LETTERS FROM ROME – 2025
Reports and Commentary on the Papal Interregnum
Edited by Xavier Rynne II
Number 2: 29 April, 2025
A PRAYER FOR THE CHURCH OF THE NEAR FUTURE
Cardinal Camillo Ruini
Cardinal Camillo Ruini, born in 1931, was ordained a priest for the Diocese of Reggio Emilia-Guastalla in 1954. After a distinguished academic career, he was ordained titular bishop of Nepte in 1983 and was made Vicar General of the Diocese of Rome, Archpriest of the Papal Basilica of St John Lateran, and cardinal in 1991. Throughout the remaining fourteen years of John Paul II’s pontificate, he sought to implement that great pope’s vision of the New Evangelisation in Rome, and indeed throughout Italy in his work as president of the Italian bishop’s conference.
He would have made an admirable pope or cardinal secretary of state.
Now 94 and confined to a wheelchair, Cardinal Ruini remains clear-minded and alert, deeply knowledgeable of Church affairs (especially in Italy), a shrewd judge of character, and a holy priest. He recently penned the following prayer, which first appeared in Italian, French, Spanish, and English on the blog of veteran Vaticanista Sandro Magister. The English translation, slightly revised, appears below. XR II
The heritage of Pope Francis is one that raises a profound and disturbing question for the church. In these lines I will address it from a perspective of trust, because that perspective is founded on the merciful power of God, who guides our steps into the way of the good.
I will formulate four wishes—which are also prayers—for the church of a future that I hope is very near. I trust in a good and charitable church, doctrinally secure, governed according to the law, and deeply united internally. These are my prayer intentions, which I would like to see widely shared.
First of all, then, a good and charitable church. Love brought to living efficacy is in fact the supreme law of Christian testimony and therefore of the church. And it is what people, even today, have a great thirst for. Our style of government must therefore be freed of all useless rigidity, all pettiness and dryness of heart.
As Benedict XVI wrote, the faith is a flame in danger of going out. Rekindling this flame is therefore another great priority of the church. For this, we need much prayer; we need the ability to respond in a Christian key to the intellectual challenges of today; but we also need certainty of truth and security of doctrine. For too many years now, we have been learning from experience that, if these are weakened, all of us, pastors and faithful, are severely penalized.
Then there is the question of governance. Benedict XVI’s pontificate was undermined by his poor aptitude for governing, and such a concern [about capacity-to-govern] is valid for all times, including the near future. Moreover, it must not be forgotten that this is a question of governing the very special reality that is the church. Here, as I have said, the fundamental law is love: the style of government and the recourse to law must as far as possible be in keeping with this law, which is very demanding for anyone.
In these years we have perceived some threats—which I do not want to exaggerate—to the unity and communion of the church. To overcome them, and to bring to light what I like to call the “Catholic form” of the church, mutual charity is once again decisive. But it is also important to reawaken awareness that the church, like every social body, has its rules, which no one can ignore with impunity.
At age 94, silence is more fitting than words. Nonetheless, I hope that these lines of mine bear a little fruit of the good I wish for the church.
RANDOM REFLECTIONS AFTER A WEEK IN ROME
George Weigel
Today, 29 April, is the liturgical Feast of St Catherine of Siena, Doctor of the Church and of the co-patrons of Europe. At a moment when some are suggesting that any criticism of the pontificate of Pope Francis is, at the very least, rude, it’s good to remember that this third-order Dominican mystic was a fierce critic of the popes of her day, who were living in Avignon as virtual vassals of the Capetian kings of France. In a certain Vatican property, there is a not-very-good, but quite large, painting of Catherine vigorously remonstrating in 1376 with Pope Gregory XI, urging him to end the papacy’s Avignon exile. I once asked a friend what the future saint might be saying to Pope Gregory, born Pierre Roger de Beaufort and the seventh Avignonese pontiff. The reply? “She’s saying, ‘Get your **** French ******* back to Rome where you belong.” My friend’s formulation was deliberately over-the-top, but its substance was an accurate reflection of Catherine’s ardor. Candor and sanctity are not antinomies.
Pope Francis often called for parrhesia, candid conversation, within the church. Those who try to shut down any serious consideration of what went wrong in the recent pontificate, limiting the focus of discussion to what went right, do the late pope no good service. They are practicing a form of Catholic cancel culture that makes a mockery of Francis’s summons to parrhesia.
