Published May 6, 2025
The Basilica of San Clemente is one of Rome’s treasures. It’s also a metaphor of the city itself. The upper church, dating from the twelfth century, is a stunning mix of mosaic and early Renaissance frescoes. But it’s merely the surface crust of a deeper and more complex experience. Below is the original basilica from the fourth century, with Byzantine and medieval frescoes ranging from the eighth to eleventh centuries. And below that is a series of Roman buildings from the late republic and imperial eras, including an altar to Mithras, the god of a popular mystery religion especially widespread in Rome’s legions. At the very bottom is a channel dating back to an early Roman water system.
Today’s Rome has layers as well. But they’re of a different sort. The city’s surface is a riot of carnality: gelato stands; restaurants; shrieking sirens; impossible traffic; body to body mobs of confused tourists, pious pilgrims, and professional beggars; cheesy religious article stores; a Capuchin crypt adorned with the bones of dead monks; Carabinieri with effusively overdone uniforms; the fashionista shops of Via Condotti; the Colosseum, Baths of Caracalla, and endless ruins amid the Jubilee Year’s portable toilets, scores of Christian churches, thousands of clergy and religious, and nonstop modern hustle.
Federico Fellini, the greatest director of his generation, captured the city’s complicated soul in his brilliant half-memory, half-dream film Fellini’s Roma—including an imagined, unforgettably weird sequence keyed to an ecclesiastical fashion show.
Beneath it all, Italian life goes on. And there, the picture is less entertaining. The United States has a large Italian-American community with a deep and positive impact on the nation’s public life. American attitudes toward all things Italian are correspondingly warm. But they’re also largely ignorant of Italy’s problems on the ground. As of 2023, nearly 10 percent of Italy’s population lived in poverty. Unemployment was high. Economic growth was slow. Gross public debt stood at 138.2 percent of GDP. The overall birthrate is very low. At the current pace, today’s population of roughly 59 million will drop to about 46 million by 2080, even with immigration. The result is an aging population. And that has economic consequences. Italy now depends heavily on foreign workers, of whom about 53 percent identify as Christian and 30 percent as Muslim.
Current patterns on the religious landscape are also negative. Nearly 80 percent of Italians identify as Catholic. But between 2001 and 2022, church attendance fell from 36.4 percent to 18.8 percent. Regular, active church practice now sits at 15 percent. The decline—in Italy, at least—is especially sharp among the young. This has obvious implications for the future. With the flight of Christians from the Middle East, Jerusalem has become a kind of theme park for pilgrim tours. Something similar is not impossible for Rome. Barring a revival of Catholic confidence and zeal, the Vatican could easily, one day, become an island of pious memories in an ocean of unbelief.
All of which has relevance for the conclave, which begins tomorrow. We live in a proud but broken world; a confused mix of the carnal and holy, the sacred and profane. Others have already named elsewhere what we truly need: We need a bishop of Rome who can marry personal simplicity with a passion for converting the world to Jesus Christ; a leader who has a heart of courage and a keen intellect to match it; a man utterly confident in, and faithful to, the Word of God, the Church, and her teachings.
So I’ll conclude with a very specific model of that fidelity. One that has particular relevance to our time and—I’d suggest—to each of the cardinal-electors as priests. I’m a sucker for history because it’s a great teacher. I talk a lot about the Reformation because, while our world today and the world of the Reformation era are profoundly different, they also share some striking similarities: political and social turmoil; big changes in technology that reshape how we learn, think, communicate, work, and believe; and a pattern of ambiguity and battles within the Church herself. Names from the Reformation era like Thomas More and Erasmus are widely known. John Colet, the priest and scholar, not so much. But I want to focus on Colet for just a moment. His love for the Church and her mission speaks directly to our age and this conclave.
Colet was born in England in 1467. He arrived in the middle of a fifteenth century that began with the chaos of three simultaneous and competing popes. The century was marked throughout by bitter political conflict. It ended with a corrupt Renaissance papacy. Colet was ordained a priest in the late 1490s. He began his ministry during the papacy of Alexander VI—one of the worst popes in a two-thousand-year line. None of this pushed Colet away from the Church. But it did anger him in the same way Christ dealt with the moneychangers. Google the words “John Colet, 1512 sermon.” You’ll be taken to a homily that he gave to English Church leaders just a few years before Luther posted his ninety-five theses. Five centuries later, it’s still a fierce critique of ambition, corruption, and indifference among Church leaders, and a barn burner on the urgent need for Church renewal. Nobody listened.
But here’s the real reason I mention Colet.
Colet had an abiding love for the clarity and zeal of St. Paul. In 1497, and barely thirty years old, he gave a series of lectures at Oxford University on Paul’s Epistle to the Romans. His lectures still have remarkable power. They speak directly to us and our Church leaders, here and now.
And here’s why: The Rome that St. Paul describes in his epistle, especially in the first two chapters, is strangely familiar—the malice, the confused sexuality, the vanity, hypocrisy, strife, and idolatries. Paul’s purpose in writing his epistle to the young Church in Rome was very simple: How should Christians live in such a place—the pagan capital of a pagan empire? Most first-century Romans viewed Christianity as an ugly superstition. Many saw it as a threat to public order and welfare. And if we think that our modern political leaders are disappointing, the early Christians of Rome had Nero.
Colet had a special love for Romans 12:2: “Do not be conformed to this world, but be transformed by the renewal of your mind, that you may prove what is the will of God, what is good, and acceptable, and perfect.”
The heart of John Colet’s life and ministry, in a time of widespread confusion and deep corruption, was his call to repentance for sin, conversion of heart, a passionate evangelical witness, and a life of choices and actions that radiate God’s love and the truth of the gospel. Colet saw this as the only source of enduring reform and renewed Church life—the only answer to the crises and failures of his own time—and the essential task of what he called a “divine reformation” of Church and world, beginning again from a personal encounter with the foundations of the Christian faith.
The same applies to the world we face today. So for whomever emerges from this conclave as our next Holy Father, may God give him the wisdom and strength to live and lead accordingly.
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Francis X. Maier is a Senior Fellow in the Catholic Studies Program at the Ethics and Public Policy Center. Mr. Maier’s work focuses on the intersection of Christian faith, culture, and public life, with special attention to lay formation and action.
