Transcript of CS#84: Patricia Treece Pope John XXIII Joyful Pope and Father to All

Transcript of Interview with Patricia Treece about Pope John XXIII Joyful Pope and Father to All. This interview and others like it can be found at http://www.catholicspotlight.com

Listen Now to the audio version of the show.

Pope John XXIII Joyful Pope and Father to All is available at The Catholic Company.
http://www.catholiccompany.com/catholic-books/1002656/Meet-John-XXIII-Joyful-Pope-Father-to-All/

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Chris Cash:  This is the Catholic Spotlight, the podcast where we talk about what’s new, cool, and exciting in the Catholic marketplace.  I’m your host, Chris Cash, director of eCommerce from catholiccompany.com, your source for all your Catholic needs.

Chris Cash:  And today in the Spotlight, we have Patricia Treece, author of Meet John XXIII: Joyful Pope and Father to All.  Welcome, Patricia!

Patricia Treece:  Thank you.

Chris Cash:  So Patricia, we were talking a little bit earlier and you were just so bubbling over with enthusiasm about John the XXIII that it got me excited and I hope that we can convey that to all of our listeners just what an exciting Pope John XXIII was.  Can you tell us, first off, just tell us a little bit about how John XXIII fits in to history of this Church and what his big role was in the recent history.

Patricia Treece:  Well, he’s really known for three things.  First of all, of course, he called the Second Vatican Council and it has had a tremendous affect on the Church as most people are aware.  He was also the first Pope to be widely recognized and really loved outside of the Church because of his own love for the whole human family that he developed as the first Pope who had actually lived among Muslims and orthodox Christians and secular post Christians and he had worked successfully with all of these different kinds of people as well as with Jews and atheists and Protestants, both when he was a young priest and during his long years in the Church’s diplomatic service.  For instance, he was the first Pope in 500 years to receive England’s Protestant Archbishop of Canterbury at the Vatican.  He was the first Pope ever to address an encyclical not just to the faithful Catholics but to all people of good will and finally, he is known for his rescue of thousands of Jews during World War II when he was stationed in Turkey which was a neutral country and he has been known as the Pope for immediately dropping references to the perfidy of Jews from the Church’s Holy Week rites and he set in motion every route towards Catholic-Jewish understanding that’s taken twice since his death and recently, he was actually proposed by Jewish people for official being listed as one of the righteous Gentiles for his work during World War II.  So he’s got a secure place in history for those three reasons alone.

Chris Cash:  And he was also known as being quite humorous, I believe as well.

Patricia Treece:  Oh yes, he was a man with tremendous wit and that’s unusual because the popes before him, they might have privately had a sense of humor but they didn’t often feel that their papal dignity permitted them to continue that.  But even when he was pope, John remained a man…he was very warm and unpretentious, a happy person and he had this wonderful sense of humor.  One time, he overheard a woman when he was pope saying, “Boy is he ugly.”  And he turned to her and he said, “You know, the conclave, madam was not a beauty contest.”  And he was known for, before he became pope for many things that he said.  Once he was in dinner where there were some women who were wearing very low-cut gowns and someone leaned over and asked him was he terribly scandalized by this big scandal and he said, “Oh no, there’s no scandal.  Nobody’s looking at them anyway.  They’re all too busy looking at me to see how I’m taking it.”

Chris Cash:   I can relate to that.

Patricia Treece:  Yeah.  Well, there are many other wonderful memories that people have had of his humor but it was just the sort of thing that just bubbled up in the man.  He was blessed from birth with a great personality which of course, was made greater by this, the deeper Christian life of his family.

Chris Cash:  Now before the interview, you were talking with me about some of the stuff that had to be removed from the book and it seems like a great place to just at least bring it out a little bit here.  Can you tell me about some of his family life and his attachment to his family that didn’t quite make it into the book, some background for helping to form him in the way he is.

Patricia Treece:  Yes, thank you.  I appreciate that opportunity and I would like to say to the listeners that it wasn’t removed for any dark reason.  It was removed just because today with the economy not being so great; my publishers wisely decided that we needed to keep the book at a manageable price.  So Meet John XXIII:  Joyful Pope and Father to All is not an expensive book.  And so, hopefully, this material on his childhood will appear in another way but he was born into a family of peasant sharecroppers in Northern Italy and these were people who were desperately poor.  They were so poor in fact that they couldn’t afford bread.  They saw meat maybe once or twice a year.  They went barefoot a lot of the time saving their shoes so they would last longer.  It was extreme poverty and yet the parents worked very, very hard as sharecroppers to get a living for the family and people had large families and were grateful for large families because more hands to work was considered a blessing and John was the fourth child born to his parents and the first son and that put him in line because his father was the oldest son of his father to be when he grew up, the head of the family.