Flying ad urbem on Easter Monday night, it seemed that more than a few of my fellow passengers were watching Conclave as their in-flight entertainment. As I wrote some months ago, the film is brilliantly acted and visually compelling. But its ending is completely absurdity, its celebration of religious “doubt” as a desirable attribute in a pope is exactly wrong, and its depiction of the cardinals’ quarters in the Domus Sanctae Marthae [St Martha’s House] is inaccurate. The suites in which the cardinals live during the conclave do not resemble those in the movie; they’re not quite Motel 6, but neither is the Domus the Four Seasons Vatican. (One of the many media ironies of the past twelve years is that, when Pope Francis decided to live in the Domus rather than the papal apartment in the Apostolic Palace, the Domus instantly changed on many journalistic keyboards from being “the Vatican’s 4-star hotel” to “the humble Vatican guest house”.)
Conclave also suggests that the process of electing a pope is almost entirely politicised and shaped by ideological conflicts. Politics are a factor in any exercise of choosing an institution’s leadership, and so are differences of philosophical and moral perspective. But there is also prayer and spiritual discernment during a papal interregnum and in a conclave. As I said on NBC the other day, when a man casts his ballot—facing Michelangelo’s stunning fresco of Christ the Judge in the Sistine Chapel and swearing that he is conscientiously voting for the one who, before that Divine Judge, he thinks should be chosen—he is taking his soul in his hands. Only the dimmest spirits would not be conscious of that.
It’s time for the world media to cease and desist from the blather about the simplicity of Pope Francis’s tomb at the Basilica of St Mary Major, as if its one-word inscription in Latin, Franciscus, is another dramatic innovation and a further demonstration of the late pope’s humility. Well. In the Vatican grottoes beneath St Peter’s, the tomb of Pope Pius XII is inscribed Pius PP XII, period. Paul VI’s tombstone reads, Sanctus Paulus V, period. Benedictus XVI, period, marks the grave of Joseph Ratzinger. Upstairs, in the alcove between the basilica’s Blessed Sacrament Chapel and the chapel where Michelangelo’s Pietà is displayed, the tomb of Karol Wojtyła is inscribed Sanctus Ioannes Paulus II, period. The tacit suggestion that pre-Francis papal tombs or graves were characterised by adulatory rhetoric is poppycock.
What seems to me to be the significance of the late pope’s choice of St Mary Major is not the simplicity of his grave, but its location in the first and greatest of Marian churches. Devotion to the Blessed Virgin Mary took something of a nosedive throughout much of the world church after Vatican II. Its revival in the last three pontificates is noteworthy, and Francis’s regular visits to St Mary Major—as well as his final resting place there— underscore that happy development.
The Litany of the Saints figured prominently in the transfer of Pope Francis’s body from the Domus Sanctae Marthae to his lying in state in St Peter’s and in the “Final Commendation of the Church of Rome” at the end of Saturday’s funeral Mass. The Litany of the Saint, with its rhythmic chant of (in this case) over seventy names may seem monotonous, even boring to some. In fact, the Litany is the church’s family album. We are indeed “surrounded by so great a cloud of witnesses,” as Hebrews 12.1 reminded us during Holy Week, and the Litany of the Saints drives that point home in a powerful way.
The congregation for Pope Francis’s funeral, while nowhere near as large as that which gathered for John Paul II’s funeral in 2005, was considerably enlarged by the number of young Catholics from all over the world, who were already coming to in Rome for the canonization of the “first millennial saint,” Blessed Carlo Acutis, scheduled for Divine Mercy Sunday, 27 April. The canonisation had to be postponed because of the pope’s death, for only a pope can preside over a canonisation. So the young people stayed and formed a vibrant part of the congregation in St Peter’s Square and the Via della Conciliazione, both for the papal funeral and for the celebration of Divine Mercy Sunday.
In his first homily as pope, Benedict XVI proclaimed, “The Church is young!” The enthusiasm of the young people I encountered around the Vatican for the generational compatriot their t-shirts proclaimed “One of Us” gave that twenty-year old assertion fresh resonance. That a young man who died of acute leukemia at 15, after a life that combined a profound devotion to the Eucharist and considerable catechetical experience with serious computer skills, could summon up the affection of so many members of what’s often considered a religiously uninterested generation was one happy, if often underreported, dimension of these sobering days in the Eternal City
LARRY CHAPP’S ROMAN DIARY
29 April, 2025
If there is one thing we’ve learned about the modern church it’s that narratives matter, and whoever gains the upper hand in controlling the public perception of ecclesial realities will also control how many Catholics view things.
We saw this clearly in the post-conciliar era where, as Pope Benedict noted, the real Vatican II was eclipsed by the council of the media—aided and abetted by many influential priests, bishops and theologians—which spun the council as a liberalising and “modernising” of the church. Since Western culture had already long since become highly secularised, and with the cultural revolution of the 60s in full force, it was almost inevitable that those in the church who were sympathetic to those trends would win the “narrative wars” and move the church into an era of revolutionary experimentation and chaos.
