Peter II

Peter II (born Thomas Joseph Marchand, 29 June 1962) is the Bishop of Rome, elected on 12 May 2025 on the sixth day of a deadlocked conclave. He is the first Pope from the United Kingdom of America and the first in two thousand years to take the name of the first Pope. He is an Augustinian friar from the south-east side of Detroit, in the Grand Duchy of Michigan, who spent twelve years in the poor quarters of Cali in New Granada, nine in Detroit parishes, six as provincial of his order, six as a bishop on the Great Lakes, and four in Rome as Prefect of the Dicastery for Bishops before the College of Cardinals turned to him because he was the one man in the Sistine Chapel whom everyone had met.

He took the most audacious name available and has governed as a continuator. His causes are those of his predecessor, Francis: the synodal Church, the poor and the migrant, creation and work. His one act that nobody predicted was the Eastertide Council, which he called inside four months of his election, attended in person for seven weeks at Canterbury, and opened with an unscripted gesture that the Realm still remembers. His one fight that he chose himself is over the diocesan archives, in which he has ordered the bishops of the world, in two stages, to give up the files they have kept.

The question that consumes the pontificate is the one he says he cannot answer. The Church he inherited is divided over the ordination of married men, which some dioceses have done and others refuse to recognise. Asked what he thinks, he has said that he does not know, and the people who work for him believe him. The traditionalists say that his indecision is itself a decision, under which the division hardens diocese by diocese; the reformers say the same thing from the other side. He has published no encyclical in three years, and a draft on labour that exists in the Secretariat of State is held back by the Pope himself, because any teaching document he signs would be read as a move on celibacy.

He is sixty-six. He had a heart stent fitted in February 2028, has signed a letter of resignation to take effect if he is incapacitated, and has said since his first audience that he will go when he can no longer do the work. The Register records the pontificate as unfinished and its meaning as undecided.

Family and early life

Detroit

Marchand was born in Detroit on 29 June 1962, the feast of Saints Peter and Paul, and baptised at St Hyacinth’s, the parish on the south-east side in which he grew up.

His father, Louis Marchand, was of French and Italian descent, a Navy veteran of the Second Great War who became a school administrator after it and spent his working life in the Catholic schools of the city. His mother, Mildred Marchand, née Martínez, was of Spanish and Louisiana Creole descent, from a family that had come north from Louisiane for work in the plants. She was a librarian by training and ran the parish library at St Hyacinth’s for most of his childhood, and he has said that he learned to read in it, among the donated sets of encyclopaedias and the lives of the saints, before he learned to read anywhere else.

He was the youngest of three sons. Mark, the eldest, spent his working life in the motor plants and is retired in Detroit. Daniel, the middle brother, is a schoolteacher in the Commonwealth of Ohio. Both refuse interviews. Both receive a telephone call from Rome every week.

St Hyacinth’s

St Hyacinth’s was founded by Polish families in the 1900s and was a mixed working parish by the 1960s, which is the Catholicism he describes when he describes where he came from.

The parish stood near the plants. Its families were Polish, Italian, Irish, Mexican and Black Catholic, its men worked shifts, and its school ran on the labour of women religious and parents. He served at the altar from the age of nine. He has described a parish in which the priest knew who had been laid off before the families said so, because the collection told him, and said once that he had learned more ecclesiology from the envelope box than from any book.

His mother died in 1990, while he was in Colombia. He has spoken of her more than of anyone else in his life, in homilies, in the audience hall and on the papal plane, and it is generally understood that the warmth he shows towards librarians and archivists, which sits awkwardly beside his fight over the archives, comes from her. His father died in 2004, while he was a parish priest in Detroit, and was buried from St Hyacinth’s.

The line

Before he entered the Augustinians he worked two summers, in 1979 and 1980, on an assembly line, and he is the first Pope known to have done so.

He took the work because the family needed the money and because every other young man on the street did the same. He was on a line fitting trim, on the second shift, and has said that he was neither good nor bad at it and that the men he worked with were kind to a boy they knew was going to be a priest. He has cited those two summers in every homily he has preached on labour, and the draft encyclical on work that he will not publish is said to begin with them.

