John Allen, Our Friend at the Vatican

It was an early April morning, twenty-one years ago, when I first met John Allen. Returning with a cup of coffee to our hotel room in Puerto Vallarta, my wife had turned on CNN to watch coverage of the recent death of John Paul II. The beloved pope and the coming conclave were subjects of mourning and fascination around the world. 

And John Allen was the one who told us about it. 

Thin, bespectacled, and sharp in mannerism and analysis, John Allen was the first journalist, in my experience, who unfolded the intricate operations and abiding faith of the Vatican with the nose of a newsman and the heart of a Catholic. He was this rare blend of beat reporter and believing Catholic, almost unheard of in the soulless landscape of the modern media. 

And John Allen was the best. 

As a Vatican correspondent for the National Catholic Reporter, a senior Vatican analyst for CNN, and editor in chief of the Catholic news website Crux, John spent decades telling us about the operations of the Church in the modern world. He never shied away from explaining the Vatican’s mechanisms of power and operators of influence. After all, the Vatican, run by human beings, was not devoid of faction and frustration, intrigue and machination. 

But John didn’t stop there. 

He also reminded us that the Church is the locus of God’s mission on earth. Somehow, John’s analysis could uncynically blend sausage-making with the Sacraments, politicking with praying, clay feet with a heavenward gaze. His sense, conveyed so well in his reporting, was that while the disciples walk in the grit of the trenches, they are forever trying to journey toward God. John’s reporting asserted one thing above all else—there is nothing so majestic and so intriguing as the Church on Earth. Nothing. 

At Word on Fire, we were blessed to have John co-author To Light a Fire on the Earth: Proclaiming the Gospel in a Secular Age with Bishop Robert Barron. John also served as the fellow of communications and media with the Word on Fire Institute. Of the eight pillars informing Word on Fire’s mission, John embodied “Affirmative Orthodoxy” to his very end. 

Several years after enjoying John’s trenchant, faith-filled analysis of the late Pope John Paul II and the coming conclave, I was received into the Catholic Church. John’s seriousness and joy as both Catholic and newsman set an enduring standard for the kind of Catholic I daily strive to be. 

Thank you, John, for being our friend at the Vatican.

Requiescat in pace.