Bologna cardinal known for dialogue, peacemaking, promoting laity

VATICAN CITY (CNS) -- If you ask an Italian, almost five decades of having foreigners as pope is enough. The pope is the bishop of Rome, and it is time for an Italian to return to the chair of St. Peter, they say.

Cardinal Matteo Zuppi of Bologna, the Rome-born president of the Italian bishops' conference, is frequently mentioned as a probable candidate.

The 69-year-old cardinal served as Pope Francis' envoy for peace in Ukraine and, through his membership in the Community of Sant'Egidio, has decades of experience in serving the poor, promoting peace and engaging in ecumenical and interreligious dialogue.

While still in his 30s, then-Father Zuppi was one of the Sant'Egidio members directly involved in mediating an end to the civil war in Mozambique. The peace accord, signed in Rome Oct. 4, 1992, lists four mediators: a representative of the Italian government, a Mozambican archbishop, the founder of the Sant'Egidio Community and Father Zuppi.

Matteo Zuppi was born in Rome Oct. 11, 1955, as the fifth of six children. He has one sister and four brothers. Answering questions from students in 2016, he said that growing up he'd think how great it would be just once to have a new coat, instead of a hand-me-down, but his large family "is where I learned to share."

He also told those students that although his parents were very religious, he was not that interested until he encountered the Sant'Egidio Community "and I began to understand the Gospel in a more living and personal way."

In 2023, more than a year after Russia's large-scale evasion of Ukraine, Pope Francis tapped him to lead a mission "to help ease tensions in the conflict in Ukraine." In that role, the cardinal met in Kyiv with President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, in Moscow with Russian Orthodox Patriarch Kirill of Moscow and with Yury Ushakov, a Kremlin foreign policy adviser, in Washington with U.S. President Joe Biden and in Beijing with Li Hui, China's special representative for Eurasian affairs.

While peace was the goal, most of Cardinal Zuppi's meetings focused on practical humanitarian issues, including the exchange of prisoners of war and the return of thousands of Ukrainian children forcibly taken to Russia.

As president of the Italian bishops' conference, Cardinal Zuppi led a slow and somewhat tentative effort to assess the breadth of the clerical sexual abuse crisis in the Italian church. The cardinal had told reporters in 2022 that the bishops had agreed to study the cases of abuse that had been reported to the Vatican Dicastery for the Doctrine of the Faith. And in 2024 he announced that the pilot research project, conducted by independent experts from two national-level research institutes, would focus on cases reported between 2001 and 2021.

The future cardinal had prepared for the priesthood at the Diocese of Palestrina's seminary, about 25 miles east of Rome, and at Rome's Pontifical Lateran University, earning a degree in theology. He also earned a degree in the history of Christianity from Rome's La Sapienza University.

Ordained to the priesthood for the Diocese of Palestrina May 9, 1981, most of his pastoral work took place in Rome, and he was incardinated into the Diocese of Rome in 1988.

Always close to the headquarters of Sant'Egidio, he served for almost 20 years as rector of the nearby Church of the Holy Cross and as assistant pastor of the Basilica of Santa Maria in Trastevere from 1981 to 2000 before becoming pastor of the parish. On a diocesan level, he served on the priests' council and as prefect of the Trastevere area parishes.

In a 2015 interview with the magazine Famiglia Cristiana, then-Archbishop Zuppi said his experience and formation within a lay community led to having a "role of priesthood that isn't very clerical. And, as the pope says, clericalism is an illness in the church. I learned to live my ministry together with my lay brothers and sisters, discovering the enormous richness of the church, which has different charisms that are all necessary for communion."

In 2012, he moved out of Rome's historic center to become pastor of one of the largest parishes on the outskirts of the city, Sts. Simon and Jude in Torre Angela.

Pope Benedict XVI named him an auxiliary bishop of Rome in early 2012, and Pope Francis named him archbishop of Bologna in 2015 and a cardinal in 2019.