This leads me to two different but related points which will direct my reflections for the rest of my time in Rome, in this interregnum period between papacies.
First, having learned our lesson from the post-conciliar chaos, Catholics who care about such arcane things as doctrinal orthodoxy and moral clarity need to enter the public square with a robust evangelical vigor: one that understands the importance of debunking false ecclesial narratives and offers in their place positive stories of the beauty of orthodox Catholicism. We cannot stand idly by and wait for the Holy Spirit to magically right the ship without our cooperative efforts.
Something new is indeed struggling to be born, but what slouches our way is neither predictable nor inevitable. And so we must enter the fray. This is, as Hans Urs von Balthasar would put it, our “Ernstfall moment” of decisional crisis and choosing not to choose is, in fact, a choice.
Second, given the fact that our culture is even farther down the path of the post-Christian social deconstruction of the institutions created by the faith, it is more important than ever that we realise what we are up against.
Along these lines, we should have learned by now that an aggiornamento construed as the uncritical importation of secular and Liberal political values, without the transposition into a Christian register of whatever spoils of Egypt reside therein, is a recipe for institutional suicide.
Therefore, it is imperative for the church to stay on message—and to return unapologetically, and with a profound creativity, to her rich narrative of liberation from the archons of this world through the deepest sources of her Christological truth (ressourcement). Neither a moribund traditionalism with its scorched earth rejection of all things modern as demonic error-factories nor an adolescent, “progressive” chasing after the fads of the day will do.
Furthermore, the solution is not to be found in some “golden mean” compromise that Bishop Robert Barron has famously called “beige Catholicism.” There is of course a place for simple, everyday Catholic piety and practice. But given our cultural decay, I fear that there is no “there there” to hold status quo Catholicism together, absent a significant revitalisation of the church’s core message among rank-and-file Catholics who live in the crushing, soul-killing boredom of the culture of the cul de sac.
Therefore, the task at hand requires both the deconstruction of false narratives and the construction of creative and provocative alternatives that have bite, and that present themselves as true accounts of the really real, rather than as boutique shop therapeutic spiritualties, which are, in truth, toothless and banal. It is my prayer that, whoever the next pope may be, that he be a man cut from the same cloth as Pope St John Paul II and Pope Benedict, since both of those popes embodied precisely this awareness. They both made mistakes, as all popes do, but they positioned the church to stay “on message” and encouraged new ecclesial movements to put that message into action.
In his better moments, Pope Francis did as well. But his papacy was marred by too many performative contradictions that short-circuited any true revitalisation of the church’s core members, and that seemed to have no controlling narrative beyond a constant pitting of mercy against truth. His “field hospital” analogy for the church is a good one, but all too often it came across as little more than a latitudinarian tolerance for attitudes and behaviors that are, in truth, spiritually destructive. Thus the Francis field hospital often seemed more like a hospice than a hospital. After all, a field hospital is still a hospital, which means that when the triage is completed and the sickest patients are given the most immediate attention, healing disease is still the goal.
The church cannot be a place where we simply hold the hands of those who are spiritually damaged with an air of “we are all in this mess together;” the church must offer a clear indication of the way out of the mess. Pastoral gradualism is definitely needed, especially for the hard cases, but as a wise man once stated, “life always seems hopelessly grey when you lose sight of moral principle.”
Allow me therefore, by way of conclusion, to deconstruct one false narrative.
I get emails all the time from people complaining that I just do not understand that the message of Pope Francis was simply a warning against pharisaical judgmentalism and rigidity; that all he was doing was counseling patience and mercy for the sinner. Michael Sean Winters at the National Catholic Reporter refers to Catholics like me as seekers after “Kantian moral certitude” who do not understand the “messiness” of life.
But this is a false narrative, and one that has gained traction of late. It shows that Winters understands neither Kant nor the true nature of Christian moral certitude. And it is a narrative that we must not allow to take root. By Winters’ account, even Pope John Paul II was guilty of seeking Kantian moral certitude. The philosophers and theologians who have been critical of Pope Francis on this score have done so precisely because his message did come across, quite often, as a criticism of moral certitude as inherently simplistic and harsh. That does not make the critics “conservatives.” It makes them clear-eyed analysts of a complex pontificate.
[Dr Larry Chapp, a retired professor of theology at De Sales University in Allentown, Pennsylvania, is the host of the Gaudium et Spes 22 podcast and the co-founder, with his wife Carmina, of the Dorothy Day Catholic Worker Farm in Harveys Lake, Pennsylvania.]