third century,...

Su questa edizione

• Editore: Viking Pr
• Data di pubblicazione: 2002
• ISBN 10: 0670030570
• ISBN 13: 9780670030576
• Rilegatura: Copertina rigida
• Numero di pagine: 241