Meet the conclave: Cardinal Jean-Marc Aveline

How early grief and hardship shaped his leadership in Marseille.

In 1962, when Jean-Marc Aveline was almost four years old, his family hurriedly packed up their belongings and left Algeria, where they had lived for four generations.

Cardinal Jean-Marc Aveline. Screenshot from @diocesedemarseille13 YouTube channel.

The Avelines were pieds-noirs — settlers of European descent born on North African soil — and saw no future in Algeria after the country gained its independence from France after a brutal seven-year war.

Jean-Marc’s uncle crafted a small wooden suitcase for the boy to carry as the family set off for the French mainland, staying initially in Paris. In the capital, his younger sister died aged just seven months. Their father, an employee of the state-owned SNCF railway company, requested a transfer to the port city of Marseille, hoping his remaining children would benefit from the better climate. They found a home in the city’s diverse, working-class Saint-Barthélemy district.

The researcher Rémi Caucanas, who later worked alongside Aveline, said these early experiences decisively shaped the churchman’s outlook. “We don’t know who Jean-Marc Aveline is if we don’t see that his first Church was that of his parents, of their living faith, lived through emigration, hardship, and mourning,” he commented.

Aveline studied at the prestigious Lycée Thiers, Marseille’s oldest high school, before entering seminary in Avignon in 1977, responding to a calling he first heard around the age of nine. He continued his studies in Paris, becoming a priest of the Marseille archdiocese in 1984. He served in a city parish while teaching at a local seminary.

Marseille’s Cardinal Robert-Joseph Coffy asked Aveline to establish a theological training center focused on the challenges of religious pluralism. He wasn’t especially interested in the topic, but recognized it could meet an emerging need in a city with significant Muslim and Jewish communities. Aveline led the Institut de sciences et de théologie des religions for a decade after its opening in 1992. He would later help to organize monthly meetings of Marseille’s imams and priests.

Aveline became vicar general of Marseille in 2007 and an auxiliary bishop in 2013, serving under Archbishop Georges Pontier, who gave him a new perspective on his growing responsibilities when he told him one day: “Every time the weight of your load is increased, lengthen the time of your prayer.”

In 2019, Pope Francis named Aveline Pontier’s successor, placing him at the head of a roughly 741,000-strong Catholic community in a gritty, colorful city.

Aveline has been described as a disciple of the Jesuit theologian Henri de Lubac and the hermit St. Charles de Foucauld. He is also said to be “obsessed” with the theme of communion within the Church.

When Pope Francis launched a crackdown on the celebration of the Traditional Latin Mass in 2021, Aveline reportedly reached out promptly to traditionalists in his diocese. Six months later, he celebrated an Extraordinary Form Mass at Marseille’s Saint-Charles parish.

Critics have accused Aveline of sitting on the fence on divisive Church questions, while supporters argue that he prioritizes consensus over individual viewpoints. When asked, for example, whether the Church needed married priests, he once replied: “Oh, I don’t know about that. These are questions that do not depend on opinions but on the needs of God’s people.”

Aveline received the cardinal’s red hat in 2022. Pope Francis signaled his appreciation again for Aveline a year later, when he made a two-day visit to Marseille, despite his wish to limit his European travels to the continent’s cultural and economic “peripheries.” The papal trip boosted the visibility of Aveline’s Rencontres Méditerranéennes initiative, which sought to promote communion among bishops in the countries around the Mediterranean Sea through regular meetings.

During the final session of the synod on synodality in 2024, Aveline was elected to the XVI Ordinary Council of the General Secretariat of the Synod, a body serving as a bridge between synodal assemblies.

The Rencontres Méditerranéennes and his work at the synod raised Aveline’s international profile, though he remains far from a household name in much of the Catholic world. Detractors suggest he has limited knowledge of Vatican mechanisms and may not be perfectly fluent in Italian, the Vatican’s working language. (He said in 2022 that he had begun to study it seriously.)

Those who’ve met Aveline often comment on his Mediterranean bonhomie. In April, he was elected as the French bishops’ conference president, reportedly after a single ballot, in which he gained 80% of votes.

At a press conference after the election, he said his priorities would include continuing the struggle against abuse and service of the poor — whose number, he said, was growing.

Asked about the remarkable rise in adult baptisms in France in recent years, he said it was vital to cooperate with the Holy Spirit and “not to cry cock-a-doodle-doo too quickly” — a French expression meaning to boast about a national accomplishment.

“If it’s through the Spirit that they arrive, we must have the humility [to understand] what the Spirit wants to tell us through them,” he reflected.