Sign up for The Media Today, CJR’s daily newsletter.
The Holy See Press Office is tucked under the arcades of Via della Conciliazione, just outside St. Peter’s Square, in a 1930s building constructed during the Fascist era as part of an urban renovation overseen by Mussolini. The boulevard symbolizes the reconciliation (hence its name) between the Catholic Church and the Italian state, an axis that visually and politically connected the Vatican to the heart of Rome.
On February 14, when the news broke that Pope Francis had been admitted to Rome’s Gemelli Hospital with a complex lung infection, the press hall, normally home to no more than a dozen wire reporters, filled up with hundreds of journalists of every nationality. Quiet chatter turned into urgent phone calls and multilingual exchanges as reporters jostled for updates and awaited the next official bulletin delivered by the Vatican’s spokesmen.
But during papal health crises, another focal point emerges: Gemelli Hospital, just over three miles to the northwest, which has treated popes for nearly a century and was once nicknamed “Vatican III” by Pope John Paul II. The updates given there are as much theological as medical: the hospital’s chaplain lately invoked the phrase Spes contra spem (“Hope against hope”). As of this writing, the pope remains in critical condition, with a diagnosis of pneumonia and bronchitis, and signs of early kidney failure.
Francis, eighty-eight, the former archbishop of Buenos Aires and the first pope from Latin America, has faced previous health challenges and has been using a wheelchair since May 2022 due to persistent pain caused by osteoarthritis of the knee. Despite the severity of his condition, Francis remains active from his hospital room. He phoned a parish in Gaza and appointed a nun to lead the Vatican’s administrative branch, the Governatorato.
As with any specialized beat—Washington, Hollywood, Wall Street, the European Union—the Vatican press corps has its rules, traditions, and obsessions. For this piece I interviewed several longtime members of the press corps, and learned something new, even as an Italian journalist who has done investigative reporting and been based in Milan, Rome, and Naples.
It was one of the biggest scoops in centuries: on February 11, 2013, Giovanna Chirri, while watching what seemed like a routine consistory, heard Pope Benedict XVI say in Latin: “My strength, due to the burdens of age, is no longer suitable for properly administering the Petrine office.“ Chirri, relying on her high school Latin, immediately grasped the significance: for the first time in six hundred years, a pope was resigning. Without hesitation, she called her editors and broke the story for ANSA, Italy’s leading news agency.
Chirri, who was with ANSA from 1987 to 2017, first set foot in the Vatican press room in 1994. It was the era of Joaquín Navarro-Valls, the Spanish journalist, physician, and academic who ran the Holy See Press Office from 1984 to 2006. “Navarro’s secretary would check the length of female journalists’ skirts—and this was 1994, not the Middle Ages,” Chirri recalled. “For several years, I was head of the Vatican bureau, but whenever someone entered looking for something, they always turned to my male colleague.“
The press corps has diversified over the years.
Christopher White, an American journalist at the National Catholic Reporter, based in Kansas City, Missouri, has covered the Vatican for over a decade and moved to Rome four years ago. Asked whether Latin or Italian was more important for the beat, he laughed. “The official language of the Vatican isn’t Italian, but bad Italian, because everyone comes here from all over the world, and the best we can manage is bad Italian,” he said.
Language barriers are only part of the challenge. The real hurdle, he explained, is adapting to the Vatican’s deeply formal and sometimes archaic bureaucratic culture: “It’s still a place where, sometimes, when you’re trying to contact people, you have to write physical letters rather than send a text or an email.” Some offices, he noted, still rely on fax machines. “In many ways,” he said, “it feels like stepping into a different era.”
Covering the Vatican is not like covering any other state. It is a complex world, with its own government, foreign policy, and economic system—yet at the same time, it is a spiritual center. “The challenge is that you have to find the news within a homily, which is not exactly the kind of speech a head of state would give,” says Manuela Tulli, ANSA’s current Vatican correspondent, who has been covering the pope since his inauguration, in 2013. “Yet, through liturgy, Pope Francis often sets the agenda on key issues.”
