Pope John XXIII, elected as an elderly caretaker, instead opened one of the great turning points of modern Christianity: the Second Vatican Council.
Angelo Giuseppe Roncalli was born on 25 November 1881 at Sotto il Monte, near Bergamo in northern Italy, the fourth of thirteen children of a family of sharecroppers. He was ordained priest in 1904 and served as secretary to the Bishop of Bergamo. In the First World War he served in the Italian army as a medical orderly and then as a chaplain.
Diplomat
From 1925 he served the Holy See abroad for almost thirty years: in Bulgaria, then from 1935 in Turkey and Greece, where during the Second World War he helped Jewish refugees, and from 1944 as nuncio in Paris. In 1953 he was made a cardinal and Patriarch of Venice, a pastoral post he loved.
Pope and Council
He was elected pope on 28 October 1958, aged 76, and took the name John. Within three months he announced an ecumenical council, saying the Church needed an aggiornamento, a bringing up to date. The Second Vatican Council opened on 11 October 1962; in his opening speech he spoke of the Church preferring "the medicine of mercy rather than that of severity".
His encyclicals Mater et Magistra (1961) and Pacem in Terris (1963), addressed to "all men of good will", spoke of human rights, peace and the common good during the Cold War. He also reached out warmly to other Christians and to the Jewish people.
He died of cancer on 3 June 1963, before the Council finished; his successor Paul VI saw it through to 1965. He was beatified in 2000 and canonised on 27 April 2014, together with John Paul II.