Editor’s Note: After the death of Pope Francis, cardinals met in the Vatican earlier this year to select a new pope. Steve Harmon traveled to Rome to cover the conclave for Good Faith Media. His book, Encountering Pope Leo XIV: Baptist Reflections on the Beginning of a Pontificate, is the result of that experience. It is now available via Nurturing Faith Books. Below is an excerpt from the book.
Monday, May 5 was my first full day in Rome covering preparations for the papal conclave that would convene on Wednesday afternoon. It began with the requisite caffeinated fuel for the day from the best place in Rome to get it according to Catholic theologian Peter Casarella, who introduced it to me during the first Rome meeting of Phase II of our Baptist-Catholic ecumenical dialogue in 2007: Sant’ Eustachio Il Caffè at 82 Piazza Sant’ Eustachio, which in the providence of God was a mere 250 feet from my lodgings at the beginning of my walk to Vatican City. Enjoying a cappuccino doppio accompanied by a caffè doppio en route to the Holy See Press Office would become a daily ritual. (I told my wife Kheresa, who was not able to accompany me to Rome and gave me good-natured grief via text message about what I was enjoying, that I ordered the second beverage for her vicarious enjoyment.)
After picking up my press credentials from the Holy See Press Office on the right side of the street leading into St. Peter’s Square, I settled into the daily routine of journalists covering the lead-up to the conclave: morning writing using the Vatican briefing room as a work space, a 1:00 PM press briefing from Holy See Press Office Director Matteo Bruni, afternoon writing in the briefing room, and an 8:00 PM press briefing from Bruni, followed by consolidating notes from the briefings and responses to questions from the press pool in preparation for writing the next dispatch. All this was of course interspersed with the enjoyment of nourishment from nearby eateries.
In the briefing room, I recognized Colleen Dulle, Associate Editor at America Magazine and co-host of America Media’s “Inside the Vatican” podcast. I introduced myself to her and let her know of my appreciation for her podcast, to which I’d been listening every time an episode dropped from the death of Pope Francis through my time in Rome. It was an indispensable resource for orienting me to the events I was now covering. When I was back in my guest room Monday night, I watched a video clip from the recording of a new episode of “Inside the Vatican” that morning and realized that when I met Colleen, I also met Scott Detrow, weekend host of NPR’s “All Things Considered” program who had hosted the show from Rome that weekend and was there to cover the conclave for NPR. Scott was a guest for the “Inside the Vatican” podcast to talk about what it was like for secular media to cover the conclave. The name didn’t register initially when we were introduced, but his voice sounded familiar, and now I knew why. A month returning home from the conclave, I learned that Scott and NPR senior editor of religion and spirituality Daniel Burke were co-authoring a forthcoming biography of the new pope.
While waiting for my first briefing as part of the press pool, I remembered having a similar experience much earlier in life. As I high school student, I had served on the school newspaper staff, ultimately as editor, and had a part-time job as a sports correspondent reporting on my school’s home varsity football games for The Cameron Herald, a newspaper serving a town about 15 miles from my hometown of Rosebud. I competed in interscholastic journalism competitions, and in my senior year I advanced to the state feature writing competition at the University of Texas in Austin. Before writing our stories, we participated in a press conference with a mystery interviewee about whom we would write, who turned out to be Kathy Cronkite, daughter of CBS Evening News anchor Walter Cronkite who was working at an Austin radio station and five years earlier had published a book on the experiences of children of celebrities. During the next week in Rome, I would realize that the vocational skills involved in research and writing in historical theology and journalism were not dissimilar: both required rigorous investigation of something before writing about it, and in the case of journalism, the subject of investigation and writing is something currently happening that must be contextualized by investigating the history that leads to it.
Monday’s press briefings focused on the activities of the cardinals, who had been meeting in daily congregations each day since the funeral of Pope Francis. The interventions (speeches) made by cardinals in the daily congregations prepare the way for conclave by making one another aware of the experiences of the church in the regions where they live, their sense of the challenges faced by the church locally and globally, and their perspectives regarding the sort of leader the church needs in a new pope.
They can also provide previews of potential candidates for the papacy. It had been reported that in the 2013 conclave that elected Jorge Mario Bergoglio as Pope Francis, the brief intervention by Bergoglio played a role in his eventual election on the fifth ballot of that conclave. Cardinals recognized to speak were granted seven minutes but routinely exceeded that limit. Bergoglio finished his speech in less than five minutes, and some of his fellow cardinals were said to comment to each other on how compellingly and succinctly he stated the issues confronting the church. Might one of the cardinals in the preparations for this conclave offer a similarly significant intervention, I wondered?
In Monday’s congregation sessions, cardinals spoke of qualities that the future pope should possess. As Bruni summarized this aspect of the cardinals’ speeches, the pope must be “a figure who must be present, close, capable of being a bridge and a guide…favoring access to communion for a disoriented humanity marked by the crisis of the world order; a shepherd close to the real life of the people.” Bruni said that the cardinals also emphasized that the pope is called to be a “true pastor” who is able to “go beyond the confines of the Catholic Church” to promote dialogue and build relationships with people who belong to other religious traditions and cultures.
Several cardinals who spoke on Monday mentioned the mission of the church in relation to challenges that the church must address. The church must embrace “caritas” (love/charity) as central in fulfilling its calling to provide relief, defend the poor, and bear witness to the justice of the Gospel. They characterized the church as a missionary church that, in the words of Bruni’s summary, “must not withdraw into herself, but rather accompany every man and women towards the living experience of the mystery of God.”
Challenges this missionary church must address mentioned by the cardinals include care for creation, war, and migration. Several cardinals offered testimonies effects of the violent conflicts taking place in their countries. The cardinals identified migration as a significant issue, speaking of migrants as “a gift for the church” and of the urgency of the church’s task of accompanying migrants and supporting their faith during their journeys and in the countries where they arrive.
One question that loomed over the 2025 papal conclave was this: will the successor to Pope Francis continue and implement his emphasis on the Catholic Church as a communion of discernment that listens to all voices, or will he offer qualifications or encourage redirections of this path?
Between Monday’s press briefings, I saw America magazine editor at large and frequent ABC News commentator on Catholicism Fr. James Martin at a restaurant on Borgo Santo Spirito next to the headquarters of the Jesuit order, Il Wine Bar De’ Penitenzieri, which quickly became my favorite Vatican City restaurant. I introduced myself to him as a Baptist theologian from North Carolina covering the conclave for Good Faith Media. He observed, “It must be interesting for a Southern Baptist to cover the conclave,” and I was able to tell him about the “Baptists Formerly Known as Southern,” a.k.a. the Cooperative Baptist Fellowship, that became my ecclesial home in the wake of the rightward turn of the Southern Baptist Convention.
I asked Fr. Martin if he had any predictions for the length of the conclave, and he said, “I think it will be a short one.” He speculated that in the present context, the cardinals would not want a lengthier conclave to give the impression that they are divided among themselves.
We would soon see whether Fr. Martin was right about this.
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Professor of Historical Theology at Gardner-Webb University. Harmon is serving as a GFM correspondent for the papal conclave in Rome.
