A boy who missed his July exams passes in October

BERGAMO, October 5, 1892 AD — In the village of Sotto il Monte, near Bergamo, farm boys left school at ten. They went to work in the fields and help at home. Angelo Giuseppe Roncalli, who was later to become Saint John XXIII, was ten in the summer of 1892 AD. But he was not in the fields.

Roncalli’s parents were sharecroppers. They farmed fields that belonged to the Morlani counts of Bergamo. The family lived in a few rooms of a farmhouse built of stone and wood. He was their first son, born after three daughters.

The parish priest, Father Francesco Rebuzzini, baptised him on the evening of the day he was born. The boy learned the faith and the life of the Church from Father Rebuzzini.

Books instead of the fields

The village school taught only the first three classes. Roncalli was good at studying, and he loved it. He was serious about religion, too, so his parents decided he would stay in school instead of going to the fields.

First he needed extra lessons outside school, to finish his first years of schooling and start Latin. Then he could skip two years of the next school, the classical school, and start in its third year. In the summer of 1890 AD, two priests from Carvico spent some months getting him ready. They were friends of Father Rebuzzini.

In the school year that began in 1891 AD, Roncalli went to Celana as a day pupil. It was the nearest college with a classical school.

It was a hard year. He spent his days away from his family. The other boys were older than he was, and their families were better off. His few months of lessons had given him only the basics. For the first time in his life, he fell behind. When the final exams came round in July, he did not sit them.

A summer with the parish priest

All through the summer of 1892 AD, Roncalli studied hard with Father Rebuzzini. The priest taught him the things he had not managed to learn at Celana.

On October 5 and 6, Roncalli sat the entrance exams of the Seminary of Bergamo. The exams were for the third year of its classical school. That was 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 started at the seminary. He was not yet eleven. Two men helped his family pay for it: Father Rebuzzini and Count Giovanni Morlani. The count was one of the owners of the land the Roncallis farmed. Both men knew what the boy could do, and both believed he had a real call to be a priest.