For this reason, the Vaticanisti, as they are known in Italian, must attend all papal audiences. Every day, the pope holds four or five meetings, and the workday for a Vatican reporter starts early—especially as, with age, Francis has begun scheduling his audiences even earlier. “For me, the day begins with the pope’s voice, because I attend every audience. Even at home, my family knows exactly what time the Angelus is,” Tulli says. “Accompanying him through these difficult times means witnessing the life of someone who, while not our friend, is a constant presence in our lives.”
Though technically an independent state, the Vatican functions more like a neighborhood in the heart of Rome, in which proximity is key to accessing information. “The Vatican is a small village,” White told me. “If you want to cover it properly, you must live in Rome. You might run into a cardinal you’ve been trying to interview while having dinner with friends in a restaurant.”
But covering the Vatican involves more than the highest-ranking cardinals and bishops who run the Curia. The best reporters cultivate sources at every level. Secretaries, collaborators, and insiders working behind the scenes often possess crucial information that never ends up in official statements. Developing these relationships is critical to succeeding in this work.
It was Benedict who brought the Vatican into the era of social media, launching the first papal account (@pontifex) on Twitter (now X), which today boasts tens of millions of followers worldwide. But it was his successor, Francis, who revolutionized the Vatican’s media strategy with his direct and personal approach to communication, making him one of the most accessible popes in history.
“Pope Francis is a media superstar, and this makes Vatican communication unusual,” White says. “He bypasses official channels, speaks directly to the public, and press officers often don’t know what he’s going to say.”
Which is not to say the pope doesn’t keep a watchful eye on those traditional outlets. As Chirri recalled: “On my trip to Rio de Janeiro for World Youth Day, I introduced myself to the pope, and he said, ‘Ah, ANSA, the one that knows what I’m doing before I do.’”
On the evening of January 11, 2022, Javier Martínez-Brocal, a Spanish journalist for the newspaper ABC, was walking near the Pantheon in central Rome when he noticed Francis emerging from the StereoSound record shop, a classical CD in hand. Martínez-Brocal captured the moment on video, which quickly went viral. The pope, caught off guard, told the journalist, “These paparazzi won’t even let me move freely!”
Wanting to explain himself, Martínez-Brocal wrote a letter to the Vatican, to which Francis responded, saying, “You don’t know how much I miss walking through the streets peacefully.” This exchange sparked a correspondence that eventually led to their writing a book together, a project that took shape after Benedict’s death, in 2022.
“There’s this black legend that you were enemies, but that doesn’t match what I saw in him and what I saw in you,” Martínez-Brocal told the pope, explaining the idea behind the book. Francis immediately agreed, saying, “Benedict deserves it.” To write the book, they met three times in person and spoke twice over the phone, a rare level of access granted to very few journalists. (Fernando Meirelles, whose 2019 film The Two Popes starred Anthony Hopkins as Benedict and Jonathan Pryce as Francis, did not get such access.)
Francis’s direct engagement with the public set him apart from his predecessors, even John Paul II, himself a master communicator. “He never trusted intellectual elites or traditional media,” said Massimo Faggioli, professor of historical theology at Villanova University. “That’s why he gives unexpected interviews to unconventional outlets.” Faggioli noted that Francis has made numerous television appearances and has frequently given interviews outside the Vatican-affiliated news outlets. “I don’t know if he’s the most media-savvy pope, but he’s certainly the most interviewed pope in history,” Faggioli observed.
While not much discussed in the open, whispers about papal succession have inevitably begun. Upon the death of a pope, the Vatican convenes the conclave to elect his successor. This secretive and highly ritualized process captures the world’s attention. Billions of believers and observers will turn their eyes to St. Peter’s Square—already teeming with crowds gathered for the Jubilee—attempting to decipher the signals emerging from behind the sealed doors of the Sistine Chapel, where the voting takes place.
