Hannah Arendt on Pope John XXIII

... In the midst of our century this man had decided to take literally, and not symbolically, every article of faith he had ever been taught. He really wanted "to be crushed, despised, neglected for the love of Jesus." He had disciplined himself and his ambition until he really cared “nothing for the judgments of the world, even the ecclesiastical world.” At the age of twenty-one, he had made up his mind: “Even if I were to be Pope…I should still have to stand before the divine judge, and what should I be worth then? Not much.” And at the end of his life, in the Spiritual Testament to his family, he could confidently write that "the Angel of Death will take me, as I trust, to paradise." The enormous strength of this faith was nowhere more manifest than in the "scandals" it innocently caused....

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It is with respect to his work in Turkey, where, during the war, he came into contact with Jewish organizations (and, in one instance, prevented the Turkish government from shipping back to Germany some hundred Jewish children who had escaped from Nazi-occupied Europe) that he later raised one of the very rare serious reproaches against himself—for all “examinations of conscience” notwithstanding, he was not at all given to self-criticism. “Could I not,” he wrote, “should I not, have done more, have made a more decided effort and gone against the inclinations of my nature? Did the search for calm and peace, which I considered to be more in harmony with the Lord’s spirit, not perhaps mask a certain unwillingness to take up the sword?” At this time, however, he had permitted himself but one outburst. Upon the outbreak of the war with Russia, he was approached by the German Ambassador, Franz von Papen, who asked him to use his influence in Rome for outspoken support of Germany by the Pope. “And what shall I say about the millions of Jews your countrymen are murdering in Poland and in Germany?” This was in 1941, when the great massacre had just begun. ...

Excerpts from The Christian Pope, by Hannah Arendt. (Reviewing Journal of a Soul, by Pope John XXIII, translated by Dorothy White). New York Review of Books June 17, 1965.