Free Pope John XXIII: The Good Pope by Wyatt North

Angelo Giuseppe Roncalli was born on November 25, 1881, the fourth of fourteen children, several of whom died in childhood. He was the eldest son of Giovanni Battista Roncalli and Marianna Mazzola Roncalli, who were poor tenant farmers. The family resided, as it had for hundreds of years, in the tiny farming village of Sotto il Monte (“Under the Mountain”), seven miles from the city of Bergamo in the Italian Alps. As Angelo would later put it, the family was poor in material goods but rich in faith.
     
    They lived meagerly in an extended-family household that included a large host of cousins—twenty-eight people altogether at the time Angelo was born. The bachelor great-uncle Zavario Roncalli presided as patriarch over the family, conducting nightly rosary and pious readings. The family was too poor for meat or bread and so usually subsisted on polenta. The two-story, 300-year-old farmhouse where they all lived had no running water or fireplaces. In winter, the farm animals were kept on the first floor, making their rising body warmth available to the people living in the upper story as had been done throughout the Mediterranean regions since biblical times.
     
    When Angelo was nine, they moved to a much larger, better farmhouse with eighteen rooms. Eventually, after many years, the family would rise from abject poverty to purchase that house and the small bit of land they farmed.
     
    Young Angelo, known at that age as Angelino, began his education at a one-room village schoolhouse with three benches, one for each grade. School was taught by the parish priest, Don (Father) Francesco Rebuzzini. One of the younger Roncalli brothers would later marvel in recollection that Angelo actually wanted to go to school. That difference between them, the brother surmised, was why he himself remained illiterate, while his brother had gone on to become pope.
     
    In this first stage of his education, Angelo so sufficiently distinguished himself that it cost him a beating. On one occasion, a visiting district supervisor of schools posed a trick question to the children: Which weighed more—a measure of iron or a measure of straw? Angelo was the only child to realize that there was no difference in the measurement, so “we beat him up,” recalled his childhood classmate. It was an environment in which excellence was viewed with suspicion and standing out provoked petty jealousies.
     
    When Angelo had gone as far as he could in the local school, Don Francesco convinced Giovanni to send his son to a nearby parish for Latin training from the priest there. The boy was taught Latin using Caesar’s Gallic Wars . He later jokingly estimated that for each page he learned, he earned one clout from the priest. Angelo was nearly ten when Don Francesco coaxed Giovanni into allowing his son to progress to a secondary school about five miles distant.
     
    Times were changing, the priest told the father; a boy with ability needed an education. At first, Angelo stayed near the school with other relatives, but his mother soon fetched him away from that squabbling environment, and he then had to walk the five miles over a mountain to school each day. He was so exhausted from the long walk each way that he was not able to learn well. In addition, the other students made fun of the country boy with his poor clothes and funny speech.
     
    Despite the boy’s poor performance at the secondary school, Don Francesco continued to champion him and won Angelo admission to the junior seminary in Bergamo, which had been founded by Saint Charles Borromeo. The year was 1892, and Angelo was not yet eleven years old. He struggled with math and some other subjects in Bergamo, but over time, he began to excel in his studies, particularly showing a predilection for history and theology.
     
    He was barely fourteen in 1895, when, probably at the behest of his teachers, he began to keep a spiritual journal, which he would continue throughout his lifetime. In it he