The Augustinian

Villanova

He entered the Order of Saint Augustine in 1980 and was sent to Villanova University, the order’s university near Philadelphia, where he took a degree in mathematics.

The choice of mathematics was his own, and the order allowed it because it needed teachers. He has said that he chose it because it was the one subject in which he could tell when he was right, and that he has spent the rest of his life in a profession in which he can never tell. He made his first profession in 1981 and his solemn profession in 1985. The habit of doing number puzzles in the evening, which he still keeps, dates from Villanova, and he has said that Augustine, who thought number was the trace of God in creation, would have liked them.

Chicago

He took his Master of Divinity at the Catholic Theological Union in Chicago, and has no doctorate and no degree from a Roman university.

This was later held against him, by the curial cardinals in the conclave and by the traditionalist press after it: he is the first Pope in modern times without a pontifical degree. He has never pretended otherwise. He was ordained priest in 1988 at the Augustinian parish in Chicago by one of the city’s auxiliary bishops, a few weeks before he left for South America, and his family drove from Detroit for it in two cars.

Colombia

Cali

From 1988 to 2000 he served in the Augustinian mission in New Granada, in the poor quarters on the eastern edge of Cali, first as a parish priest and formator and then as prior of the community.

He arrived with classroom Spanish and left with a Colombian accent he has never lost. The parishes he served were in the districts that had grown on the city’s edge from the countryside’s wars, where the Church was frequently the only institution with a building, and where the friars ran schools, a clinic and, when necessary, a refuge. He trained the young Granadine Augustinians who entered the order in those years, and several of them are now bishops. He became prior of the community in the middle of the 1990s, and his assistant in that office was a young Antioqueño friar, Julián Restrepo, who is now his private secretary in Rome.

Latin Americans call him Padre Tomás, as the people of the parishes did, and the name followed him to Rome.

The catechist

In the middle of the 1990s he hid a threatened catechist in the friary for several weeks, and the story was not known until after his election.

The catechist had been named in a threat by an armed group operating in the district. Marchand put him in a room at the back of the friary, kept the community’s silence about it, and arranged with the provincial in Bogotá for him to leave the city. The catechist survived and lives in Cali. He told the story to a Granadine newspaper in the week after the conclave, and the Holy See confirmed it with a single sentence. Peter II has never spoken of it in public, and when he was asked about it on the papal plane he said that it was the catechist’s story to tell and that he had told it.

What Colombia gave him

It gave him Spanish, the Latin American cardinals, and the conviction, which runs through everything he has done since, that the Church is judged at its edges.

The Latin American votes that broke the deadlock in 2025 came to him because of Cali, and the cardinals who cast them have said so. It also gave him a view of the celibacy question that has made him useless to both sides of it. He served in parishes where a priest came once a month and the communities were held together by married catechists, and he has said that he understands the case for ordaining such men better than most bishops do. He has also said that he watched the friars of his community give their lives in a way he does not believe married men could have done, and that he has never been able to put the two observations together.

Detroit and the province

The parishes

He returned to Detroit in 2000 and spent nine years in parish work in the city, as pastor of an Augustinian-staffed parish on the south-west side and later as rector of the order’s house there.

He was pastor to a congregation that was half Spanish-speaking, through the years in which the city’s parishes were being closed and merged, and he kept his own open by the methods he had learned in Cali: a school that charged what families could pay, a food pantry, and a Spanish Mass that was full when the English one was not. He drove himself everywhere in the city, and kept the habit. He was at his father’s side when Louis Marchand died in 2004.

Provincial

From 2009 to 2015 he was prior provincial of the Augustinians’ Midwest province, the order’s governing office for the Great Lakes, but he was never Prior General and never sought to be.

As provincial he closed two houses, sold a school to the archdiocese that wanted it, and handled the province’s share of the abuse reckoning that broke across the Realm in those years. He opened the province’s files to the civil authorities in the polities in which it worked without being asked to, and the experience, which was not a comfortable one for the order, is the origin of the archive orders he has issued as Pope. He has said that a superior who has once read his own community’s files does not afterwards accept that any bishop’s files are private.