And that made him rather special but he grew up one of twenty children because the sharecroppers as an extended family.  There were about 32 people in the big sharecropper’s house.  They didn’t own it.  It just went as part of the deal.  So he was raised with, ten in his family of children and ten children in another family, relatives, cousins that lived with them.  And I think this is part of why he grew up to be such a convivial person.  He got along so well with people.  He had had practice from the time he was born and being part of a group.  But his parents were outstanding Christians and his grandfather and great uncle who had lived with the family.  The great-uncle was the head of the family as the oldest male of his generation, were also really saintly people and had a great influence on John.  Many years later he said that he had forgotten a lot of what he learned in books but he would never forget the lessons and charity and love and mutual forbearance and forgiveness that he learned at home.

Chris Cash:  Okay, now let’s unpack some of the three reasons that you gave earlier for why John XXIII is going to be so well-loved and remembered.  The first reason you gave was his ecumenism and his living with the people.  So can we talk just a little more about some of his experiences living abroad and living with the Muslims, with the Jews, and with the non-Catholics.

Patricia Treece:  Yes, you know, that was of course forming him to be this new kind of pope, not that there was anything wrong with the popes before but the times needed someone who could really reach out to the world and that came about because he was the first pope, as I said, to have actually lived among all these people.  Most popes lived in Italy.  Most of them were, of course, Italian until John and they only knew other Catholics and they only knew in an intimate way, people from their own country but John was sent first to Bulgaria.  Bulgaria was an orthodox Christian country that was very anti-Catholic.  The orthodox remembered the Crusades and they remembered, they split as if it had been yesterday between orthodox Christianity and Catholic Christianity and he had to learn to be a minority, what it felt like to be rejected, to be hated for his religion, that he actually sometimes be in peril of bodily harm.  So this was a tremendous experience for him.  He also learned to practice what he called the diplomacy of brotherly love and to love these people and to try to bring them to be less frightened and less angry towards Catholicism and the Pope and Italians.  So that was a very important part of his development.  But then he was sent to Muslim Turkey and the Muslims were openly anti-Christian and one of their government representatives later said, “We did everything we could to thwart this man.”  And yet the same representative ended up saying that they considered him one of their own and actually when John was elected pope, even though there were no diplomatic relations and he had never been officially recognized as the Pope’s representative when he was in Turkey but the Turks immediately not only sent congratulations but they sent a delegation to the Vatican because they went so far sometimes, some of them as to call John the first Turkish Pope.

So he had really made inroads just by wearing away at the prejudices towards Christians and towards Catholics by his warmth, his humor, his good nature, and his letting them see over and over that he valued them as children of God.  Then he was also stationed part time in Greece where again, there was tremendous hatred of the Catholics.  The Greeks too remembered the Crusades plus during his time there, the Greeks were invaded by Italy.  So he was not only suspect as part of the foreign occupying forces but as a Catholic and as an Italian who had been part of the Crusades even though this was hundreds of years later.  And he also there did tremendous good works to help the Greeks.  There was a famine during World War II and John pulled out all the stops to help the Greek people, went to the Pope, got money from the Pope to try to bring in food.  Actually, he went to the Muslims.  The Greeks and the Turks were hereditary enemies and yet he went to the Muslim Turks to raise money to help the children of the Greek Orthodox and managed to do so which is a tremendous point for what kind of person he was, that he could enemies to help each other just by his own goodness.

Chris Cash:  Okay, we’re going to take a break here to hear from our sponsor but we’ll be back in a minute to talk more with Patricia Treece about Meet John XXIII.  This is the Catholic Spotlight.

Chris Cash:  And we’re back on the Catholic Spotlight with Patricia Treece and we’re talking about John XXIII, one of the great popes of recent times.  Of course, I think pretty much all the popes of recent times have been remembered for doing some pretty great things so not to downplay any of the others but…

Patricia Treece:  No, indeed they have all…we’ve been blessed, really blessed with our 20th century and 21st century popes.  I would like to add…

Chris Cash:  We’ve certainly faced a lot…they’ve all faced many world crises, I think, it’s part of what has propelled them into that line of greatness as well.

