October 11 is the day the Second Vatican Council opened in St. Peter's Basilica in 1962, and the Church keeps John XXIII's memorial on it rather than on the day of his death. He had convoked the Council on January 25, 1959, three months into a pontificate the conclave had intended as a short one, and he did not live to see it finish.
Angelo Giuseppe Roncalli was born at Sotto il Monte in the province of Bergamo on November 25, 1881, the fourth of thirteen children of a family of sharecroppers. He served as a sergeant in the medical corps and then as a chaplain in the First World War, spent two decades as a papal diplomat in Bulgaria, Turkey and Greece — where he worked to help Jews escape the deportations — and was nuncio to Paris after the liberation. He was made patriarch of Venice in 1953 and elected pope on October 28, 1958, at seventy-six.
He died on June 3, 1963, between the Council's first and second sessions. His body was moved in 2001 from the Vatican grottoes to the altar of St. Jerome in the nave of St. Peter's Basilica at Rome, where it can be seen. Francis canonized him on April 27, 2014, together with John Paul II, waiving the requirement of a second miracle.