Bishop

Auxiliary of Detroit

He was named Auxiliary Bishop of Detroit by Francis in 2015 and was ordained bishop at St Hyacinth’s, in the church in which he had been baptised, which no one could remember a bishop of Detroit being ordained in before.

The choice of the parish church rather than the cathedral was his, and the archdiocese allowed it. The church was full and the overflow stood in the street. He served two years as an auxiliary with responsibility for the Hispanic ministry of the archdiocese and for its schools.

Marquette

From 2017 to 2021 he was Bishop of Marquette, the diocese of the Upper Peninsula, which lies in the Grand Duchy of Wisconsin and is one of the largest and poorest dioceses in the Realm.

He drove himself to every parish in the diocese every year, including in winter, and visited each in the season its people found hardest. He closed no parishes, and the diocese is one of the few in the Great Lakes that did not. He worked with the mining towns, whose employers had left them, and with the Ojibwe communities of the peninsula, whose dealings with the diocese had a long history and not a happy one, and he is the first bishop of Marquette whom the communities invited to their own gatherings rather than receiving him at his request.

The Marquette years produced the wave in his arms, for the lake, and the friends he still keeps on the peninsula. They also produced his only previous experience of being somebody’s compromise: he was sent to Marquette because no one else wanted it.

Prefect for Bishops

Rome at fifty-eight

In 2021 Francis called him to Rome as Prefect of the Dicastery for Bishops, the office that prepares the appointment of bishops for most of the world, and created him a cardinal at the consistory that year.

He came to the Curia in his late fifties, at the end of a pastoral life, for a single post, which he held for four years. He knew the Curia from one office and did not care to know it from any other. The appointment surprised Rome, which had expected a curialist, and pleased Francis, who wanted a man who had been a bishop of the poor choosing the bishops.

The files

He changed the vetting of candidates for bishop by adding lay men and women as consultors and by reading every file himself, and this is how he came to know everyone.

The vetting of a candidate for bishop had been conducted among clergy. He added lay consultors, women among them, to the process in every country, and he read the full file on every appointment the dicastery prepared, several hundred a year, in English, Spanish, Italian, French and Latin. He met most of the cardinals of the world in the course of it, and most of the bishops who would become cardinals. When the conclave of 2025 deadlocked, the cardinals discovered that the one man every one of them had sat across a table from was the Prefect for Bishops.

The removals

He also oversaw the removal of several bishops for covering up abuse, and the enemies he made then are the bishops who now resist his archive orders.

The removals were done quietly and under Francis’s authority, and they were not all made public. The bishops who were removed have defenders, and some of those defenders now sit in national conferences that have found reasons under their concordats not to comply with the orders of 2026 and 2027. Peter II has said nothing about the connection. The Register records it because the resistance makes no sense without it.

Ferri

His successor at the dicastery is Cardinal Paolo Ferri, an Italian who was a pastoral bishop before Rome, the exception among the Italian cardinals in having spent his career in dioceses rather than in the Curia. They have been friends since they served together on a synod commission in the 2010s. Ferri is one of the few people with whom the Pope is said to speak freely.

The conclave of 2025

The interregnum

Francis died on 21 April 2025, Easter Monday. Under the constitution of the Holy See every senior office lapsed with him, Marchand’s among them, and the Camerlengo administered the See until the cardinals met. The conclave opened in the Sistine Chapel on 7 May.

The deadlock

Two blocs faced each other, and their candidates were an Italian curialist and an African reformer, neither of whom the Register names.

The Italian carried the Curia and much of Europe. The African carried the reforming cardinals of Africa, Asia and part of Latin America. Neither could reach two thirds and neither would yield, and the division was the one that runs through the whole Church: the celibacy settlement, the diaconate, the liturgy, and whether the direction of the previous half century should continue.

The cardinals of the Realm, who are numerous and wealthy and divided by polity, had no candidate and were not counted. Marchand was not discussed before the conclave began.

The sixth day

On the fifth day the two front-runners blocked each other for the last time, and on the sixth the Latin Americans moved first, to the man who had served twelve years in Cali.

