HOME View All Genre

Book

Audiobook

GENRES 🌙 Dark

The Election of Pope Leo Xiv and Gerard's Story - Reid Reflections

By Reid Reflections

Release Date: 2026-03-04

Genre: Biographies & Memoirs

(0 ratings)
Read Download
On the morning of April 21, 2025, Pope Francis died at the Casa Santa Marta. Within hours, Rome began preparing to elect his successor. Within days, the most consequential conclave in a generation would produce a result that almost no one had seen coming. Almost no one. Gerard O'Connell had known Jorge Mario Bergoglio before he was pope — in Buenos Aires, in the years when he was still an archbishop who answered his own telephone. Bergoglio baptised O'Connell's children. He witnessed O'Connell's marriage. And when he walked onto the loggia of St. Peter's Basilica on the evening of March 13, 2013, and asked the crowd to pray for him before he blessed them, O'Connell was standing in the square below, press credential around his neck, trying to do what journalists are trained to do — observe without feeling — and failing completely. Now Francis was gone. And the story that O'Connell had spent thirty years preparing to tell had arrived at its defining moment. Written with O'Connell's wife and co-author Elisabetta Piqué — herself one of the Vatican's most trusted correspondents and a close friend of the late pope — this book is unlike any other account of the 2025 conclave. It is simultaneously a work of the finest Vatican journalism, a portrait of one of history's most consequential papal transitions, and an intimate memoir of a friendship that gave two reporters an angle of vision no press credential alone could have provided. Drawing on interviews with six cardinal electors and decades of accumulated relationships inside the Church's most opaque institution, O'Connell and Piqué reconstruct the story the cameras could not show: the behind-the-scenes battle lines of the pre-conclave period, the quiet withdrawal of the Italian frontrunner, the ceiling that Parolin could not break through, and the name that began circulating — carefully, cross-ideologically, and with unusual speed — among the cardinals who had worked most closely with the Dicastery for Bishops. That name was Robert Francis Prevost. Chicago-born, Peruvian by vocation and citizenship, Augustinian by formation — a man who had spent three decades at the edges of the Church rather than its centre, who had become a citizen of the country he had served, and who had spent two consequential years in Rome building, through the patient work of episcopal appointments, the kind of direct relationships with cardinal electors that no amount of pre-conclave positioning could have manufactured. The conclave that elected him as Pope Leo XIV took four days and five ballots. The outcome surprised the world. It did not, quite, surprise the two journalists who had spent the preceding weeks tracking signals that the public story had missed. But The Election of Pope Leo XIV and Gerard's Story is more than a work of reporting. It is the account of what it means to spend a professional lifetime bearing honest witness to an institution you love — to report its failures alongside its achievements, its humanity alongside its aspirations, its present reality alongside its highest calling. It is the story of a friendship between a journalist and a pope, and of what that friendship made possible and what it cost. It is a reckoning, conducted with unusual honesty, with thirty years of Vatican correspondence and the questions such a career inevitably poses: What did the work make of the person? What does the person believe, at the end of it? And what does he think, now that the conclave is over and the new pope is on his throne, about whether the Church he has spent his life covering is capable of becoming what it claims to want to be? This is Gerard's story. It is also, in the fullest sense available to two journalists who were present for all of it, the story of the Church at one of its most consequential crossroads.

