When Pope John XXIII is
canonized this
April, the honor will be long-awaited—and richly deserved. After serving as
a model priest and prelate, he became an equally beloved pontiff, convening
Vatican II and articulating the timelessness of the Church’s teachings.
Among his most important statements
is
Ad
Petri Cathedram
(“To the Chair of Peter”), the opening encyclical of
his pontificate. Much less known than
Mater
et Magistra
(1961) and Pacem
in Terris
(1963)—Pope John’s two great social encyclicals—Ad Petri Cathedram is equally relevant as
a significant window into his legacy and a constructive critique of modernity.
Issued on June 29, 1959, the
Feast of the Apostles Peter and Paul,
Ad
Petri Cathedram
is about many things—the
need for Christian unity under the
Holy See, preparations for Vatican II, the role of bishops, the mission of
religious, the value of theology, the urgency of world peace, and the necessity
of social justice. But if there is one theme reverberating throughout the whole
encyclical, it is Pope John’s defense of objective truth and morality—almost
fifty years before Pope Benedict famously inveighed against the “dictatorship
of relativism.”
The encyclical minces no
words. After extending his greetings and apostolic blessings, Pope John
comments:
All
the evils which poison men and nations and trouble so many hearts have a single
cause and a single source: ignorance of the truth—and at times even more than
ignorance, a contempt for truth and a reckless rejection of it.
John then affirms that “God
gave each of us an intellect capable of attaining natural truth,” but stresses
that ordinary people, left to their own devices, “cannot do this easily.” This
is why God took mercy on man’s plight, sending his own Son to dwell among us,
so that everyone could be led “not only to full and perfect truth, but to
virtue and eternal happiness.”
This is followed by a series
of dramatic warnings that still concern us today. First, John affirms, as Pope
Francis teaches in
Evangelii
Gaudium, that everyone is “bound to accept the teaching of the Gospel,”
for if it is ignored, “the very foundations of truth, goodness, and
civilization are endangered.”
He rebukes those “who
consciously and wantonly attack known truth,” for those who do so mislead the
young and impressionable, an act John denounces as “an altogether despicable
business.”
He addresses the press, which
has “a serious duty to disseminate, not lies, error, and obscenity, but only
the truth,” and to publicize “what is conducive to good and virtuous conduct,
not to vice.” He acknowledges that modern communications—radio, television,
motion pictures—have the capacity to achieve genuine good, but far too often
entice people into “loose morality” and “treacherous error.” Here, the
New
Evangelization, which John XXIII helped lay the groundwork for, could
counter this destructive trend, so that “health will come from a source which
has often produced only devastating sickness,” as the encyclical says.
Having criticized earlier
skeptics who “contend that the human mind can discover no truth that is
certain” and lamented those who are “carried about by every wind of doctrine,” John’s
exhortations end with a battle cry against modernity’s “indifference to truth,”
especially “that absurd proposition: one religion is just as good as another.”
That becomes clear in the
encyclical’s vigorous defense of the family, as God intended it to be. The
beauty and unity of the family, declares John, “rises from the holiness and
indissolubility of Christian marriage. It is the basis of much of the order,
progress, and prosperity of civil society.”
Harmony is achieved when
husbands and wives embrace their God-given roles, and when children, in return,
honor and obey their parents. The Holy Family is presented as a model to
emulate, for “the charity which burned in the household at Nazareth should be
an inspiration for every family.”
One cannot help reading these
stirring words without thinking about the challenges now facing Christian
marriage, or the misguided efforts to redefine it. But long before the campaign
to upend the true meaning of marriage, Pope John’s prophetic encyclical described
what would happen if marriage was emptied of its supernatural content:
We
earnestly pray God to prevent any damage to this valuable, beneficial, and
necessary union. The Christian family is a sacred institution. If it totters,
if the norms which the divine Redeemer laid down for it are rejected or
ignored, then the very foundations of the state tremble; civil society stands
betrayed and in peril. Everyone suffers.
Given the force of
Ad Petri Cathedram’s warnings—as
striking as any of those heard in today’s culture wars—it’s revealing to see
how Pope John’s biographers have dealt with it. Many of them, including major
writers like
Paul
Johnson
and Thomas
Cahill, don’t even mention it. Peter
Hebblethwaite
does, but complains about its severity, speculating that it
may have been ghostwritten.
Even Pope John’s authorized
biographers,
Mario
Benigni and Goffredo Zanchi, struggle with it, wondering why “the
prevailing tone is one of condemnation,” and puzzled by John’s “use of
uncharacteristically sharp words.”
But
there shouldn’t be any great mystery here. As
Greg
Tobin, Pope John’s most recent biographer, notes, John was a visionary and
a reformer, but “deeply traditional in matters of faith and morals.”
Ad Petri Cathedram (which Tobin, to his
credit, devotes five pages to) reflects the Pope’s commitment to Christianity’s
perennial and demanding truths.
For those accustomed to the
image of “Good Pope John” as a sugary-sweet pontiff,
Ad Petri Cathedram should serve as a healthy corrective; for while John was certainly a joyful man,
he was also a serious one, entirely committed to the teachings of the Church.
William Doino Jr. is a contributor to Inside the Vatican magazine, among many other publications, and writes often about religion, history and politics. He contributed an extensive bibliography of works on Pius XII to The Pius War: Responses to the Critics of Pius XII. His previous articles can be found here.
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