Angelo Roncalli, ten, passes seminary exams after a summer with his priest

BERGAMO, October 5, 1892 AD — Angelo Giuseppe Roncalli, who was later to become Saint John XXIII, passed the entrance examinations of the Seminary of Bergamo on October 5 and 6, and was admitted to the third year of its classical school. He is ten years old, and his parents are sharecroppers at Sotto il Monte. Three months ago, at the bishop’s college of Celana, he did not turn up for his final examinations.

The Roncallis farmed fields owned by the Morlani counts of Bergamo, and lived in a few rooms of a stone-and-wood farmhouse called Palazzo, in the hamlet of Brusicco. The boy was the first son of Giovanni Battista Roncalli and Marianna Mazzola, born after three daughters.

The parish priest, Father Francesco Rebuzzini, had known the boy all his life. He baptised him in the church of Santa Maria on the evening of the day he was born, and gave him his First Communion in the same church in March 1889 AD. The boy’s deep grounding in the faith and the life of the Church came from Father Rebuzzini.

Sotto il Monte lies about 16 km south-west of Bergamo, and its school teaches only the first three classes. At ten, the sons of peasant families there leave school to work in the fields and help at home. Roncalli was the exception. In his three years at the village school he had shown a marked gift for study and a love of it, and he was serious about religion, so his parents decided he would stay in school instead of going to the fields. They arranged private lessons to finish his elementary schooling and start him on Latin, so that he could enter the classical school in its third year. The lessons began in the summer of 1890 AD, when two priests of Carvico who were friends of Father Rebuzzini spent some months preparing the boy for classical studies.

In the school year that began in 1891 AD, Roncalli went as a day pupil to Celana, the nearest college that taught the classical school. It was a hard year for him. He spent his days away from his family, among boys who were older than he was and came from families of higher standing. The few months of lessons at Carvico had given him only the basics, not enough for the Celana course, and for the first time in his life he fell behind in his studies. When the final examinations came round in July, he did not sit them.

Through the summer of 1892 AD he studied hard under Father Rebuzzini, working on the gaps Celana had shown up. On October 5 and 6 he sat the Seminary of Bergamo’s examinations for the third year of the classical school, the same class whose finals he had not sat at Celana. He passed, and the place was his.

A month later, on November 7, he went on to enter the seminary, before his eleventh birthday. His family could send him because two men helped with the cost: Father Rebuzzini, and Count Giovanni Morlani, one of the owners of the land the Roncallis farmed. Both knew what the boy could do, and both believed he had a real call to the priesthood.