Pope John’s Vatican Council aide
LORIS FRANCESCO CAPOVILLA Oct. 15, 1915 - May 26, 2016
Cardinal Loris Francesco Capovilla, who as personal secretary to Pope John XXIII helped prepare the Roman Catholic hierarchy for the opening of the Second Vatican Council, died on Thursday in Bergamo, Italy. He was 100.
Cardinal Capovilla was a priest when he met Cardinal Angelo Giuseppe Roncalli, the future pope, in Venice in 1953. He had served as a military chaplain during World War II and later as a radio broadcaster and journalist for the church. Cardinal Roncalli had just been installed as the patriarch of Venice.
The two men formed an instant rapport. Cardinal Roncalli engaged Father Capovilla as his private secretary and, after the death of Pius XII in 1958, as one of his representatives to the papal conclave convened to elect a new pope. After his election to the papacy, Pope John took his assistant with him to the Vatican.
“In Capovilla, Roncalli got much more than a secretary: He got a spiritual son, a literary executor, a confidant and a Boswell,” Peter Hebblethwaite wrote in “Pope John XXIII: Shepherd of the Modern World,” his 1985 definitive biography of Pope John.
Loris Francesco Capovilla was born on Oct. 15, 1915, in Pontelongo, near Padua. His father, Rodolfo, died when was a boy, and his youth was filled with extreme deprivation. His mother was the former Letizia Callegaro.
He entered the Patriarchal Seminary of Venice as a teenager and was ordained a priest in the Archdiocese of Venice on May 23, 1940.
After serving as a chaplain at the air force base in Parma, he took on a more public role when he returned to civilian life in Venice, delivering Sunday sermons on Radio Venezia and editing La Voce di San Marco, the diocesan weekly. He also edited the Venice section of L’Avvenire d’Italia, a Catholic daily published in Bologna.
In the first days of the new papacy, Cardinal Capovilla recalled in the 2015 documentary “Voices of Vatican II: Council Participants Remember,” Pope John turned to him and said: “My desk is piling up with problems, questions, requests, hopes. What’s really necessary is a council.”
Worried that Pope John, at 77, might not be up to the demands of a council, he recommended a go-slow policy. The pope, he argued, should use his considerable personal charm to build a base of support and avoid major initiatives.
He was overruled, and Pope John sent him in early 1959 to Venice, Padua and Bergamo to give a series of addresses aimed at easing apprehensions about the proposed council and countering the impression in certain quarters that the new pontiff was a bit of a bumpkin.
The council opened in October 1962, and it was Father Capovilla who suggested to Pope John at the end of the council’s opening day that he address the crowd in St. Peter’s Square, estimated at 500,000. It proved to be a masterstroke of public relations. In plain language, the pope expressed his hopes for the council and concluded with the now famous words, “Now go back home and give your little children a kiss — tell them it is from Pope John.”
In June 1963, it fell to Father Capovilla to tell John, in the terminal stages of stomach cancer, that there was no longer any hope.
“I must be totally honest with you: Your time has come,” he recalled saying, in an interview with The Tablet in 1992. The pope thanked him for his loyalty.
“We have worked,” he recalled the pope’s saying. “We have served. We have loved. We have not stopped to gather the stones which were thrown against us from one side or the other of the way, to throw them back.”
He wrote a memoir of his time with the pope, “The Heart and Mind of John XXIII: His Secretary’s Intimate Recollections,” published in 1964. Several years earlier the pope had entrusted him with the diaries he had kept since age 14, with permission to publish them after his death. They were included in “Journal of a Soul,” published in English translation in 1965.
Pope Paul VI appointed him prelate di anticamera, an advisory position under the chief chamberlain of the Vatican, and expert to the Second Vatican Council, after Pope John’s death.
He was made bishop of the Archdiocese of ChietiVasto, in the Abruzzo region, in 1967. Four years later he was named prelate of Loreto and titular archbishop of Mesembria, Bulgaria, appointments he resigned in 1988.
In retirement he moved to Sotto il Monte, northeast of Milan, the birthplace of Pope John, now known as Sotto il Monte Giovanni XXIII. There he helped run a museum dedicated to the pope.
On Jan. 12, 2014, Pope Francis announced his appointment as cardinal.