CANONISATION - JOHN XXIII

John XXIII

The short pontificate of John XXIII, from 1958 to 1963, was a turning point in the history of Church. With his charismatic nonchalance Pope John XXIII, called also the Good Pope, has ceased with old traditions and has bestowed to the Catholic Church a new image of not only papacy but also of Church. He has opened wide windows and doors of the Church to all who wanted to get to know it better from inside, especially to the separated Christians in East and West. Thus, the period of ecumenism and aggiornamento (modernisation) of the Church was initiated.
After the death of the Pope Pius XII, John was elected Pope on the fourth day of the conclaves, on 28 September 1958. At that time he was 77 and represented a total contrast to the strict and aristocratically mannered Pius XII.
Everybody has felt his human kindness and simplicity as well as his unconventionality in meeting people. He used to go out from Vatican, to mix with the population of Rome, he visited orphanages and hospitals, talked with prisoners and served liturgy with the vicars in roman suburbs. He convoked the Roman diocesan synod (1960), and then the General Council of the Church in Vatican, whose first phase (11 October – 8 December 1962) he brought to a successful end and announced its second phase (29 November. – 8 December 1963).
All Croatian bishops could attend the first session of the Second Vatican Council in 1962. It was the greatest council of the Catholic bishops in the history of the Catholic Church by that time. While the Council was taking place, the Council’s commissions in which also Croatian bishops participated, were active. Dragutin Nežić, the bishop of Poreč and Pula, was a counsellor of the Commission of the Lay Apostolate, and Alfred Pichler, the bishop of Banjaluka, was the member of the Liturgical Commission.
Pope John XXIII appointed Croatian bishops also as members of preparatory council's commissions which also meant a kind of recognition for the Church in Croatian areas. The archbishop of the bishopric of Zagreb, Franjo Šeper was nominated member of the Commission for the Discipline of the Sacraments and the archbishop of Split and Makarska while Frane Franić was nominated member of the Theological Commission.
Croatian bishops played an important role in discussion at the Council. So, Franjo Šeper talked about the freedom of faith and dialogue with non-believers and Frane Franić about a millennium old Slavic language in Roman liturgy, as well as about the necessity of founding the secretariat for the dialogue with non-believers. At the intervention of Petar Čule, the bishop of Mostar, the name of St. Joseph was introduced into the Roman canon of the mass, which particularly rejoiced the Pope John XXIII.
In their 13 centuries old Christian history, the Croats did not have in the hierarchy of the Catholic Church a man like Franjo Šeper, the archbishop of Zagreb, who would become such a close co-operator of even four popes: John XXIII (1958 – 1963), Paul VI (1963 – 1978), John Paul I (1978) and John Paul II (1978 – 2005) and who became also one of the most distinguished and influential dignitaries of the Catholic Church in the period after the Second Vatican Council. Pope Pius XII appointed him on 22 July 1954, at the proposal of the detained archbishop A. Stepinac, the titular archbishop coadjutor sedi datus of Zagreb, with all the rights of the residential bishop. Pope John XXIII appointed him on 5 March 1960 the metropolitan archbishop of Zagreb and on 28 May 1961, by the decision of the State Secretariat of the Holy See also the president of the then Yugoslav Bishop's Conference.
As the archbishop of Zagreb, during full six years before his appointment as the principal of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith on 8 January 1968, Franjo Šeper developed a vivid and successful religious, cultural and especially liturgical activity. He owes his advancement in the hierarchy of Church dignitaries to Pope John XXIII to whom he was a trustful friend.
Juraj Kolarić