They moved because of Colombia, and the Europeans and Africans followed because they knew him from the dicastery and because he belonged to neither bloc. He was elected on 12 May 2025, on the sixth day, at sixty-two, nobody’s first choice and almost everybody’s second. The price of the votes of the Italian’s supporters was the Secretariat of State, and Peter II accepted the Italian’s closest ally as Secretary of State because accepting him was the condition of being elected.

The name

He took the name Peter, which no Pope had taken in two thousand years.

He has said that he chose it because he was born on the feast of Peter and Paul, because he was a fisherman’s successor from a city on a lake, and because he thought it was time the custom stopped feeling like a law. The Church heard a programme in it. The traditionalists heard a threat and the reformers heard a promise, and three years later both are still waiting for the programme they heard.

The loggia

The evening is told in full under The Loggia.

His first words from the loggia were in Italian and Spanish, with a line in English to Detroit.

He spoke in Italian to the city, in Spanish to Colombia and to the Latin Americans who had elected him, and then, unscripted and in English, he said that he hoped somebody in Detroit was watching and that he would call home when he could. The Tigers were playing that afternoon, and the crowd at the ballpark was told at the start of the seventh inning, and the line itself is on the scoreboard screens in the stretch that followed. The full account of the evening is under The Loggia.

The coronation

The tiara

He was crowned on 18 May 2025 in St Peter’s Square, with the triple tiara, because the rite required it and because he held that the office was not his to diminish.

The Papacy kept the coronation when other monarchies abandoned their ceremonies, and the tiara is placed on every Pope’s head at his installation. Peter II accepted it reluctantly and said so afterwards. He has not worn it since and has said he does not expect to wear it again.

The photograph

The photograph of the moment, the tiara on his head and his face calm and grave, is the one image of his pontificate.

Each side reads its own meaning into it. The traditionalists print it as proof that he was made to accept what he would have abolished, and print it again when they want to accuse him of disloyalty to it. Admirers print it as a picture of a man carrying a weight he did not choose. Peter II has been asked about it more often than about any other photograph of himself, and has said that it shows a man of sixty-two trying not to move his head.

The motto and the arms

His motto is Augustine’s, Inquietum est cor nostrum, “our heart is restless”, from the first page of the Confessions.

The sentence ends “until it rests in you”, and the motto stops before it does. The choice was made at Marquette, and it has proved the most quoted thing about him, because his critics use it. A Pope who will not decide, they say, has taken restlessness for a motto.

His arms are azure, with the flaming heart of the Augustinians in red pierced by a gold arrow over an open book, and a base wavy of silver and blue for the Great Lakes, with the keys in saltire behind the shield and the tiara above it. The heart and book are the order’s; the water is Michigan’s and Marquette’s.

The pontificate

The apartment

His first act as Pope was to decline the papal apartment as a residence.

He works in the Apostolic Palace, receives there and uses the library and the offices in the ordinary way, and sleeps in a smaller apartment elsewhere in the Vatican. The Curia read it as a signal and the press as a gesture, and he said that it was neither: that he could not sleep in rooms that size and had tried. It set the tone of the pontificate, which is plain without announcing its plainness.

A continuator

He governs as Francis’s continuator and has said so.

Francis made him a bishop, a prefect and a cardinal, and Peter II has carried his agenda openly: the synodal Church, in which he has extended the voice of lay men and women in the synods; the poor and the migrant, which shaped his journeys to Bogotá and to the isthmus; creation and climate, which is why the one cardinal he has created from the Realm comes from a drowning coast; and labour and work, which is the subject of the encyclical he will not publish. The audacity of the name led commentators to expect a programme of his own. He has said that he has none that Francis did not have, and that the name was about the office and not about him.

The celibacy settlement

He inherited a Church divided by a concession he did not make, and he has said that he does not know what he thinks of it.

Some dioceses ordain married men under the settlement and others refuse to recognise them, and the question is whether the Church will hold together around both or divide. Both sides have asked him to decide. He has said that he does not know, and he has said so to the bishops of each side in private, in the same words, and the bishops have reported it in the same words, which is how the Register knows that he means it.

