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The day after the veteran Rome-based journalist John Allen Jr died, on January 22nd, his widow and Crux colleague Elise Allen wrote that his real legacy was not his "legendary career", or his books, or even the way he rewrote the rules of Catholic journalism for a generation.
Rather, she wrote, "John’s greatest gift to the world was his big and generous heart. Everyone who was blessed enough to call themselves John’s friend bore witness to his gift for friendship, his limitless self-giving, and his insatiable desire to help and empower others whenever and however he could."
No doubt there will be more on this theme at the Requiem Funeral Mass being held for John at 3pm on Monday, 26th January, at the Basilica of Sant’Eugenio in Viale delle Belle Arti, 10. It’s not often that a Vatican journalist in Rome is given the equivalent of a ‘lying-in-state’ but those wishing to pay their respects can pray for his mortal body in the Antea Pavilion (Padiglione Antea) in Piazza Santa Maria della Pietà, 5, on Sunday, Jan 25: 9am–1pm and Monday, Jan. 26: 8am–12pm.
As his editor at the Herald after John and Elise became our Vatican Special Correspondent team in July 2023 (following GEM’s acquisition of the Herald) I can testify to his generosity of spirit, combined with a total professionalism – even when going into hospital for treatment he never missed a deadline – that made him a star amongst his peers.
As Melanie McDonagh, former acting editor of the Herald, put it as we raised a glass to John’s memory: “Everything he wrote was simply authoritative. He had a special gift of writing like a real journalist, not an academic or in church speak.”
Yet his deep knowledge of Catholic and Vatican history reflected his scholarly approach to writing, with honorary doctorates from four American universities including the University of Dallas. The last time I saw him was in April last year, smiling but frail, on the terrace of Rome’s Kolbe Hotel – named after Polish priest and writer St Maximilian Kolbe, Auschwitz martyr and patron saint of journalists – holding a glass of champagne after being awarded the New York-based Catholic Near East Welfare Association’s (CNEWA) ‘Faith & Culture Award’ for his ‘maddening ability to report on all things Catholic in the pursuit of truth, clarity and accountability’.
Back in 2014, John enjoyed a flash of media celebrity when he became, as Time magazine put it: “The Man Who Picked the Pope” when he – alone of all Vaticanistas – wrote an in-depth profile of Jesuit Jorge Mario Bergoglio, Cardinal of Buenos Aires – runner-up to Ratzinger in the 2005 Conclave and thought to have missed his moment to become Bishop of Rome – and tipped him to succeed Benedict XVI.
What I especially loved about John was that his prolific output, which included 11 books, endless podcasts and articles as well as being in demand on the Catholic lecture circuit, came from a writing ‘office’ – a hermit-like cell to be more exact – not some grand book-lined room in his sprawling Rome flat but rather a tiny monk-like broom cupboard off the main entrance hall. Above his computer screen was a photograph of Elise and himself being blessed by Pope Francis, presumably after their 2020 marriage (in Key West, Florida). I recall some other photos of him with other popes, an LED alarm clock and a Kansas Chiefs baseball cap.
But John was not infallible. When I last saw John, Pope Francis had died just a few weeks before and the award ceremony had been preceded by a pre-Conclave panel discussion that I had been on with John and Elise and other Vatican watchers. The debate was wide-ranging as we reflected on how Pope Francis had packed the 130-plus members of the College of Cardinals with his own appointments in the hope that the next pope would continue his legacy. “One thing is for sure,” said John, when pressed to name the likely favourites, “We will not have an American pope!”
Yet in true Allen scoop style, it turned out that, in a stroke of outrageous good journalistic luck, John and Elise had actually hosted Pope Leo XIV, as Cardinal Robert Prevost, for an informal supper – well, a shrimp cocktail with some horseradish from a local Ukrainian ex-pat store, John’s own Roman cacio e pepe recipe followed by chicken al Marsala and gelato – at the Allen apartment back in October 2024, less than six months before he became pope.
“He arrived without any retinue... he seemed for all the world like a neighbour dropping by for a visit... he’s skilled at not necessarily betraying what he thinks, preferring to draw others out rather than immediately revealing what’s in his own mind.”
Needless to say, the pasta supper resulted in Crux (via Elise) getting the world’s first exclusive interview with Pope Leo last September – three hours of talk which were turned into the first biography of Leo.
Many would say the above reticence to take sides could equally apply to Allen whose career success was built on being a standard-bearer-in-chief for ‘independent’ Catholic journalism. I recall him nodding approvingly when we once discussed how the Herald’s Vatican II coverage, under Irish-born maverick editor Desmond Fisher, had cemented the Herald's international reputation as the world’s leading Catholic newspaper for its fiercely objective and balanced coverage, standing apart from the Vatican propaganda promulgated by the majority of “Catholic” papers for most of the 20th century.
When John came on board the Herald in July 2023, I quoted from Desmond Fisher in my Editor’s letter for July 2023, saying that Allen belonged firmly to the same tradition of fearless Catholic editors who valued independence more than even access, or praise. In 1962, in his very first Catholic Herald editorial, Fisher wrote a Leader saying that a lay-owned and independent Catholic paper had “a freedom that is journalistically necessary if it is to carry out what it conceives to be its function and which relieves the hierarchy and the clergy generally of any responsibility for opinions expressed in its columns.”
John wholeheartedly agreed with this editorial mantra and led by example. His eleven books included two biographies of Pope Benedict XVI and Conclave, an insider’s guide to the byzantine and secretive process of papal elections that came out 14 years before Robert Harris’s thriller of the same title – made him (alongside America magazine’s veteran Vatican watcher Gerard O’Connell) the chef de band of the post-John Paul II generation of Vaticanistas in the same sort of way George Plimpton led the New Journalists of the Me Decade of 1960s and 70s.
