St. John XXIII

Who they were

Angelo Roncalli was a sharecropper's son from Sotto il Monte, one of thirteen children, and his long unhurried career ran through service as a stretcher bearer and chaplain in the First World War, decades of Vatican diplomacy in Bulgaria and Turkey, where during the Second World War he used his position and his paperwork to help save Jewish refugees, and finally the patriarchate of Venice.

Elected pope in 1958 at seventy six as everyone's transitional caretaker, he announced within ninety days the Second Vatican Council, which opened on 11 October 1962, the date the Church now keeps as his feast. He gave the era Pacem in Terris and left behind the Journal of a Soul, fifty years of his own examens. What the world kept, though, is the warmth: the unscripted speech from the window on the council's opening night, telling the crowd to go home and give their children a caress and say it came from the Pope, and the humour he wielded like a crozier. Asked how many people worked in the Vatican, he is said to have answered, about half. He died in June 1963 and was canonized in 2014 in the same Mass as St. John Paul II.

Why people turn to St. John XXIII

Everyone starting the big thing late, with St. Hildegard of Bingen, St. Rose Philippine Duchesne and St. Helena. The holy who have gone humourless, for whom he is a prescription, with St. Philip Neri. Diplomats and go betweens.

How to ask their intercession

Borrow his night prayer whole. He ended the day's examination by telling God it was his Church, not Roncalli's, and going to bed. It is the shortest prayer a tired leader can say honestly.