John L. Allen Jr., a journalist admired for his informed coverage of the Vatican, much of it derived from his extraordinary insider access to the church’s power players that some critics said put him too close to his sources, died on Jan. 22 in Rome. He was 61.
His death, from stomach cancer, at a hospice facility, was announced by the Catholic news website Crux, which he founded.
For 25 years, Catholic Church watchers paid close attention to the reporting that Mr. Allen did, first as the Vatican correspondent for the National Catholic Reporter, and then as the executive editor of Crux and as a columnist for it.
Mr. Allen seemed to know everybody at the Holy See, from the lowest functionaries to the popes themselves — from John Paul II to Leo XIV — and it showed in the depth of his reporting. He arrived in Rome in 2000, “a somewhat sloppily put together Midwestern man” from Kansas, the NCR journalist Christopher White wrote, and soon became an insider’s newsman with a passion for explaining a mysterious and opaque institution to the laity.
He often dined with his sources, and he reaped the benefits. Some criticized him for being too close to the Vatican and not tough enough on the church over the sex-abuse scandal that burst into view in the 1980s, but nobody questioned his access to the Curia’s inner reaches.
Mr. Allen wrote 11 books on the church, including several about Pope Benedict XVI and one about Opus Dei, the secretive and powerful Catholic organization. He was regularly called on by other news organizations, including CNN and The New York Times, to offer commentary on what was going on behind the scenes in Rome.
“From the end of the 20th century until his death, Allen was essential reading for anyone who cared about the inner workings of the Vatican,” the Rev. Thomas J. Reese, a veteran religion journalist and Jesuit priest, wrote after his death. “I, like many of my fellow Vatican observers and opiners, always checked to see what he said.”
Mr. Allen had been in Rome for barely four years as the National Catholic Reporter’s Vatican correspondent when, in 2004, Kenneth L. Woodward, Newsweek’s religion editor and writer, called him “the journalist other reporters — and not a few cardinals — look to for the inside story on how all the pope’s men direct the world’s largest church.”
Four years later, on a flight taking Benedict XVI to the United States for a five-day visit, Mr. Allen was selected to ask the first question of the pope. The Vatican press officer turned to Benedict and said, “Holy Father, this man needs no introduction.”
In the major Vatican stories Mr. Allen covered — the conservatism of Pope Benedict, the sluggish response of John Paul II to the sex-abuse scandal, the liberalism of Pope Francis — he earned respect across most of the political spectrum for his neutrality.
But that attempt at balance, and his close relationships with Vatican officials, led to blind spots, in the view of some critics.
In 2004, after the priest who was head of the Legionaries of Christ, a powerful church order, was accused of having sexually abused minors, Mr. Allen wrote in his NCR column, “I think the only honest answer is that the pope and his senior aides obviously do not believe the charges.”
What appeared to be a defense of Pope John Paul II drew a rebuke from the veteran Catholic journalist Jason Berry, who first broke the scandal in the mid-1980s.
In a letter to Mr. Allen, which Mr. Allen printed at length in a later column, Mr. Berry accused him of being too protective of the pope and called him an “apologist” for the Legionaries’ leader, the Rev. Marcial Maciel Degollado, against whom, he added, the evidence was “overwhelming.”
As detailed later in a church report, Father Maciel was found to have sexually abused dozens of minors. He was removed from the ministry in 2006 by Pope Benedict and ordered to observe a “life of penance.” He died two years later.
“John moved seamlessly in Vatican society,” Mr. Berry, who wrote “Vows of Silence: The Abuse of Power in the Papacy of John Paul II” (2004, with Gerald Renner), said in an interview. “He was very plugged in. He sometimes got over-close to the people he covered.”
It was that very closeness that often yielded unusual insight, and scoops. A dinner invitation that Mr. Allen extended to Cardinal Robert Prevost in October 2024 allowed him to spot the qualities that would clinch the papal job for the cardinal, now Pope Leo XIV, the first American pontiff.
In his Crux column in May 2025, Mr. Allen singled out Cardinal Prevost as a leading papabile, or papal candidate, calling him “a moderate, balanced figure, known for solid judgment and a keen capacity to listen, and someone who doesn’t need to pound his chest to be heard.”
Mr. Allen’s own moderation and balance was on full display in the obituary he wrote about Pope Francis in Crux. The judgment was nuanced, careful to offend neither the late pope’s fans nor his detractors.
“There were moments when Pope Francis seemed almost the Mikhail Gorbachev of Roman Catholicism, a reformer whose willingness to buck tradition made him a sensation outside the church and among marginal Catholics,” Mr. Allen wrote, “but whose standing within his own flock, especially those most devoted and committed, could be uneven.”
John Lewis Allen Jr. was born on Jan. 20, 1965, in Hays, Kan., to Eileen and John Lewis Allen Sr., a U.S. Army veteran and minor league baseball player who died when John was young.
John Jr. graduated from Thomas More Prep-Marian high school in Hays in 1983 and went on to earn a B.A. in philosophy from Fort Hays State University and an M.A. in religious studies from the University of Kansas.
He taught journalism at Notre Dame High School in Sherman Oaks, Calif., from 1993 to 1997, before joining the National Catholic Reporter, becoming its Rome bureau chief in 2000. In 2014, he was hired by The Boston Globe, where he started Crux, a website focusing on news about the church. When The Globe ended its sponsorship of Crux in 2016, Mr. Allen carried on with it independently.
His books include “The Rise of Benedict XVI: The Inside Story of How the Pope Was Elected and Where He Will Take the Catholic Church” (2005); “Opus Dei: An Objective Look Behind the Myths and Reality of the Most Controversial Force in the Catholic Church” (2007); and “The Future Church: How Ten Trends Are Revolutionizing the Catholic Church” (2009).
Mr. Allen is survived by his wife, Elise Allen, a journalist at Crux.
After his death, tributes in the Catholic press emphasized his determination to unravel the Vatican’s mysteries. But Mr. Allen was equally keen to determine where the future of the church lay.
“The most significant transition in Catholicism in the 20th century was a demographic shift from the global north to south in terms of the faith’s center of gravity,” he wrote in his obituary about Pope Francis. “And as history’s first pope from the developing world, Francis put a face and an agenda on that epochal change.”
Susan C. Beachy and Sheelagh McNeill contributed research.
Adam Nossiter has been bureau chief in Kabul, Paris, West Africa and New Orleans and is now a writer on the Obituaries desk.
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