Patricia Treece:  Yes, definitely and you know, that last thing I wanted to mention about your question in his last couple of posts, John also had to deal with many people who were atheists and who were kind of part of that post World War II God-is-dead movement and yet he again made many staunch friends with people who atheists or agnostics or who were anti-Catholic politically as communists, socialists, other political parties in Europe.  So he had this amazing ability to approach people cognizant of their human dignity as God’s children, treat them respectfully as people even if being very honest and upfront about his difference with their ideas and this, I think also was what made him so greatly loved as Pope.

Chris Cash:  Now, another thing that had cemented his place in history was the work he did in saving the Jews during World War II so can we talk a little bit more about the specifics of what happened there?

Patricia Treece:  Well, as I had mentioned, he was in Turkey which was a neutral country and many Jewish people fleeing for their lives were trying to get of course to Palestine and if they could get into a neutral country like Turkey that would be a big help.  John facilitated that in many ways.  He tried to help through his contacts in Greece, through his contacts in Bulgaria, and through other papal diplomats that he knew in places like Romania and Hungary and so on.  Just to mention one thing, he went to the King of Bulgaria, this orthodox king and persuaded him to help the Jews and this was amazing because out of fear of the communists who were trying to take over Bulgaria and would take it over after World War II, the king of Bulgaria had had to ally himself with the Nazi side because the Russians had allied with the so-called allies which is the United States and England and so on.  And yet, he persuaded King Boris to risk offending the Nazis who were his bulwark against the communists.  He was really caught between the rock and a hard place, this good Christian king, but he stepped up and he facilitated the passage of many Jewish Bulgarians and Jews of other kinds who had gotten into Bulgaria safely onto freedom.  So that was just a typical thing and then in Turkey, John again amazingly went to the Nazi representative and got him a German Catholic to help save 24,000 Jews and including a boatload of Jewish children who were scheduled to have that vessel go directly into a port where they would have all been taken by the Nazis and undoubtedly murdered.

Chris Cash:  Now, have we had the same view of John XXIII since his death as those who knew him as a contemporary or has it changed any?

Patricia Treece:  Well, I think our view has changed since his death in 1963 and I hope that my book Meet John XXIII:  Joyful Pope and Father to All will be an eye-opener for people who still haven’t given up some old misconceptions.  For instance, after his death and after the finish of the Vatican Council which he was able to open and participate in the first session but was not there for the rest of it, some people blamed John when the Church turned away from Latin and from devotion to the saints and to the Blessed Virgin Mary.  They didn’t know that Pope John himself loved all three.  He loved Latin, read it for pleasure.  He was devoted to the saints and he was devoted to the Blessed Virgin Mary.  He even did an encyclical on her and his other writings on her were published after his death in a book.  So he was dead before any of these things that they blamed him for happened but the liberals too, so-called liberals.  I hate to divide the Church into conservatives and liberals.  I don’t in the book and I don’t in my own mind but people who didn’t know John after his death, tried to draw John as they imagined him and some of them thought that because he was so ecumenical, that he would approve watering down differences between the faiths.  But John’s ecumenism was always based on, he himself said, “Charity, charity, charity and gentle but honest representation of the truth.”  So he never watered down what he believed or what Catholics believed.  He just didn’t condemn others for their beliefs.

Chris Cash:  And what was his biggest weakness as a person?

Patricia Treece:  Oh gosh, like all of us, he had a number of weaknesses.  I would say that probably one of the biggest ones was that he was considered too soft.  He was not a personality that enjoyed conflict.  Instead he was made for harmony.  He was made to bring people together and so he was criticized many times in his life that he didn’t lay down the law.  He didn’t force people to do the right thing.  When he was patriarch of Venice which was his last post before he became pope, he was criticized there because for instance, he didn’t immediately excommunicate a priest who was not doing what he should but he kept trying to work with the man.  Now eventually, the man turned his life around, thanks to John but others would have just had John excommunicate him and defrock him and kick him out right away.  So that was one of his weaknesses.

Chris Cash:  Although in that case, it seemed like a strength.

