John Allen, nonpareil Vaticanista

Early Sunday morning, July 28, 2002, things were looking grim for the closing papal Mass of World Youth Day in Toronto.

The previous four days had been a tremendous success, symbolized by hundreds of thousands of young people making the Way of the Cross up Toronto’s great north-south boulevard, University Avenue: an act of Christian witness the likes of which had never been seen in that self-consciously, even smugly, secular city. A hard rain had started early Sunday, however, and by the time an NBC driver had gotten me to Downsview Park, some 800,000 congregants were soaked to the skin. The television “platform” from which I would do commentary on the papal Mass was a rickety, tubular-steel affair with plywood “floors”; I remember the scaffolding as four stories high, but it may have been only three.

In any event, it was open-air broadcasting, and as NBC’s Keith Miller and I did our set-up conversations before Mass, water was streaming down my glasses from the rain, which seemed to be falling sideways in the fierce wind. Then someone got the not-so-bright idea to put up plastic sheeting on the open back side of the tubular platform to protect the cameras and other equipment there, and a gust of wind began to tip the scaffolding over, until other techies frantically slashed open the sheeting with box cutters, so that it stopped acting as a sail.

As it happened, CNN and its commentator, John Allen of the National Catholic Reporter, had the platform position two slots over from NBC. The skies had cleared as John Paul II entered Downsview Park, the Mass had gone beautifully, and after it was all over, I said to my friend Allen, when we’d climbed down to terra firma, “You know, if they’d found us buried side-by-side under the rubble of that contraption, it would have been a great testimony to the universality of the Church.” He laughed, I laughed, and off we went.

That wisecrack had less to do with John personally than with his employer in those days, for no one will think me wrong if I suggest that I was not then, never had been, and am not now a poster boy at the National Catholic Reporter. All the more reason, then, to be grateful to divine providence for NCR being the midwife, so to speak, of my relationship with a man whose friendship I enjoyed until his death this past January 22, which followed a heroic battle against cancer.

It all began with John’s NCR review of the first volume of my John Paul II biography, Witness to Hope. Given the venue, I was expecting trouble, but the review was thoughtful and rather positive. Nonetheless, I thought Allen had gotten several things wrong and told him so in an e-mail of thanks. Within an hour, I received a brisk and good-humored reply telling me what he thought I had gotten wrong in my email. I returned the volley, saying that this could only be sorted out over barbecue and bourbon in Kansas City, where NCR was located and where I would soon be speaking. He readily agreed; we had a sparkling evening of nonstop conversation in one of K.C.’s famous barbecue houses, and a friendship lasting over a quarter-century was sealed.

We would often meet in Rome, usually at the Taverna Giulia, home of the best pesto on the planet. There, at what we called “our table,” we exchanged stories, observations, and intel on the always-challenging, often-changing Vatican scene. Some may have thought us rivals, but I don’t think we ever thought of each other that way. We respected each other’s competence, didn’t regard our differences of perception or opinion as existential threats, and were glad of each other’s successes.

All of that, I think, was because we recognized in each other Catholics who were committed to a Church that was ever more effective in its evangelization and witness, which required transparency from the Church and candor from those writing about it. In later years, our readings of the signs of the times along the Tiber diverged more than before. But when we visited last December, the old affection was still there. I was grateful for that, as I think John was.

For many years, John Allen was the best Anglophone Vaticanista ever, a man of great kindness who graciously helped everyone on that beat who had the sense to counsel with him.

May he rest in peace, in a time beyond time where there are no deadlines to meet, and where all is clear in the clarity of the divine light and the divine love.

(George Weigel’s column is distributed by the Denver Catholic, the official publication of the Archdiocese of Denver.)