Only there was nothing Gonzo or egotistical about his polished writing. Although he conceded that his first biography of Cardinal Ratzinger – written before he was elected Pope Benedict XVI – may not have been entirely balanced, he made up for any bias with the second volume that was a masterclass in balanced papal biography.
John decided to move to Rome in 2000 for the National Catholic Reporter (NCR) after he realised that it was impossible to be a true papal expert writing armchair commentary from the US. Ever since he based himself in Rome, the Vaticanista crown belonged to John, and not only his peers knew it. But popes also.
When, in April 2008, John stood up on the papal flight from Rome to Andrews Air Force Base, outside Washington, to ask the first ‘pool’ question to Pope Benedict XVI before his historic five-day visit to America, the Vatican press officer turned to the pope and said: “Holy Father, this man needs no introduction.” Fellow Vatican historian and Pope Benedict biographer George Weigel described Allen as “the best Anglophone Vatican reporter ever.”
The Herald was lucky to get not just John as their Special Vatican Correspondent in July 2023 but also his wife Elise, one of many brilliant journalists whose talents were encouraged and nurtured by John after he set up Crux. Thanks to a deal negotiated in Rome by Mark Ackermann, now CEO of the Catholic Herald, shortly after GEM acquired a controlling stake in the Herald in 2023, we enjoyed a ‘special relationship’ with John and Elise, and the resources of Crux as a news agency.
John wrote a monthly Herald ‘essay’ on papal affairs which always arrived on time and hardly ever needed any editing whatsoever. Not even a change of comma. When his first story was filed in June 2023, on the subject of Fiducia Supplicans, Pope Francis’s declaration on the non-liturgical blessings of same-sex couples which had caused a volcanic reaction in Catholic circles when it was published by the Dicastery of the Doctrine of the Faith (DDF) in December 2023, John immediately jumped on the historical parallels.
He defused the Vatican bomb by downplaying the document as a “walk down memory lane, recalling the dynamics of St Paul VI’s über-controversial encyclical letter Humanae Vitae of 1968, which confirmed the Church’s traditional ban on artificial contraception.”
From his first essay, I knew I was dealing with a master of his craft. After the first few stories, it was evident there was no need to ‘discuss’ what the subject was going to be as he had such a finely tuned Vatican radar that he was always two steps ahead of the rest of the Vatican pack. His essays were so well written and intelligent without being brazenly provocative that it almost became an embarrassment the number of times we made his articles our monthly cover story.
On one occasion, ahead of yet another papal visit to Portugal – Francis went four times – I had gone out to Lisbon to try and understand why the Vatican-Lisbon spiritual axis had become a new ‘special relationship’ for Francis, with his appointing no less than six red hats to a country of only seven million people (whilst cities like Milan and Paris had no cardinals).
When I asked him for his take, he came back, by return, noting that Mexico, with a Catholic population of 97.8 million, has just two cardinal-electors and that Pope Francis was also packing the electoral college with Portuguese speakers – “no fewer than 12 Portuguese-speaking cardinal-electors, including six from Brazil and one each from Cape Verde and East Timor.”
It was this sort of encyclopaedic detail that made John peerless. Many journalists wouldn’t always be so helpful, closely guarding their contacts and sources. “When you are in Rome, we’d love to have you over… and introduce you to the journo community” was a typical text. When I arrived at his apartment with Amanda Bowman and Michael La Civita of CNEWA we found half the Vatican press corps drinking wine whilst John held court on a wicker sofa on his sprawling terrace surrounded by his two pugs.
Michael La Civita, a senior director of CNEWA, said: “I first got to know John in Rome, circa 2002, over a bowl of rigatoni alla vodka. Despite the tough questioning that followed over several glasses of limoncello, I trusted him as someone who understood the contradictions and compromises our churches sometimes have to make in such inhospitable political climates.”
John loved an old-fashioned scoop and had a knack for being not only on the ‘pulse’ of the Catholic Church but, as I saw it as his editor, performing monthly open Vatican heart surgery for us using his years of craftsmanlike news experience, and reporting skills and unrivalled sources to give us unique insights into the inner sanctum of Curia thinking and politics.
He may have been a pioneer of Vatican journalism but his style was the very opposite of the Kool-Aid, attention-seeking journalists of the Me-Decade. His style was measured, low-key, conversational, engaging, never florid. An old-fashioned American newspaperman, straight out of The Front Page – think a Catholic version of Ben Hecht – combined with the sort of gracious manners and kindness of a Midwestern divinity professor who liked his wine, conversation, pasta and pugs.
Indeed, when I look at my phone to go back over our two years of messages, the very first message is not about papal affairs, or a piece to write, but is a photo of his and Elise’s two black pugs – my wife and I are also black pug obsessives. Indeed, it was exchanging photos of our black pugs that we first bonded when I sat next to John at a CNEWA dinner in the garden of the Kolbe Hotel in Rome hosted by Amanda Bowman and her close friend Cardinal Dolan, Archbishop of New York.
“John's generosity of spirit was especially evident in the hospitality he and Elise offered to the Catholic literati from near and far,” says Amanda Bowman of John. “Their terrace was a Roman salon, where the champagne flowed as did the great conversation. Fun and laughter prevailed as well as gravitas. Their beloved pugs added a special welcome to us all as we were immediately embraced by humans and dogs alike. His loss will be felt by all of us and his devotion to Elise was truly unforgettable. All who knew him will carry him in our hearts and prayers.”
No doubt the pugs will be present at the Requiem Funeral in Rome on Monday where tutti Vaticanista, along with a great many clergy, from priests to Curia cardinals, will be paying their respects. And for all we know, maybe an American pope who once dropped by for supper.