The Election of Pope Leo Xiv and Gerard's Story - Reid Reflections

By Reid Reflections

Release Date: 2026-03-04

Genre: Biographies & Memoirs

(0 ratings)
Read Download
On the morning of April 21, 2025, Pope Francis died at the Casa Santa Marta. Within hours, Rome began preparing to elect his successor. Within days, the most consequential conclave in a generation would produce a result that almost no one had seen coming. Almost no one. Gerard O'Connell had known Jorge Mario Bergoglio before he was pope — in Buenos Aires, in the years when he was still an archbishop who answered his own telephone. Bergoglio baptised O'Connell's children. He witnessed O'Connell's marriage. And when he walked onto the loggia of St. Peter's Basilica on the evening of March 13, 2013, and asked the crowd to pray for him before he blessed them, O'Connell was standing in the square below, press credential around his neck, trying to do what journalists are trained to do — observe without feeling — and failing completely. Now Francis was gone. And the story that O'Connell had spent thirty years preparing to tell had arrived at its defining moment. Written with O'Connell's wife and co-author Elisabetta Piqué — herself one of the Vatican's most trusted correspondents and a close friend of the late pope — this book is unlike any other account of the 2025 conclave. It is simultaneously a work of the finest Vatican journalism, a portrait of one of history's most consequential papal transitions, and an intimate memoir of a friendship that gave two reporters an angle of vision no press credential alone could have provided. Drawing on interviews with six cardinal electors and decades of accumulated relationships inside the Church's most opaque institution, O'Connell and Piqué reconstruct the story the cameras could not show: the behind-the-scenes battle lines of the pre-conclave period, the quiet withdrawal of the Italian frontrunner, the ceiling that Parolin could not break through, and the name that began circulating — carefully, cross-ideologically, and with unusual speed — among the cardinals who had worked most closely with the Dicastery for Bishops. That name was Robert Francis Prevost. Chicago-born, Peruvian by vocation and citizenship, Augustinian by formation — a man who had spent three decades at the edges of the Church rather than its centre, who had become a citizen of the country he had served, and who had spent two consequential years in Rome building, through the patient work of episcopal appointments, the kind of direct relationships with cardinal electors that no amount of pre-conclave positioning could have manufactured. The conclave that elected him as Pope Leo XIV took four days and five ballots. The outcome surprised the world. It did not, quite, surprise the two journalists who had spent the preceding weeks tracking signals that the public story had missed. But The Election of Pope Leo XIV and Gerard's Story is more than a work of reporting. It is the account of what it means to spend a professional lifetime bearing honest witness to an institution you love — to report its failures alongside its achievements, its humanity alongside its aspirations, its present reality alongside its highest calling. It is the story of a friendship between a journalist and a pope, and of what that friendship made possible and what it cost. It is a reckoning, conducted with unusual honesty, with thirty years of Vatican correspondence and the questions such a career inevitably poses: What did the work make of the person? What does the person believe, at the end of it? And what does he think, now that the conclave is over and the new pope is on his throne, about whether the Church he has spent his life covering is capable of becoming what it claims to want to be? This is Gerard's story. It is also, in the fullest sense available to two journalists who were present for all of it, the story of the Church at one of its most consequential crossroads.

More by Reid Reflections

Save Me an Orange and Hayley Grace's Insights

Occult Feminism and Rachel Wilson's Insights

The Election of Pope Leo Xiv and Gerard's Story

101 Brain Hacks to Prevent and Even Reverse Dementia And Dr. Clint Steele's Strategies

If I Don't Return and Mark Hertling's Journal

Cancel Me If You Can and Dave Portnoy's Journey

Still Lost and Sam A. Miller’s Tales from 2080

Hunt, Gather, Parent and Michaeleen Doucleff's Insights

Jennica Pounds' Insights on Unelected Elites

Wisdom Untethered and Michael Singer's Insights

The Gift of Not Belonging and Rami Kaminski's Theory

The Gift of Fear and Gavin De Becker's Theory

From Genesis to Junia and Preston Sprinkle's Theory

Learning the Virtues and Romano Guardini's Practices

Come Close to Jesus and Lysa Terkeurst's Teachings

Lloyd Blankfein And Lessons from Streetwise

The Year of the Bride Presents and Tiphani Montgomery's Strategies

Obsessed with the Best and Ella Quittner's Cooking Methods

No More Boring Bible Study and Faith Womack's Principles

2 Chainz and The Voice In My Head Is God Story

Killed to Order and Jan Jekielek's Exposé

Kids, Wait Till You Hear This and Liza Minnelli's Story

Dopamine Kids and Michaeleen Doucleff's Science-Based Plan

New You, New Life and Joe Dispenza's Principles

I Keep Taking Pictures and Amy Morgan Grace's Collection

Catholic Novena & Consecration to Our Lady of Guadalupe

Lessons From You with The Sad Eyes

Bendita Mañana Bendito Café Y Emilio Pérez’s Perspectivas

Braving The Truth and Rachel Held Evans' Essays

You Better Believe I'm Gonna Talk About It and Lisa Rinna's Unapologetic Story

Stand Firm and Act Like Men and Joby Martin's Principles

Adam Grant and Vibe Theory

The Ancient Herbalist & Healer Natural Remedies Handbook

A World Appears and Michael Pollan's Theory

The Power of Short Prayers and Jentezen Franklin’s Principles

Middle-Class New Deal and Mechele Dickerson's Insights

The Art of Gravity Falls and Alex Hirsch's Insights

We Are the World Cup and Roger Bennett Insights

Weight Loss Cure and Dr. Mercola's Methods

The End of My Life Is Killing Me and Annabelle Gurwitch's Story

Walk For Peace

Maxi's Kitchen Prep Guide

Will This Make You Happy and Tanya Bush's Cookbook

Empire of AI and Karen Hao's Insights

Coffee, For Here And Morgan Eckroth's Principles

Secrets of the Millionaire Mind in Turbulent Times and T. Harv Eker's Principles

Construction Site Spring Delight Stories for Kids

Cbk: Carolyn Bessette Kennedy and Sunita Kumar Nair's Insights

Related Articles