Customer Reviews

Pope John XXIII: A Penguin Life (Penguin Lives)

5 star:		(6)
4 star:		(11)
3 star:		(3)
2 star:		(5)
1 star:		(7)

 

 

I wanted to get a look at the pope, but I couldn't see past the chip on Cahill's shoulder. Make no mistake, this book is not primarily about Pope John XXIII (Angelo Roncalli). It is primarily about Cahill's opinion of the papacy as an institution. John just serves as a model for Cahill's ideal. A good half the book is spent bemoaning the shortcomings of other popes.

Even once the author gets around to talking about Roncalli's life, he still spends a fair amount of words complaining of the conservative programs of the popes at the given time. It's not until Roncalli becomes pope that the story squarely centers on him, at which point the book actually becomes quite good. If Cahill would have kept his focus on Roncalli throughout, the book would have been much better.

I'm a protestant, so I have no particular love for the idea of the papacy, but I was distinctly turned off by the scornful, condescending tone that Cahill takes toward even the idea of orthodoxy. In short, there's just too much of the author in this book.

I discovered the author on the wonderful world of C-Span where one find authors not invited to Letterman, et all.

Thought now retired, I am still a slow reader-- and thus liked the brevity of Cahill's book. A still "recovering" Catholic, I wss enchanted with the story of John XXIII. Whatever the current Vatican may do, I regard him as saintly. Cahill's bio may be brief, but one gets a clear picture of a boy from a poor but devout rural Italian family. His pastor is well described, who was a lovig mentor. One sees this boy become the man Angelo Rancalli. And beyond as a priest he finds leaders who---it seems to me--- practice what they preach. At the same time Angelo manages to survive and become a leader, with no loss of integrity--in times of repression.

His success in helping Jews escape the Nazis is touched on, as well as the dramatic way he changed elements of anti-semitic liturgy.

This was a radical man--- in the best sense of the word. As I learned from the nuns years ago, Jesus was a true radical.
Cahill give us a history of the Church before and after John XXIII. At times witty, caustic, but clearly fond of this remarkable man.

I read all of the reviews here and then bought the book. I wasn't all that familiar with papal history and found that interesting. Still, it is one person's opinion and little space for such a huge undertaking. It's utility is that it helps to frame John XXIII's life. And obviously, that is what we want to learn about. Unfortunately, I feel we didn't spend much time with the pope and walk away feeling like we glimpsed him from a distance. Cahill's opinions abound, and he uses strong language in conveying them. Like a couple of reviewers, I feel that Cahill wanted to send a message about the Church and used this book as the vehicle. That's OK. I would not have minded a longer work with more evidence and analysis to provide an overview of the papacy or the Church in general. For me, John XXIII was someone I wanted to get to know more about. This book could have given me more. Still, while I feel this is a deficit, I still think this book is very much worth reading and recommend it...for the history, occasionally jarring opinions, and truncated bio.

John XXIII was one of the rarest of humans...a gentle, loving and merciful soul who touched the world in ways that will long be remembered. One can't help but wish for more time with him. Let us hope that we do not wait another age for another like him.

This is a short biographical essay on John XXIII sandwiched between pages and pages of anti-papal screed and pseudo-history. I have read all of the author's "Hinges of History" series, but will read him no more; Mr. Cahill's bias and cant are a barrier to the necessary trust between author and reader. Here's the book in a nutshell: reforming/liberal popes = good, conservative/traditional popes = bad. I am exaggerating only a little in my encapsulation! The author frequently substitutes assertion for argument, particularly in regard to the last pope, John Paul II. After re-reading the book, I am still unsure what it is that the author dislikes so much about the current pope except that he appears to be holding the line on traditional Catholic teaching. For all the much-vaunted tolerance of liberal believers, I was shocked by the author's repeated ad hominem attacks upon the character of popes and others who take views not sanctioned by the author. As for Mr. Cahill's liberal utopia, I suggest that he look at the Episcopal Church in the US for a picture of what the Church will look like if we vote on our doctrine and elect our bishops; I don't think it is an improvement! This book is a perfect example of the saying that "when orthodoxy becomes optional, orthodoxy will soon be prohibited." I have tried but cannot understand those (like the author) who want to belong to an organization with which they completely disagree and then want to make the organization over in their own image. There are plenty of non-hierarchical denominations out there if Mr. Cahill truly wants one. I recommend that you avoid this book or read only that portion of it dealing directly with John XXIII. A more scholarly alternative from the same perspective without the cant is Eamon Duffy's Saints and Sinners: A History of the Popes; Third Edition (Yale Nota Bene) or Ten Popes Who Shook the World.

