Giovanni Panico

Giovanni Panico (12 April 1895 – 7 July 1962) was an Italian cardinal of the Catholic Church. He served as nuncio to several countries during his career, and was created a cardinal in 1962.

Life

Early life Panico was born in Tricase, in the Province of Lecce, to Carmine Panico and his wife Marina Zocco, a farming family. The sixth of eleven children, he was given the baptismal name was Santo Giovanni. After studying under a private tutor, he attended the minor seminary in Ugento. He then went to Rome, where he lived in the Leonine College, a residence for students from southern Italy at the Gregorian University (1910–1915), then studied at the Pontifical Roman Seminary (1915–1919). An accomplished musician on both the organ and the piano, he was the official organist for the seminary during his time there.

Panico was ordained to the priesthood by Cardinal Basilio Pompili on 14 March 1919, in the Lateran Basilica. That summer he founded a boys choir and a separate girls choir for the children of Rome. He then attended the Pontifical Lateran University until 1922, obtaining a doctorate in theology in 1919, and later a doctorate in canon and civil law in 1922. When in 1945 Norman Gilroy was appointed cardinal in preference to Mannix, the Australian government minister Arthur Calwell publicly criticised Panico, "whose limited ability and equally limited knowledge of Australia and Australians has ill-fitted him to influence the destinies of the Australian church".

Panico officiated at the Eucharistic Congress of 1938 which was held in Newcastle, New South Wales. He also presided over similar events in 1939 in Wellington, New Zealand, to mark the centenary of the Catholic Church in New Zealand (1838), and of the nation itself (the Treaty of Waitangi, 1840).

During World War II, Panico established charities for Italian, German, and Japanese prisoners of war in Australia and for the Australian and New Zealand prisoners in Italy. The Jesuits were playing poker in their cabin at the time the ship hit the reef. Panico rushed into the cabin in his nightshirt and asked what was happening. When one of the Jesuits informed him that they were going to sink, he apparently told them that he must die like a priest so he went and put on his biretta. This was further fuel to his nickname of "Panicky Jack".

Panico was named nuncio to Peru on 28 September 1948, and Apostolic Delegate to Canada on 14 November 1953. Pope John XXIII appointed him nuncio to Portugal on 25 January 1959. He then founded the Cardinale Giovanni Panico Hospital in his native Tricase, where he soon died at age 67. On 23 June 2012, his remains were transferred to a tomb in front of the altar of St. Charles Borromeo in the main body of the church.