Meet the conclave: Cardinal Pierbattista Pizzaballa

How the Holy Land shaped his faith and leadership.

In the 1960s, a lantern-jawed figure with a memorable surname played in goal for Italy’s Atalanta soccer team. His name was Pier Luigi Pizzaballa. In 1965, Pier Luigi’s cousin, Pietro, welcomed a son into the world and named him Pierbattista.

Cardinal Pierbattista Pizzaballa, the Latin Patriarch of Jerusalem, pictured in January 2025. © Mazur/cbcew.org.uk.

Pierbattista’s fame would ultimately eclipse that of the illustrious goalkeeper (whose trading card is prized by collectors for its rarity).

Pierbattista Pizzaballa was born in the northern Italian province of Bergamo, where, he later said, “you were Catholic even before you were born.” Aged 11, he entered a Franciscan minor seminary in Bologna, receiving the habit in 1984. After his priestly ordination in 1990, he left for the Holy Land, where he would spend the next three decades.

Studying at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, he was the sole Christian student in his class. Jewish classmates peppered him with questions about Jesus, so he invited them to read the Gospel with him. He quickly discovered the limits of his knowledge. At one point, a participant in the meetings pressed him on why Jesus needed to be resurrected.

“Again, I answered as the catechism answers and I realized from her face that she had not understood anything,” he later recalled. “I was unable to make myself understood. It took some time for me to understand that the Resurrection is not explained. It is not explained in the Gospels. There are only encounters with the Risen One.”

The experience convinced him there is a constant temptation to reduce Jesus to an easily understood and accepted figure. The Church’s challenge, however, is to testify that Jesus is the Son of God.

“The task that we have as a Church is to be able to say that Jesus is Kyrios, is the Lord,” he concluded. “To say it being convincing, to say it because we believe it, having experienced it.”

In 1995, Pizzaballa oversaw the publication of the Roman Missal in Hebrew, a language in which he is fluent. He also organized pastoral care for Hebrew-speaking Catholics in Israel.

In 1999, he formally joined the Custody of the Holy Land, a Franciscan mission established by St. Francis of Assisi himself. Within five years, he was elected Custos of the Holy Land, responsible for Franciscans throughout the Middle East.

Shortly after his election, he visited the Franciscan community in Buenos Aires. Pizzaballa was invited to visit local Cardinal Jorge Mario Bergoglio (the future Pope Francis). The Italian arrived late and flustered, worrying about his poorly parked car. He handed the keys to a man he assumed was a priest, asking him to move the vehicle if necessary. The priest told him to calm down as he was the cardinal and had been waiting for him.

In 2016, Pope Francis named Pizzaballa the apostolic administrator of the Latin Patriarchate of Jerusalem, a jurisdiction serving Latin Rite Catholics in Israel, Palestine, Jordan, and Cyprus. As an Italian, rather than a local Christian, Pizzaballa was seen as an outsider. His immediate challenge was to tackle a vast deficit related to the construction of a university in Jordan. He did so through an administrative overhaul, fundraising, and the sale of land and properties.

In 2020, Pizzaballa was named Latin Patriarch. He was elevated to cardinal three years later, days before the Hamas-led attack on Israel that initiated the Gaza war. Pizzaballa announced he was prepared to do anything to secure the release of hundreds of Israelis taken as hostages to Gaza.

“I am ready for an exchange, anything, if this can lead to freedom, to bring the children home. No problem. There is total willingness on my part,” he stressed.

While Hamas ignored the cardinal’s offer, Pizzaballa continued to advocate for peace, visiting the sole Catholic parish in Gaza during a lull in the fighting.

Commenting recently on the decades-long decline in Catholic practice in his native Italy, Pizzaballa suggested that “a model of Church is ending.”

“I think Benedict XVI said it well: we know that something is ending but we do not know what it will be like afterward. It will be defined in time,” he said. “Even in the Acts of the Apostles, we see that great moments in the history of the Church were the result of great travails: the question of the deacons, the opening of evangelization to the Gentiles, for example. This crisis too, therefore, will produce something.”

Meanwhile, he said, the Church is called simply to “say that there is nothing better in life than to encounter Jesus Christ.”