Patricia Treece:  Yeah, well you know, he would listen to all these criticisms and he himself wondered, in his private notes whether he should be speaking up more but he continued to follow the golden rule, “Don’t say to others what you wouldn’t like said to yourself” and he tried to lead by example and by love.  But finally, he concluded.  He said, “Well, if God abrades me about this, I’m just going to say to Him, You shouldn’t have sent Your Son to set me such a bad example.”  So that was a weakness.  When he was young, he was ambitious but he beat that down with his determination that he was going to be God’s man and not his own man.  He had a tendency like many of us, to take on too much.  It wasn’t enough to just do his job and his job was always a big job and time-consuming and many faceted.  He would take on all these extra things just because he wanted to help people and again he was soft.  It was hard for him to say no.  When he was Nuncio, that’s the papal delegate in Paris, he took on roughly 12 special occasions beyond his duties each month so that’s one every two or three days and many of them meant he had to travel long distances to preside at something or be present when there was say a natural disaster like a flood or an earthquake.  He was rushing there, never about himself but always to see what the Pope could do.  He was the papal representative, remember, to help these people.  Another of his weaknesses which many people share, he was a stress eater.  If you’ve seen pictures of John XXIII, he was fat and that was a weakness.  He tried to diet but he was unable many times to have any control on over what he ate.

Chris Cash:  He was just under too much stress, obviously.

Patricia Treece:  He was under so much stress and he was a diplomat.  He had to go to meals.  For instance, one meal that was given for him when he came to Paris was 30 courses!  Can you imagine?  And of course, they were diplomats…

Chris Cash:  I hope there were small.

Patricia Treece:  Yeah, you hope they were small but if he didn’t try everything or if he said, “Oh, I’m sorry, I’m on a diet.  I only want two courses.”  That would have been a diplomatic faux pas.  You couldn’t do that.  And then much of the time when he wasn’t caught in diplomatic meals, he was on a trip or something and he just had to eat catch-as-catch-can and we all know that that’s not the best food but he definitely, I believe, reacted out of stress.  Now the Archbishop retired now who was not an Archbishop at the time and was John’s personal secretary said that he never saw John over eat and that he thinks that it’s wrong to say that John was a stress eater but obviously, you don’t put on as much weight as John did if you don’t ever over eat.  But I think it’s wonderful that God left him that particular weakness because in our day, this is such a problem for people who become bulimic or anorexic, who feel that they can’t be loved if they’re not skinny.  John was one of the most greatly loved popes of all time and he was fat.  I think this also is a comfort and a consolation and perhaps an inspiration to people who are heavy that they can be loved as they are.  I’m not saying that for health that people shouldn’t try to lose weight.  John tried too but his schedule and his inability to get exercise for many years because his time wasn’t his own, didn’t let him do that.  Well, if you can’t succeed, at least you can know that there was a fat pope.  He was a wonderful person, a holy person.  He is now beatified; Blessed John XXIII and maybe that will be inspiring to you whether you’re too fat or too thin.

Chris Cash:  I’m just imagining him taking his audiences with the bishops and doing them on matching treadmills next to each other.  It probably wouldn’t have worked very well, I’m sure.

Patricia Treece:  Probably not.

Chris Cash:  Well, thank you very much, Patricia for coming on our show and sharing with us about John XXIII.  Was there anything in closing you wanted to say to our listeners?

Patricia Treece:  I would just like to say that John is a person just like so many of us.  You know, at times, he was far away from home and was lonely.  He had pull of family demands as the oldest son versus his job demands.  He had to work with people who didn’t like him sometimes.  There were difficult bosses.  He suffered sometimes from insecurity, after all, he was peasant-born.  He had to deal with hatred and scorn and rejection, as I said, and he became holy dealing with all these things by his responses to them.  And I hope that that will encourage you as it encourages me that if sanctity was accessible to John, it’s accessible to us.

Chris Cash:  Well that is a great message to leave with, Patricia.  Thank you so much for coming on the show.  For all of you listeners out there who want to help out the show, go on over to PodcastAlley and vote for us this month as well as head on over to iTunes and leave us some positive reviews, help us to get the word out about the show and help us to bring more listeners in.  Patricia, thank you very much.  You have a great day and God bless!

Patricia Treece:  Thank you.

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Transcript of Interview with Patricia Treece about Pope John XXIII Joyful Pope and Father to All. This interview and others like it can be found at http://www.catholicspotlight.com

Listen Now to the audio version of the show.

Pope John XXIII Joyful Pope and Father to All is available at The Catholic Company.
http://www.catholiccompany.com/catholic-books/1002656/Meet-John-XXIII-Joyful-Pope-Father-to-All/