Sunday, March 15, 2009

AS SEEN ON TV: POPE JOHN XXIII

Since it's a Lenten Sunday, I thought I might delve a bit into my faith for the "As Seen On TV" feature........

Blessed Pope John XXIII, born Angelo Giuseppe Roncalli (25 November 1881 – 3 June 1963), known as Blessed John XXIII since his beatification, was elected as the 261st Pope of the Roman Catholic Church and Sovereign of Vatican City on 28 October 1958. He called the Second Vatican Council (1962–1965) but did not live to see it to completion, dying on 3 June 1963, two months after the completion of his final encyclical, Pacem in Terris. He was beatified on 3 September 2000, along with Pope Pius IX, the first popes since Pope Pius X to receive this honor. His feast day is the 11th of October in the Roman Catholic Church, the day that Vatican II’s first session opened.

Following the death of Pope Pius XII in 1958, Roncalli was elected Pope, to his great surprise. He had even arrived in the Vatican with a return train ticket to Venice. After the long pontificate of Pope Pius XII, the cardinals chose a man who, it was presumed because of his advanced age, would be a short-term or "stop-gap" pope. John XXIII's personal warmth, good humor and kindness captured the world's affections in a way his predecessor, for all his great learning and personal holiness, had failed to do.

Far from being a mere "stop gap" Pope, to great excitement John called an ecumenical council fewer than ninety years after the Vatican Council. From the Second Vatican Council came changes that reshaped the face of Catholicism: a comprehensively revised liturgy, a stronger emphasis on ecumenism, and a new approach to the world.
[from Wikipedia]

Raymond Burr played Pope John XXIII in a 1973 TV movie, "Portrait: A Man Whose Name Was John".....


BCnU!
Toby O'B

No comments:

Post a Comment