ROME — Looking back over the last 12 months on the Vatican beat, it’s tempting to call 2024 “tumultuous” — tempting, that is, but also superfluous. Since he ascended to the Throne of Peter in 2013, absolutely every year in the Pope Francis era has been tumultuous, so why should 2024 be any different?
In thinking about the year we’ve just witnessed, there was no shortage of drama, and therefore plenty of candidates for its most memorable moments. What follows is a rundown of my own choices for top five Vatican stories of 2024 … and, in keeping what we might call the “spirit of synodality,” the aim here is to start conversations, not end them.
5. A tale of one city, seen twice
Over the summer, Paris became a focus for Catholic outrage when a July 26 opening ceremony for the Olympics featured a segment with drag queens allegedly designed to celebrate diversity, but which many saw as an offensive parody of the Last Supper. The French bishops called the spectacle “a derision and mockery of Christianity,” and were quickly joined by other bishops and Catholic leaders from around the world.
Eventually the display drew protests from other religious groups as well, prominently including Muslim leaders. The Vatican was a bit late to the party, waiting a full week to speak out, but eventually condemned “the offense done to many Christians and believers of other religions.”
Yet five months later, the bad taste left by the Olympics controversy seemed washed away by a remarkable ceremony on Dec. 7 to reopen the famed Cathedral of Notre-Dame de Paris, which had been devastated by a massive fire in 2019.
Presided over by Archbishop Laurent Ulrich of Paris, the ceremony was attended by French President Emanuel Macron, who described the rehabilitation of the cathedral within just five years’ as “proof that we can do great things, we can do the impossible.” Macron was joined by President-elect Donald Trump, President Volodymyr Zelenskyy of Ukraine, and other dignitaries from across the globe.
“Notre Dame, model of faith, open your doors to gather in joy the scattered children of God,” Ulrich cried out in front of the cathedral’s central door, proceeding to strike it three times with his pastoral staff, which was made from a wooden beam of the cathedral that had survived the fire.
In 2024, Paris was twice the center of the Catholic world — and, for many, its second act largely redeemed the first.
4. Asian odyssey
Pope Francis, at the age of 87, undertook the longest and most demanding overseas trip of his pontificate Sept. 2-13, traveling to Indonesia, Papua New Guinea, East Timor, and Singapore. All in, the trip logged more than 20,000 miles by air and saw the pope switch time zones almost as often as he did vestments.
At the level of content, the trip allowed Francis to move the ball of multiple pastoral and geopolitical concerns. In Indonesia, the world’s largest Muslim nation, he deepened his outreach to Islam; in Papua New Guinea, he solidified his reputation as the “Pope of the Peripheries,” visiting one of the most rural nations on earth where small, isolated tribal communities speak 840 separate languages; in East Timor, he celebrated the faith in one of the most pervasively Catholic societies on the planet; and finally, Singapore gave the pope a platform to address neighboring China too.
Beyond that, the trip also had a significant impact in reframing impressions of the octogenarian pontiff’s health and resilience. Prior to the Asian outing, many commentators were focusing on his various ailments and occasional need to withdraw from certain events to suggest the end might be near; afterward, the consensus seemed Francis might be good to go for a while yet.
3. Election season
2024 brought two high-stake elections, first the race for the European Parliament in June and then the U.S. presidential race in November. Though the Vatican obviously took no formal position in either contest, it’s nonetheless fair to say that Pope Francis and his team likely weren’t entirely satisfied with either result.
In Europe, the main center-right faction, the European People’s Party of Ursula von der Leyen, won the most seats, enough to keep von der Leyen in power and the Euroskeptic faction at bay. Yet far-right populist parties, Francis’s political bête noire, made significant gains, while leftist, social democratic, and green parties took a drubbing.
Of course, Trump, whom Francis once famously described as “not a Christian” for his positions on immigration, also triumphed in the U.S., along with his running mate J.D. Vance, a convert to Catholicism, though not quite to the “social gospel” embodied by Francis.
In both cases, Catholics were partially responsible for the results. In the American election, Trump and Vance won the Catholic vote overall by roughly 56% to 41%, and they did even better among white Catholics. Meanwhile in Europe, seven nations now have far-right parties in their governing coalitions, and five of the seven are majority Catholic countries, meaning those parties had to have attracted significant Catholic support. (That list famously includes Italy, the pope’s own backyard.)
2024 confirmed, in other words, that Francis can lead, but that doesn’t always mean his flock will follow.
2. The fracas over Fiducia
While the issuance of Fiducia Supplicans (“Supplicating Trust”), the Vatican document authorizing blessings of persons involved in same-sex unions, technically occurred at the end of 2023, the firestorm it set off unfolded in 2024.
After a tit-for-tat cycle over a couple of weeks of one bishop or bishops’ conference praising Fiducia while another lamented it, things seemed to reach a sort of crescendo on Jan. 11, when the bishops of the Symposium of Episcopal Conferences of African and Madagascar released a joint statement.
“We African bishops do not consider it appropriate for Africa to bless homosexual unions or same-sex couples, because this would cause confusion,” they said.
The bottom line, according to the statement, is that there will be “no blessings for same-sex couples in the African churches.”
It was the first time that the bishops of an entire continent had ever flatly rejected a papally approved decree. Even more remarkable, Pope Francis basically countenanced the dissent, giving his consent to Ambongo to publish the SECAM statement when he presented it to the pontiff in a private audience.
The significance appears to be twofold.
First, the controversy over Fiducia seems to have created a de facto Catholic equivalent of jury nullification. If a significant enough cohort of bishops rises up and says no, the Vatican eventually will be forced to accept that dissent, effectively making the implementation of such decrees a matter of local option.
Second, the contretemps created a new papabile, or candidate to be pope, in Congo’s 64-year-old Cardinal Fridolin Ambongo Besungu. His deft handling of the situation, firmly asserting the position of the African episcopate but also showing deference to the pope by receiving his blessing before rolling it out, won admirers on both the Catholic right and left, and left some observers wondering if he might be able to bridge divides in a future conclave.
1. The sound of (synod) silence
Across the history of science, sometimes the most groundbreaking and consequential experiments actually produced negative results. The famous Michelson-Morley experiment at Case Western University in 1887, for example, disproved the notion of the “luminiferous ether,” long regarded by physicists as the medium through which light waves passed through the air. That finding paved the way for Einstein’s special theory of relativity in 1905.
In a similar fashion, the grand experiment of the Synod of Bishops on Synodality, which came to close in October after three years of consultations, listening sessions, surveys, round tables, and debates of all sorts, produced what one might term a negative result on its most hot-button topics. There was no ordination of women deacons, no revision of teaching on sexuality or marriage in outreach to the LGBTQ+ community, no married priests, no direct election of bishops — in effect, none of the revolutionary changes which some Catholics had ardently desired, and others dreaded.
Officially, the explanation is that the synod was always about process, not outcomes, and that its main fruit was to give rise to a new way of being church, one in which all constituencies have a place at the (round) table. Others might credit stronger than expected conservative resistance, or suggest that Pope Francis himself put on the brakes, shaken in part by the example of the Germany “synodal path” and its open defiance of Vatican pleas to slow down.
However one explains it, what didn’t happen as a result of the 2024 synod rates as the year’s biggest Catholic story. The question now is whether that negative outcome will have the positive results Francis obviously desires going forward.
