Our man with Havanas

Freddy Gray meets the chain-smoking, workaholic reporter who really does know what's happening inside the Vatican
here are so many selfproclaimed "Vatican experts" or "insiders" that one might be forgiven for thinking every other Roman dedicates his or her life to analysing what's going on inside the Holy See.
Some of these commentators know their subject, while others clearly do not. But John LAllen Jr, author of the National Catholic Reporter 's hugely popular "Word From Rome" column, as well as of several highprofile books about Church, stands above the rest.
Inevitably, he has his critics, but his expertise, integrity and clarity are recognised by all his readers. This high reputation is all the more remarkable, considering that less than 10 years ago he was teaching in a Catholic high school in Los Angeles.
But then, John Allen is an unusual sort of American. There is something of the 19th century about him. With his trimmed beard and unimposing spectacles, he looks a little like a friendly but ineffective bank clerk about to be robbed by baddies in a Western. But you feel that the baddies might be in for a surprise.
Allen is short, yet stands firmly upright. He speaks in a clipped, almost robotic, fashion, which could be unfriendly, yet somehow isn't. He smokes filterless Havanas. In the course of a 45-minute interview, he puffs his way through at least six. He seems to derive great pleasure from these little dark-brown smokes, judging from the way in which he tilts his head back and, dragon-like. expels plumes of smoke from his nostrils. "These are supposed to be 'the finest cigarettes on earth'," he says, looking proudly at the Havana box.
"However that's just marketing language, I haven't taken a survey. But they are very smooth and I like 'em."
John Allen confesses, uneasily, to "probably" being a workaholic. "1 get up at 5.00 am and I like to be at my desk by 5.30," he says. He attributes this in part to his "mid-west American farm upbringing", but adds defensively: "I'm hardly unique in that way, there are plenty of people in this profession who work equally hard. I find this work endlessly fascinating and I love doing it."
He is clearly excited by his professional contact with the Holy See. "The Vatican is the best beat in journalism," he enthuses. "It may be a small window but it's a small window on to the entire world. There is no area of human concern that doesn't have some organic connection to the Vatican."
Allen's obvious affection for Catholicism is tempered by a stern emphasis on balance and objectivity. "If you are going to be a Vatican correspondent for a Catholic publication you really have one of two choices," he says. "You can be a pundit, and cover Rome through the filter of the particular theological or ideological perspective of your publication, or you can try to be an analyst, and try to describe fairly what is going on without trying to draw conclusions about it.
"It seems to me that the Catholic Church has plenty of pundits, but there really tends to be a vacuum of honest analysis."
Yet his strict emphasis on neutrality does cause problems. "When I lecture to Catholic groups, they all want me to tell them what I think." he explains. "Am 1 in favour of women's ordination'? Should there be more collegiality?" His answer is a question: "What has gone wrong with the world that we expect journalists to give • answers to these questions?
"That is what we have theologians for and that's what we have bishops for. My role is to provide tools and an analytical framework for people to settle questions."
Nevertheless, there must be occasions when his Catholic faith conflicts with his mle as an even-handed analyst? The term Catholic journalist is, after all, almost an oxymoron: while the faith demands devotion to God and to the good, the Press often seems to require a sceptical approach to the idea of trust and a fixation with the sensational.
"I think of myself as a journalist who covers the Catholic Church not as a Catholic journalist. I think journalism is essentially a secular enterprise.
"I bring the same canons of journalistic excellence to cover the Church that you would bring to covering the White House or any other institution. On the other hand. I would be lying if I didn't say that I was attentive to the impact of my work on the common good of the Church."
To prove his point, he cites the example of a recent story which he broke: the Vatican's sanctions on Fr Marciel Macial, founder of the Legionaries of Christ. "Actually I had this story a week and a half in advance." he recalls. "We waited to give the Holy See an opportunity to decide what they wanted to say publicly."
His obsession with balance and fairness seems to draw him towards the most divisive of subjects. He last book was about Opus Dei, a tough test of anyone's impartiality.
"One of my concerns about the Church is that we have this phenomenon of tribalism and
I think that is just not healthy," he explains. -My thinking was that if we could have a rational conversation across party lines about such a controversial subject as Opus Dei, then we ought to be able to do it about anything."
The book was generally well received, though there were critics on both sides. Damian Thompson, in the Daily Telegraph, wrote that Allen had been "sclunoozed" by Opus and described the book as a "whitewash".
Allen insists that he learns a lot from negative reviews. Still, this particular criticism rankles: "The argument there was that I didn't talk enough to Vlad Feltzinan [Mgr Vladimir Feltzman. a senior priest of Westminster diocese and a former member and critic of Opus Ded. This, in my view, was a peculiar English reaction.
"There are plenty of Opus Dei critics all over the world that I did talk to. I think it is almost self-parodying to think that the book is a whitewash. If it had been, it would certainly have been written quite differently."
Allen has also written two books on the man who is Pope Benedict XVI. The first, published in 2000, was a critical biography, entitled Cardinal Ratzinger: The Vatican's Enforcer of the Faith. Today, he seems rather embarrassed by the work: "It was largely an exercise in auto-didacticism, born out of a desire to learn more about something 1 obviously didn't understand. That was written before 1 got to Rome. I think it represented a somewhat early stage in my intellectual development."
To redress the balance, Allen tried to paint a fairer picture in his next attempt, The Rise of Benedict XVI: The Inside Story of How the Pope Was Elected and Where He Will Take the Catholic Church.
The difference between the two Ratzinger books, combined with the largely positive tone of his opus on Opus, prompted suspicion that Allen had gone from being a young liberal into a firmly orthodox, almost reactionary, defender of the faith.
The Pope's private secretary, Mgr Georg Ganswein, recently told Allen that he was on "a beautiful path".
Typically, Allen was somewhat alarmed by this.
"People always have to divide the world between friends and enemies," he explains.
"Ganswein seemed to think that I had gone from an antito a pro-Ratzinger view. I think I have swung from a progressive American outlook to a comprehension of the broader complexities of the Church. But I am not trying to act like a spokesperson for Benedict XVI."
Many Catholics might be dis
tressed to learn that in future John Allen will only be in Rome for six months of the year, spending the rest of his time in Manhattan or travelling around the world. "Word from Rome" is likely to be renamed. "It is something that is already happening anyway. We just might rebrand it," he adds.
The real reason for the change seems to be that his wife, Shannon, wanted to live in America again."She has spent a dutiful six years in Rome and is kinda tired of it."
But Allen also wants to write less on Vatican intrigues and more on broader issues facing the Universal Church. His next book, The Upside-down Church, will be a wide-ranging study of Catholicism from a global perspective.
"You know Thomas Friedman's book The World is Flat? It's basically a history of the 21st century before it happens. Well,I wanna write that book on the Catholic Church," he reveals. "My basic argument is that the paradigm which has governed Catholicism since 1870 — with the definition of papal infallibility — has meant that the most important Catholic conversations have been ad intra, focusing on our internal business. That's all giving way and the Catholicism of the 21st century is going to be ad extra. Increasingly the question is not going to be which groups are able to rise to power inside the Church but rather who is able to change the world?"
It should be quite a read, whatever the critics may say.