At a sidewalk café and wine bar on Via dei Penitenzieri near St. Peter’s Square last month—the day before the funeral for Pope Francis drew a quarter of a million people to the square—a friend handed me his phone and said, “Look at this. It’s like a Renaissance tableau.” I looked and said, “It is!”
The friend was James Martin: Jesuit priest, best-selling author, and adviser to the Vatican’s Dicastery for Communication. He was also a delegate to the late pope’s Synod on Synodality, the oddly named gathering in Rome over two Octobers, in 2023 and 2024. The synod, an exercise in collective listening, centered on monthlong meetings of several hundred attendees, was one of Francis’s main efforts to carry out his vision for the Roman Catholic Church. The cell phone photograph was one Martin had snapped “on the fly” on the final day of the synod in the Paul VI Audience Hall, a venue a short distance from the café where we were sitting. It’s an image that at once captures the extraordinary openness of Pope Francis’s pontificate and points to the challenge facing this week’s conclave—and the next pope.
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The photo shows Pope Francis seated among delegates, who cluster around him: scarlet-capped cardinals, violet-capped bishops, women religious (nuns), and lay people in garments of many colors. Everybody is in high spirits, strikingly at ease with the pope. Some are wearing big crucifixes, others lanyards with credentials. Several are taking pictures: In the foreground, a delegate thrusts their phone out to capture the moment; at the upper edge, a nun in a full-on white habit and wimple snaps a picture of the bishop at her side. Close to Francis are two priests, and also two women: one, dressed in white, is kneeling, while the other leans in, clad in a print dress and a headscarf. These four figures are akin to the magi in a nativity scene, people animated with piety and curiosity.
As for the pope: Francis, more robust-looking that day than he would be after acute respiratory failure in March, is looking at the pair before him with the attentiveness, even intimacy, that led me, in a 2015 Vanity Fair profile, to call him the pope who looks “the whole world in the eye.”
The sheer vivacity of the scene calls to mind Renaissance works like The School of Athens, Raphael’s great fresco (1509-1511), now in the Vatican Museums, which depicts a gathering of classical philosophers and learned figures—each at once vividly personal and yet allegorically representative. And as Martin and I considered the photograph further over coffee and orange juice amid the bustle of the café—a go-to spot for Vatican officials and journalists—we agreed that it conjured a painting we’d seen, independently, in the remarkable show of early Renaissance art from Siena at New York City’s Metropolitan Museum last fall. This is Duccio’s The Raising of Lazarus, from 1310-11, where the cheek-by-jowl closeness of the figures suggests the tight-knit character of the community Jesus gathered around him, and of 14th-century Siena too.
So a tableau it is. And yet this is a photograph that belongs very definitely to the Catholic era characterized by Pope Francis’s leadership. For it’s an image of the pope and the faithful in a relationship that scarcely existed before Cardinal Jorge Mario Bergoglio of Buenos Aires was elected pope in 2013. The Church “needs nearness, proximity,” Francis told an interviewer in August of that year, and the synod was one way he sought to make that figure of speech real. The women here are pioneers: Prior to Francis, few women enjoyed proximity to the pope or were asked to take roles in the Vatican power structure. The same is true of the delegates from Asia and Africa: their presence at the pope’s elbow was at once a structural breakthrough and the expression of a demographic change, whereby Catholicism is thinning out in Europe and North America but growing in the Global South. Which means that this cell phone tableau is an image of the future—of a global community of believers that Francis brought near.
A few days later I asked Martin to tell me more about the photo and recall the mood when he took it. “Well, who is in there? Crouching down on the pope’s right, at the pope’s right hand, sort of looking excitedly into his face, is Philippe Bordeyne, a Jesuit theologian, who looks just delighted to be so close to the pope. Above him, beaming down, is Cardinal Mario Grech, an archbishop from Malta, who really was running the synod. Toward the right side with the grey beard is Giacomo Costa, an Italian Jesuit also instrumental” in coordinating the meetings.
“The woman in the green or aqua-colored sweater, also smiling at the pope, is María Luisa Berzosa”—a Spanish nun of the Daughters of Jesus, and a consultor to the Synod of Bishops—one of the most powerful women in Catholic history, and a woman who was said to have had the pope’s ear. “Way in the back of the picture, near the image of Mary,” Martin continued, is Julia Osęka, then a 22-year-old undergraduate at Saint Joseph’s University in Philadelphia, said to be the youngest woman in attendaence.
Martin, who is staying in Rome through the conclave, which will begin on Wednesday, May 7, as a commentator for ABC News, says that he looks at the photo often, refreshed by the “delight” in it. “There’s delight that comes from being around the pope, there’s delight that comes from finishing the synod, and there’s simply a delight from being in a community like that. It’s just a picture of great joy.”
The image stands in stark contrast to the conclave. That forum will be all men, all cardinals, all in late middle age or older, all dressed in red and white. And rather than jostling spontaneously together, the cardinals will likely be kept in line both by conclave rituals and by the Vatican habit whereby clerical eminences flock together in language groups or blocs. Will the Italians regain the papacy, and if so, will it be through an alliance with the North Americans, or the Latin Americans? Will the Ladbrokes-touted man whose skull-capped visage is all over social media wind up confirming the adage that “he who enters the conclave a pope leaves it a cardinal”? Those questions, legitimized by the hit film Conclave, will dominate the coming days. But Martin’s photograph is a reminder that things don’t have to be that way. This digital tableau reflects the variety and openness Francis brought to the Catholic leadership—qualities that this observer hopes the next pope will carry forward.
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