A busy month - Spring 2025 in Vatican City

This is a book of present-day journalism, not one that spends a lot of time digging into religious history or doctrine unless those bear on the events as they happened. The authors were close friends of the previous pontiff, Pope Francis, even from the time before he had been elevated from his office of Bishop in Argentine and they are now Vatican insiders working for high-profile publications.

The first section of the book treats the events set off by the unexpeced death of Pope Francis the day after Easter and has a personal tone to it. The exact details of when the Cardinals from all around the globe could be summoned to Rome to choose a successor was unknown, let alone who were the most likely candidates to be chosen. But step by step, by talking to cardinals and others on the inside of the Vatican bureaucracy by professional reporters it doesn't come off much like the Hollywood treatment.

So much of it is played out in the press and broadcast news, but they do not give any of it a sensationalistic treatment. There are factions and individuals with power to affect matters, but you get the impression that even these have less influence on outcomes than the Cardinal electors as a whole. Editorials advocating candidates from the Catholic right and left also tried to throw their weight behind one or another.

The last part of the book is where the authors talk about how they and everyone around them learned the outcome of the election and talked to their contacts what this would mean for the Church. One of the authors had previously interviewed him as a Cardinal and had an idea of his ideas about the direction the Church should go. The days after, as they spoke with electors who had participated in the voting, they got an idea of how the balloting went and what was being said among the sequestered Cardinals. The following ten days were devoted to filing their stories from the perspectives they were able to gain from all the discussion surrounding them. A few who were part of the opposing faction were tentative, but what was most clear was a great deal of happy excitement particularly among the North and South American faithful.