Light and Shadow on the Via della Conciliazione
Wayfare Goes to Rome
History held its breath. Rome, the eternal city, was on pins and needles.
The conclave to select the new pope started the previous day, Wednesday, May 7, 2025. Smart money suggested a decision by Friday. But Thursday evening a wave started to move across Rome and the internet. A little after 18:00, church bells began ringing, and people eagerly checked their phones to see if the white smoke (“fumata bianca”) announcing the election of a new pope had billowed forth from a small smokestack to the immediate right of St. Peter's Basilica. In Rome for an unrelated conference, we, son and father, went online to confirm the news. Could it happen so soon?
It had! History exhaled white smoke.
We rushed to text our old friend and colleague, Manuel Martín Algarra, a professor at the University of Navarra in Spain, who was staying nearby. (He generously joked that the Angel Moroni had heralded the good news to him.) Later we would meet another friend, Fr. Jordi Pujol, a professor at the Pontifical University of the Holy Cross, who had been tied up with media appearances. We left within a few minutes for a brisk walk to St. Peter’s Square. Going with the flow, we could have followed the crowd to the Vatican if we hadn’t known the way, despite an occasional pedestrian swimming against the current like a salmon. Though we never made it to the Square itself, already bursting with expectant throngs, about twenty minutes later we pressed as close as we could on the grand Italian boulevard rimmed with embassies, the Via della Conciliazione, Conciliation Road.
It was a pleasant evening, with only a few clouds in the sky, the setting sun blinding the festive crowd for a while before a blessed shadow let us all see. It’s no mistake that the Catholic term for such an event is a celebration. The people pushed through one another without aggressiveness or malice. The vibe was a bit like a football game without the bloodlust to crush the opponent. It was less a crowd of fans than a flock of Christians.
A Christian flock armed with cell phones, of course. We were standing at a planetary nerve center of digital and mass media. The previous day we had walked around the same area and seen international media encampments, possibly 400 in number. We saw many news anchors delivering cameos in multiple languages with the Vatican in the background, but the only person we recognized was NBC’s Lester Holt, once ranked as the most trusted news anchor in America, interviewing a charismatic American Catholic leader whom our friends immediately identified as Bishop Robert Barron. On the rooftops of the surrounding buildings, shadowy personnel moved around behind newly built emplacements: camera crews, not snipers. The rental price for such a rooftop perch, we heard, was astronomical. (Holt provides a brief video tour of his own media set-up here.) The whole world was watching.
We made it through the jolly, jostling crowd as far as the Brazilian embassy on the grand boulevard when, to great cheers, the Dean of Cardinals stepped out onto the balcony and read in Latin, "Annuntio vobis gaudium magnum" ("I announce to you a great joy"). He paused for a few expectant seconds before uttering, with a slight grin, the famous words "Habemus papam" ("We have a pope"): Pope Leo XIV. The crowd roared, followed by a slightly perplexed whispering: just who is Pope Leo? It clearly was not Cardinal Parolin, the frontrunner, proving the old maxim that he who enters the conclave as a pope exits as a cardinal. We soon learned it was “the American.” The crowd soon roared "Leonem, Leonem, Leonem," using the proper Latin conjugation of his name. Our friend fell to his knees in gratitude to receive the first papal Urbi et Orbi blessing, which reaches out from the city of Rome to summon the whole world of the ecclesia. His spontaneous gesture was a good lesson for us, members of a church that usually treats the phrase “every knee shall bow” as happening on some future millennial day. Why not now?
Rome is a city with a past both ancient and very much alive. As we viewed the area around the Forum and Coliseum earlier that day, we were struck by how crowded narrow streets suddenly reveal wide open ancient vistas (portrait mode and landscape mode alternate endlessly). Every stone, every past and present, quivered in continuity with one another. In that chant of Leonem, we could have been hearing the acclamation of a new Roman emperor by the assembled vox populi. Perhaps we were.
Pope Leo XIV (born Robert Francis Prevost) emerged from the conclave with remarkable swiftness to become the first Augustinian Pope. He is also the first Pope from the USA, a White Sox fan from Chicago and a Villanova graduate in mathematics. He is moreover the first Pan-American Pope, holding Peruvian citizenship after twenty years of missionary work there. Finally, he is the first Pope since the fifth century with an African background (his mother's family hails from French-speaking Creole Louisiana). While the Church has a long, dark history, serious accusations against Pope Leo appear limited: these claims involve his negligence in not fully investigating sexual abuse allegations during his time in Peru—apparently a personal sin of omission rather than commission, although the institutional burden any leader bears must remain grave.
The buzz in the air was electric. His message that evening, booming over the massive loudspeakers and delivered in deliberately paced Italian, with a brief interlude in fluent Spanish, was one of pace and giustizia, peace and justice. (He also speaks French and Portuguese and reads Latin and German, in addition to his native American English.) He offered a vision of a synodal Church moving forward in personal and global peace while prioritizing the poor. He wore the traditional papal garments, in contrast to Francis’s preference for a simpler all-white costume. His swift ascent seems connected to his having checked many boxes at once. He appears to mix somewhat politically progressive ideas about economics and immigration with enough social and ritual conservatism; thus he takes seriously the Christian mission to liberate people from social, economic, and geopolitical captivity of every kind. He is also a savvy and well-liked operator within the labyrinthine Vatican bureaucracy, the Curia, a word that wonderfully connects care and ministry (think "ministering sister" as well as "ministry of magic").
His choice of name, Leo XIV, also powerfully connects the past to the present. As our friend Manuel pointed out, it indicates his intention to uphold his predecessor's commitment to Catholic social teaching. This doctrine, with its focus on the poor, was developed by Leo XIII into a progressive-era socioeconomic tradition. It prizes workers and laborers for their humanity and accepts capitalism only under strict conditions of state social responsibility. It also limits absolute ownership in favor of active stewardship for future generations. It sounds very good to our Zion-trained ears!