Before reading this book, I admired Cahill for his "Hinges of History" series. While he often shocked me with his obsession with detailed sexual rituals or practices, he seemed to weave a good pattern of history and narrative, making the books an enjoyable (and presumably beneficial) read.
However, about half way through this work, I began to doubt the accuracy of anything I had ever read by Cahill. His history of the papacy is anachronistic, ripped from its context, and overly biased (which is putting it nicely, a better description might be propaganda).
In Cahill's opinion, there have been about 5 good popes, but none can compare to John XXIII. He goes to great lengths to point out the evils and flaws in even the best popes. When he comes to Paul XXIII, however, even his flaws are praised. When another pope acts in a way that offends Cahill's sense of what a pope ought to be, he is evil, misguided or vindictive. When John XXIII fails, he is just showing us his brokenness and reminding us that he is just a human.
He applies this method when speaking of other clergy. When a conservative makes an appearance in the narrative, he is always evil, conniving, angry, divisive, etc (you can almost hear the music change in your head). I cannot call to mind one conservative opinion or decision Cahill praises in the book. However, anyone leaning to the left (Liberation Theologians, Liberal Theologians, Feminist thinkers, etc) comes on the scene, they are forward thinking, working in the true spirit of the Church, thoughtful, following Jesus, etc. Even when "liberal" characters do something duplicitous (e.g. when John goes on for hours so as to lull the conservative bishops before announcing his controversial council) they are praised as wise.
If John XXIII was such a great man (and hear me clearly on this, I think he was, I too wish more Christians were like him) why does Cahill need to paint all other popes with such a dark brush? I can only wonder if this book is more a diatribe against the conservatives in the Church than a biography of John XXIII. In all honesty, I think John XXIII deserves better (and, if Cahill is right about him, would never have written or read a book like this which so demonizes everyone he disagreed with).
Finally, Cahill often refers to 'hunches' he has or tells stories he admits are 'unverifiable.' That is not history, that's editorial.
It will take a lot for me to pick up another Cahill book.

POPE JOHN XXIII is not a long book but the author does try to cover a lot of territory as he traces the history of the church and especially the papacy from its beginnings to the present day.He also manages to give us a short biography of Angelo Giuseppe Roncalli, the 258th successor to the apostle Peter.

Two passages in the book stand out as beacons of optimism. The first is a description of John walking up the central aisle of Saint Peter's at the start of Vatican II while 2500 bishops, patriarchs and abbots sing and pray for the guidance of the Holy Spirit.

The second passage contains Cahill's prediction that the Holy Spirit will descend again on the church as it surely did at Vatican II and also 2000 years ago at Pentecost in Jerusalem.

For those who love the Roman Catholic Church, another Pentecost will be most welcome.

Whether you are a Catholic or a non-Catholic will doubtless have massive implications for how you approach this book. I am a non-Catholic with very little grounding in the history or structure of the Western Church or of the Papacy. For myself, I would not have fully understood why Angelo Roncalli's Papacy was considered successful without the not so brief but engaging Papal history that takes up 72 of the book's 241 pages. It is a dizzying survey of Papal history, and obviously not definitive, but it gives Pope John XXIII a context within which to appreciate him. Some Catholics may take such a history for granted, and want to get to the meat of Roncalli's story. But, the author has to take into consideration those without a Catholic background so they can understand why he was not only a good Pope, but a good person.

Cahill does make much out of what Pope John XXIII had to contend with in the form of conservative Cardinals and Vatican administrators. There are times Cahill seems too harsh towards these people, and possibly he overplays it to demonstrate Roncalli's legacy. However, the Catholic church does have the reputation as one of the most conservative institutions in the world (there are many examples as to why, the case of forgiving Galileo about 300 years after the fact is only one), so perhaps Cahill's depiction is accurate. It is ultimately hard to know for a Vatican outsider, but Cahill's book, skewed or not, is a great starting place for non-Catholics on the subject of the Papacy.