Conclave, the 2024 film by the Swiss Austrian director Edward Berger, starring Ralph Fiennes, is in contention for multiple Academy Awards, including Best Picture, with the winners to be announced Sunday in Los Angeles. While the film contains some implausible premises, it does reflect the diversity of the College of Cardinals, with growing influence from Africa, Asia, and Latin America. Vatican journalism has become increasingly global, demanding a deep understanding of theological, geopolitical, and demographic dynamics that extend far beyond Rome.
“An interesting thing about Conclave is the lack of media pressure,” Faggioli said. “It makes it seem as though the cardinals gather without external influence, whereas in reality media scrutiny has always been part of the process. In the past, conclaves protected cardinals from Roman noble families’ influence; today, it’s the outside world that applies constant pressure.”
In his new book Conclave: Rules for Electing the Next Pope, Martínez-Brocal argues that the real question is not “Who will be the next pope?” but “What kind of pope are the cardinals looking for?”
“The conclave doesn’t function like a political race,” he said, acknowledging the skeptics. “The cardinals don’t enter with fixed candidates and programs, but rather, they gather to assess the church’s priorities and the state of the world before identifying the right leader.”
Some journalists argue that, outside of major events such as illnesses, resignations, and transitions, the Vatican beat is in decline, reflecting the diminished stature of Italy more broadly. “Vatican journalism is struggling; many major outlets have closed their Rome bureaus,” Faggioli said. “Italy’s decline as an international power is mirrored in the shrinking coverage of the Vatican.”
Around two hundred and fifty correspondents are part of the association of Vatican journalists and registered with the Holy See Press Office. “The Vatican beat will always exist because the Vatican will always exist. It’s like asking whether City Hall in New York will continue to exist,” said Philip Pullella, a retired Italian American Reuters correspondent who is writing a book about his four decades covering the Vatican.
During his long tenure in Rome, Pullella extensively covered the Vatican Bank, officially known as the Institute for the Works of Religion, a secretive institution entangled in decades of financial scandals. (One such scandal was dramatized in The Godfather Part III, Francis Ford Coppola’s 1990 conclusion to the saga.) Despite Pullella’s critical reporting, Francis granted him multiple interviews, recognizing his credibility and professionalism. “I established a reputation for working for a serious news organization, being a serious reporter, but not being soft on the Vatican,” Pullella said.
Vatican reporters have traditionally focused on official statements, diplomatic affairs, and church doctrine, leaving investigative digging to outside journalists.
“To my recollection, the Vatican has never withdrawn a journalist’s accreditation,” said Tulli, ANSA’s Vatican correspondent, who is also the vice president of the Vatican journalists’ association. The pope’s greatest critics are American traditionalist media outlets that represent the church’s most conservative faction, Tulli said, and they are allowed to report freely.
However, the Vatican remains an absolute monarchy, where the pope holds full authority—including over what information is shared. “In every other country, journalists hold state officials accountable because taxpayers demand transparency,” Tulli said. “The Vatican isn’t bound by that logic.”
During his hospitalization, Francis took an unusually transparent approach in disclosing his condition. He had detailed medical bulletins delivered twice a day. But this level of disclosure is rare. For example, despite covering the Vatican for years, Tulli has repeatedly been denied an interview with the Vatican’s economic secretariat.
Transparency is especially elusive when it comes to the clergy sexual abuse scandal that has unfolded in recent decades. Investigating these crimes remains fraught with obstacles: access to information is tightly controlled, records are shielded from scrutiny, and the cover-ups outside and within the Vatican have been considerable.
Many Vatican correspondents tend to be believers, though reporters told me that they stay so long on the beat because it offers a unique and enduring challenge, not because of the faith. “What I love about the Vatican is that you’re in Italy, but your perspective is global,” Chirri, who was born and raised in Rome, told me. “It’s a form of journalism that gives you a worldwide outlook while staying at home, without needing to be a foreign correspondent.”
Has America ever needed a media defender more than now? Help us by joining CJR today.
