DENVER (CO)
Crux
July 6, 2019
By John L. Allen Jr.
Rome – Once upon a time, Rome in July was a tranquil place for those whose professional activities unfold in and around the vacation.
Popes suspended their audiences and left town, seeking to escape the brutal summer heat, so Vatican personnel and Vatican-watchers alike could while away leisurely days catching up on reading, taking long lunches and equally long naps, and just savoring la vita dolce. (Total honesty? Right now, I’m deeply nostalgic for those days.)
Famously, St. John Paul II had a swimming pool installed at his summer retreat in Castel Gandolfo outside Rome in 1979 so he could take dips in the dog days of July and August. When Pope emeritus Benedict XVI was elected in April 2005, one of the first items on his to-do list was to organize a summer vacation to Les Combes in Valle d’Aosta, in northern Italy by the Alps, that July.
Then, Pope Francis happened.
This energizer bunny of popes has laid waste to the old days of July as a time of lethargy and repose. Just consider what the month of July has brought over the last six years.
July 2013: A papal outing to Lampedusa to signal Francis’s solidarity with immigrants; World Youth Day in Brazil, including the “Who am I to judge” mother of all soundbites; and approval of a miracle clearing Pope John Paul II’s path to sainthood.
July 2014: Francis’s first meeting with victims of clerical sexual abuse; his second interview with Eugenio Scalfari, in which the nonagenarian Italian journalist had Francis basically saying that priestly celibacy is on the way out; and the first-ever papal visit to a Pentecostal church, one located in southern Italy and pastored by a friend from Argentina.
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