This is a wonderful biography of the pudgy man born to a poor peasant family who became, in his old age, the much-beloved (at least by the people) Pope John XXIII. I was a ten-year old Protestant boy when Angelo Giuseppe Roncalli ascended to the throne of St. Peter. I remember reading about him and his Vatican Council over the next five years and hearing my Catholic friends talk favorably about the new pope. Then in 1963 the pope died and a few months later the young American president was assassinated and the whole world changed (or at least it seemed--and seems--to me).

Thomas Cahill's addition to the Penguin Lives series of brief biographies is the best so far. Cahill's prose is easily read; his history flows smoothly. The book open with an account of the church's history and its long line of mostly undistinguished popes. Then Cahill focuses on the long life of Roncalli: his service in the Italian army during World War I; his rise to some significance in the church in Italy; then his unexpected posting to mostly Orthodox Bulgaria; and then to the plum job in sophisticated and free-thinking Paris. Somehow this widely varied experience combined with his native empathy for people and love of the soil to deliver a remarkably liberal and unfettered man to the head of the Roman Catholic church for a brief, but monumental, five years.

Cahill concludes with a negative, almost searing, overview of Pope John's successors including a pretty nasty picture of Pope John Paul II who he thinks represents a weird, Polish kind of Catholcism. I can't comment on the fairness of that, but am encouraged that Cahill feels that the waters representing John's humanism and warmth run near the surface and will emerge again. Frankly, I hope so.

At first it may seem odd that this biography of John XXIII, with a limited number of pages, devotes 1/4 of them to the popes who came before John XXIII-- centuries before him.

But the purpose is to show how unusual John was-- and how rare a loving, generous, apolitical (though necessarily wily) and good-hearted pope like him really has been. The overwhelming picture is of how the anti-modern, inbred, conspiratorial atmosphere in the Vatican seems bound to turn almost any pope against the rest of the world and to close his heart and mind to ordinary peoples' lives-- not that many of them needed much help closing them.

If there is a saving grace to the system, it is that sometimes it recognizes that it needs men like John for certain tasks, and so at least has the sense not to destroy them. Thus John escaped the oppressions of the paranoid era of Pius X, and emerged from World War II (unlike the then-pope, Pius XII) with a reputation for goodness and anti-Nazism which enabled him to negotiate with a Charles deGaulle determined to oust Pius' pro-Vichy bishops. Yet it still seems remarkable that such a man was able to be elected pope after the "moral pygmy" Pius, and that in his short reign-- he was chosen with the expectation he would not live long-- he managed to do so many things to bring the church forward by centuries. Even as John Paul II has turned the church back to a more authoritarian era, he must grudgingly acknowledge that his moral stature in the Communist world would not have existed without John's overtures to that world, which helped thaw the Cold War.

Admittedly I was hesitant to buy this book. The life of John XXIII and Vatican II is one of the more significant stories about the Catholic Church and I was concerned that the short length of this book was not enough space to appropriately address the topic. Well, I was right, but for the wrong reasons.

Cahill spends almost the first third of the book providing a "brief history" of Catholic Popes from Peter to John XXIII. While an undertaking of that magnitude may have been appropriate in a more comprehensive biography, it was out of place in a book of this brevity. While I am certainly not a Catholic apologist, I was amazed at Cahill's ability to present a National Enquirer-type story without the slightest effort to present a more realistic historical context. I am not suggesting that anything Cahill presented was untrue, but he was so tabloidish in both his writing style (he actually used the phrase "getting laid") and objectivity, that it was hard for me to continue. But continue I did.

Unfortunately, continuing was a further disappointment. Once again, Cahill insists on a conclusory writing style without expounding on truly significant points. At one point, Cahill suggests that John XXIII was gay based on a "hunch" (his word, not mine). In my opinion, if you are going to make such a conclusion, you either back it up or leave it alone. This cocktail party approach to his book simply because too much to take.

The sad thing is was that I would probably agree with most of the positions Cahill advocates for the reform of the Catholic Church. The problem is that he advocates for them so poorly and with such an amateurish style that I actually found myself wanting to disagree with him.

Certainly not a book I would recommend.