Perhaps most striking was the fact, as the evangelical opinion columnist David French argued in the New York Times, that President Trump was no longer the most important American. Hearken here to the new global leader calling for peace, justice, and care for the poor, a world leader that bears the calluses of service, not the callousness of ego. We were witnessing in Rome a global media event of the first order. As our colleagues Daniel Dayan, Elihu Katz, and Julia Sonnevend have long argued, we stood in the middle of a brief moment of communitas, the collapse of social hierarchy into warmth among strangers in a global media event. Neither one of us should have been there, given family and work obligations; yet we both knew that we were also supposed to be there, despite the calendar and carbon costs. We remember an earlier LDS-papal connection, Eugene England witnessing the assassination attempt on Pope John Paul II in 1981: in some photos of the event, England is said to be visible, reaching out to touch the Pope. We felt like we’d been sent to witness a much happier moment of papal continuity and renewal: returned missionaries, we recognized what it feels like when we are exactly where we are supposed to be.
In Rome, of all places. How remarkable that this shepherd, this successor to Peter, was preaching peace from the city that the Book of Revelation called the Great Whore of Babylon. There’s probably no single metric for comparative atrocity, but Roman history surely ranks high. Start with the cross on Golgotha, a Roman torture device, then Caligula and Nero: that’s about 50 years out of 2500! In Luke chapter 2, the imperial power of Caesar Augustus contrasts sharply with the homely scene of shepherds adoring mother and newborn in an out-of-the-way town in Palestine. Three centuries later, Constantine fused opulent empire and desert faith, and some of that long, abusive history got dragged in, and even spread, not without some enthusiasm, by certain popes. The streets of Rome are made of sampietrini–cobblestones, each one a potential weapon or building block. In a violent spasm of grandiose urban reform, Mussolini muscled through the Via della Conciliazione, with its wonderful name; we noticed an inscription at the base of a gigantic statue of Julius Caesar in nostalgic Latin: “renovated by the fascists.” SPQR was a terror-filled acronym for early Christians, and now it adorns the manhole covers. In Rome the vices and the virtues live side by side.
Any institution has skeletons in its closet, perhaps none more than the Vatican. It is a rare scholar who can gain even partial access to its massive library. The LDS doctrine of the great apostasy might seem to grant a theological license to imagine a church unburdened by history. Our Catholic sisters and brothers offer a salutary corrective: no thoughtful Catholic expects the Church to be perfect; that favorite fantasy was banished millennia ago by an ample record of chicanery. The very idea of institutional purity is a non-starter.
And yet we felt God working that evening amid the light and the smoke. President Oaks’s recent approving quotation from Orson F. Whitney sprang to mind: “God is using more than one people for the accomplishment of his great and marvelous work. . . . It is too vast, too arduous, for any one people.” As the ebullient crowd dispersed that evening, we took home the lesson that nothing, even Rome, is beyond the reach of redemption. Catholic history necessitates a less skittish understanding. The spirit is strong and can work with all kinds of materials. It’s not easily daunted by errors. It cowers before no task of learning. Perhaps the atonement reworks even the scars of history. Our friend Manuel likes to quote the saying of the twentieth-century Spanish saint, San Josemaría Escrivá: “Creo en mi Madre, la Iglesia Romana, a pesar de los pesares” (“I believe in my mother, the Roman Church, in spite of the despites, i.e., in spite of everything.”) At a time when Latter-day Saint thinkers are finding deeper connections with Catholics, this lesson might not be the least of shared wisdoms: you can be loyal to the church in spite of everything--in spite of the despites. As the first bishop of Rome once said, where else would we go?
Coda:
Before we arrived in Rome, we made a brief stop in London, where we visited the Tate Britain Museum and feasted our eyes on works by the great J. M. W. Turner. During a three-month stay in 1828 Rome, he painted the stunning painting known as Regulus. Its light dazzles, almost exploding onto a crowded scene of ships, harbor, people, and buildings. Those who have not visited Rome previously might be tempted, as we were, to look at it skeptically, thinking, “There’s no light like that on earth; here’s a Romantic fantasizing a sunny Mediterranean as an escape from the notoriously cloudy skies of England.” But during the evening of the inauguration, like our other evenings in Rome, the light glimmered an unusual golden and rose, warmly glancing off the ancient buildings, the particulate mix in the atmosphere, and the cupping surrounding mountains.
We felt as if in Rome we had walked into a Turner painting; what we first saw as romantic projection became physical fact. Turner, of course, was exaggerating the blinding quality of Roman light, but his canvas still catches a truth: so too did the light and smoke moving across the Via della Conciliazione that day. A skeptic might say that our enthusiasms are merely those of romantics blinded by the historic moment, fantasizing a grace in the wake of a long train of abuse; that we are apologists for brutality; and that our enthusiasm is just one more instance of Northern Europeans mistaking Rome for romance. Perhaps so. Yet, whether standing on Via della Conciliazione, or before a Turner painting, or even in the awe that sneaks through the cracks of mundane living, we all also glimpse God’s work moving among the setting sunlight, in the announcement, in the speech, in the jubilant crowd, in the deep friendship that unites us there and here, then and now.
There’s work ahead along the way of conciliation, of course. Much work. We join over a billion members of his church in praying for Pope Leo—together with all others who follow the master teacher once born in a far-flung corner of the Roman Empire.
Ben Peters, Wayfare Associate Editor, is a media scholar, author, and editor interested in Soviet century causes and consequences of the Information Age.
John Durham Peters teaches and writes about how how we live in the middle of things on earth. These things in the middle are often called media!
Photo credit to Ben Peters.
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