Saint John XXIII, Pope

Angelo Giuseppe Roncalli was born in 1881 at Sotto il Monte near Bergamo, in a large sharecropping family. Ordained in 1904, he was secretary to the bishop of Bergamo and in the First World War served as a medical orderly and chaplain. For nearly thirty years he was a papal diplomat in Bulgaria, in Turkey and Greece, where during the Second World War he helped Jewish refugees with transit documents, and then in France. In 1953 he became patriarch of Venice, and in October 1958, aged 76, was elected pope. Within three months he announced the Second Vatican Council, which opened on 11 October 1962, now his feast day. In 1963 he wrote the encyclical Pacem in Terris. He died on 3 June 1963 and was canonized in 2014.