Papal gelatos, press office chaos, and a Sistine shock
Our Vatican correspondent’s notes from a hectic week in the Eternal City.
A few days before Pope Francis died, I went to Padrón Gelateria, his favorite Roman gelateria, with some friends.
I’ve discovered that churchmen usually have good taste in food, so when some place is a cardinal’s or a pope’s favorite, you need to go there.
And I wasn’t wrong. It’s the best gelato I’ve had in my life. I went for a combination of yogurt with berries, pistachio, and dulce de leche.
Dulce de leche is essentially caramelized milk with vanilla and is the most important thing to come out of Argentina after tango. Pope Francis is a close third. (I think the Holy Father would have agreed with me on that order.) At Padrón Gelateria, dulce de leche was the pope’s favorite flavor.
When I went, I didn’t know the pope would die just a few days later. I ventured again this week to try to speak with the owner, Sebastián Padrón, who graciously received me despite being the most sought-after non-cardinal in Rome these days. I tried the dulce de leche gelato again, and it was just as good.
The story of how Padrón Gelateria became the pope’s favorite is a very Francis-like tale. When the gelateria opened in 2018, close to the papal residence, the Casa Santa Marta, Padrón decided to send Pope Francis some gelato.
“My wife just walked to Santa Marta and told the guards she had gelato for the pope, and they said that they would bring it to him,” Padrón told me.
“Then the pope started sending people, usually with the same order, dulce de leche,” he added, laughing.
In 2020, something even more unexpected happened.
“Then in 2020, when the first lockdown was over in Italy, one day he called me, inviting me and my wife to visit him. That’s where the picture here on the wall comes from,” Padrón recalled.
“Even when he was sick in Santa Marta these weeks they kept ordering the gelato. You know, he needed it to regain his strength,” Padrón concluded.
When Pope Francis was hospitalized in February, I was still living in the Netherlands. Before we finished packing our things and moved to Rome, I went to Spain on a family trip.
If the pope had died then, I would have had to fly from Madrid to Rome, leaving my wife to handle our move to Italy by herself with two small kids running around.
“The pope is not the only one getting buried if he dies,” she used to tell me in those days.
Pope Francis seemed to recover slowly. So it was something of a surprise when he died on Monday, April 21. That was the start of a hectic week.
What made it hectic was not so much the rivers of people coming to say their last goodbyes to the Holy Father, but how disorganized everything seemed.
The lines that without rhyme or reason went from taking three hours to get into St. Peter’s Basilica to just 20 minutes. The chaotic atmosphere at the Holy See press office. The thousands of tourists rushing to the Vatican Museums just before they closed. It felt like Rome on steroids.
The accreditation process for journalists was a hot mess. Normally, you apply online for an event and pick up your card in person. Nothing complicated.
But when you have a staff that probably doesn’t reach 10 people handling accreditation for 2,700 journalists, plus the diplomatic corps, it’s bound to end badly.
I don’t blame the press office itself. Its employees were doing the best they could with seemingly a single printer for all the accreditation cards. (It’s still a mystery to me where the Dicastery of Communications’ sizable budget is going).
They did their best too when journalists from big networks popped up without respecting the procedures, asking for accreditations by the dozens.
And they did their best when members of the diplomatic corps appeared claiming priority, almost sparking a war in the press office.
But as someone who’s stood in line for up to 10 hours at 4 a.m. to fill up a gas tank, get a passport, or buy toilet paper, I was not going to let the circumstances defeat me.
Twenty-five years in Venezuela had prepared me for this moment. If I’ve stood in front of the Venezuelan National Guard — very scared, I must add — an Italian ecclesiastical bureaucrat would not defeat me.
So I did what every Latino would do in such a circumstance: find another Latino.
I sought out the most Hispanic-looking priest amid the press office staff, asked him for help nicely, then not so nicely, insisting and insisting. Two hours later, I was out with all of our accreditations in hand.
All you needed was a little patience and Spanish proficiency, it turned out.
Nicaragua’s Cardinal Leopoldo Brenes has raised some eyebrows in Rome in recent days.
The Archbishop of Managua is said to have come with Fr. Julio Arana, the archdiocese’s judicial vicar, who is known for his links to the country’s Ortega dictatorship, including baptizing one of Ortega’s grandchildren.
Many in Nicaragua speculate that this means that the dictatorship is keeping an eye on what Brenes will do during the conclave, and especially who he will vote for.
Our Nicaraguan sources are divided on whether this is true. Many believe that such a thing would be counterproductive, as it would set Nicaragua’s relations with the new pope off on the wrong foot.
Moreover, the conclave voting process is secret. There’s no way that Ortega could know who Brenes voted for.
But the cardinal’s also been known for being easy to scare, maintaining absolute silence on the persecution against the Church, and having forbidden formators and seminarians from commenting on or even praying for persecuted priests and bishops.
The relationship between Brenes and Bishop Rolando Álvarez, the leader of Nicaragua’s Matagalpa diocese, reportedly has been strained since Álvarez was exiled in 2024. Observers suggest that Álvarez felt the cardinal had left him alone, and even tried to convince him on the regime’s behalf to accept exile when he had refused to do so.
The Managua archdiocese recently published some pictures of Brenes and the Nicaraguan delegation to Pope Francis’ funeral in which he looked more like a prisoner than a cardinal.
But all of the sources agree on one fact: Brenes’ mission is to ease the tensions between Nicaragua and the new pope, so Ortega can negotiate friendlier appointments to the vacant episcopal sees in the country — something the dictatorship couldn’t achieve under Francis.
There was some respite from the chaos in Rome when I unexpectedly found myself on a night tour of the Vatican Museums led by the art historian (and Pillar columnist) Elizabeth Lev.
Lev explained so much to us that day, but there’s one thing that really stuck in my head.
There’s a pious belief among Catholics that “the Holy Spirit chooses the pope.” I held this view when I was younger. But this is not really what we believe.
As the then-Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, the future Pope Benedict XVI, said in a 1997 interview: “I would not say so, in the sense that the Holy Spirit picks out the pope… I would say that the Spirit does not exactly take control of the affair, but rather like a good educator, as it were, leaves us much space, much freedom, without entirely abandoning us.”
He added: “Thus the Spirit’s role should be understood in a much more elastic sense, not that he dictates the candidate for whom one must vote. Probably the only assurance he offers is that the thing cannot be totally ruined... There are too many contrary instances of popes the Holy Spirit obviously would not have picked!”
I find it hard to believe that the Holy Spirit positively willed a man such as Alexander VI (Rodrigo Borgia) to become pope other than to punish the Church for its sins.
As Lev decoded the Sistine Chapel for us, some details in Michelangelo’s fresco of the Last Judgment really shocked me.
The lower part of the painting (see above) has a group of demons coming out of a cave and the Crucified Christ on the altar of the chapel right in front of them. This detail — and the whole painting — is, in Lev’s words, the ultimate image of accountability.
When a cardinal casts a vote for the next pope, he stands before the Cross, with the devil looking him in the eye, and looking at all of humanity being judged by an awe-inspiring image of Jesus Christ. But the cardinal also sees Christ on the Cross stopping the devils from taking hold of the world.
The Holy Spirit doesn’t nullify the cardinals’ freedom. But He inspires them, and Christ holds them accountable.
In the end, God is in control of His Church. Not the press or scheming cardinals.
Loved this! More from Edgar, please!
Edgar, this was an interesting read from start to finish (and the finish was special on its own).