Cardinal Roncalli leaves Venice for the conclave, expecting to come home

VENICE, October 12, 1958 AD — Cardinal Angelo Giuseppe Roncalli, the Patriarch of Venice and the future Saint John XXIII, left the city by train for Rome today. A large crowd of Venetians went with him to the station. He is seventy-six, and he expects to be back at his work here once the cardinals have chosen a new Pope.

Pope Pius XII has died, and the cardinals of the Church are gathering in Rome for the conclave that will elect his successor. Cardinal Roncalli is one of those electors.

Cardinal Roncalli came to Venice on March 15, 1953 AD, after almost thirty years in the Holy See’s diplomatic service. He had spent the last eight of them as the Pope’s ambassador in Paris. His parents were sharecroppers at Sotto il Monte, near Bergamo, and on the day he arrived he told the Venetians: “I come from humility, and I was brought up in a contented and blessed poverty that asks for little.” In his first homily in St. Mark’s, Cardinal Roncalli told the congregation: “Do not look on your Patriarch, then, as a politician or a diplomat; look for the priest, the pastor of souls, who carries out his office among you in the name of the Lord.”

The Venetians soon called him la quiete dopo la tempesta (the calm after the storm). His predecessor, Patriarch Agostini, had been an austere and reserved man. After all those years abroad, Cardinal Roncalli at last had the work he had wanted since the day of his ordination: a pastor’s work, close to his priests and his people.

He went about the city on foot. Every so often he walked through the streets and the campielli (little squares) with only his secretary beside him. He stopped to talk with people he knew and people he did not, tried out the Venetian dialect and made friends with the gondoliers. He gave the sacrament of Confirmation in the parishes in person, visited the sick in the nursing homes and went to see the workers at Porto Marghera. In five and a half years he set up about thirty new parishes. A Venetian newspaper quoted one man as saying that the Patriarch “received even the last of the ragged beggars without any fuss,” and that he “had a whole library in his head.”

Between 1954 AD and 1957 AD Cardinal Roncalli visited every parish in the diocese. He closed those visits with a diocesan synod, a formal meeting of the diocese’s clergy, held from November 25 to 27 last year.

Cardinal Roncalli left today with “the calm of always,” his secretary, Monsignor Loris Capovilla, wrote. He had been correcting the printed proofs of the synod’s official record when the call to Rome came. Before earlier journeys, to Lebanon and to Spain, he had left his personal testament out where it would be found. This time he did not set it out, and he took no personal papers with him at all. He saw Rome as a short break before he came home to Venice. After years of travelling the world, he believed Venice would be his final home and resting place.

At the station the crowd called out after him at the top of their voices, wishing him a good journey and good work. Fifty-five years earlier the city had seen another Patriarch of Venice, Cardinal Giuseppe Sarto, the future Saint Pius X, leave for the conclave of 1903 AD. He never came back. The biographer Piero Gheddo judged from the size of the crowd that the Venetians seemed to sense this Patriarch would not come back either.

Sixteen days later, on October 28, the cardinals elected Cardinal Roncalli Pope, and he took the name John XXIII. He did not come back to Venice as its Patriarch.