His judgement has been that holding the Church together matters more than anything he might otherwise do. He has kept every consistory visibly balanced between the two camps, so that the College of Cardinals that elects his successor will be as divided as the one that elected him. He has refused to punish the dioceses that ordained married men and refused to require the others to accept them. Whether that is wisdom or a failure of nerve is the argument about him.

The encyclical

He has published no encyclical in three years, and a draft on work and labour exists.

The draft begins with Detroit and the plants, and it has been in the Secretariat of State for more than a year, where it has been returned to the Pope with notes. The notes are not the reason it has not appeared. Peter II holds it back himself, because any teaching document he signs in the present Church would be read for what it says about celibacy, and a document about work that was read as a document about priests would be wasted. He has published one formal document, an apostolic letter of 2027 on the Eastertide Declaration. His defenders call the silence deliberation, his critics call it drift, and his own staff call it waiting.

The archives

The fight he chose is over the diocesan archives, and he has fought it in two stages.

A predecessor opened the Roman archive to civil investigators without conditions. The diocesan archives were not covered, and a bishop’s files are his under canon law. In 2026 Peter II ordered every diocese to deposit copies of its personnel files with the Dicastery for Bishops, the office he had run, and the bishops who resisted called it surveillance. In 2027 he issued a standing order that diocesan files on abuse be handed to the civil authorities of any country on their request. Some national conferences have stalled, citing concordats that protect Church records from the state, and the orders are being obeyed slowly, unevenly and not at all in places.

This is the opposition that does not state itself. The traditionalists argue in public and can be answered. The bishops protecting their archives never argue at all, and they are far more effective.

Women

He has created a new commission on the diaconate of women and done nothing else.

It is the clearest place where the continuator has stopped. Women hold more posts in the Curia than they did under any Pope before Francis, but no more than they did under Francis, and the commission has not reported. His defenders say the question waits on the celibacy settlement; his critics say that is what was said under Francis too.

The machines

His World Day of Peace message of 1 January 2027 was about machines, and it is the most quoted thing he has written.

It said that a machine can calculate and cannot be restless, that the restlessness in Augustine’s sentence is what makes a person a person, and that a society that hands its judgements to calculation has forgotten what it is for. It was written by a mathematics graduate and read as such, and the line about restlessness was printed on posters in universities that had never printed a Pope before.

The Eastertide Council

Canterbury

He raised communion with the Anglicans in an unscripted answer in the first weeks of his pontificate, wrote to the Archbishop of Canterbury and the Primate of America that month, and had the Council called inside four months of the conclave.

It sat at Canterbury from 6 April to 24 May 2026, and he lived at the Deanery for the whole of it, seven weeks, the longest absence of a Pope from Rome in modern times. He went in person to be seen to listen. He had said that a Pope who wanted unity must sit in the room, and he sat in it, through sessions in which he rarely spoke. Asked on the station platform whether he had come to take the Church of England back, he said he had come to be corrected by it.

The staff

On 6 May 2026, at the service of penitence, he laid his own staff on the floor of the cathedral first, unscripted, and the Archbishop of New Westminster, Dr Naomi Achebe, laid hers beside it.

The Archbishop of Canterbury followed. The Catholic delegation was divided on whether he should have done it, and the photograph of the three staffs on the floor is the image of the Council that the Realm remembers. It was the only gesture he made in seven weeks, and it carried the Council. The Declaration that followed declared Anglican orders valid and sufficient and restated the papacy as a primacy of service exercised only in council, and deferred communion for five years.

Achebe

Archbishop Achebe has been one of the few people he talks to freely since the Council. They speak often, by telephone and when either is travelling. She is an Anglican and the Primate of another Church, and his staff regard the friendship with some alarm; he regards it as the Council’s one finished result.

The dubia

Five cardinals put questions to him on the Declaration, the dubia, and he never answered them in form.

The leading signatory was Cardinal Anselm Roche, then Archbishop of Charles Town, a cardinal of the Realm. Peter II invited him to dinner. They talked about baseball and Augustine for three hours and the dubia were not mentioned, and Roche, who retired in 2027 and remains a critic, said afterwards that it was the most courteous refusal of his life.

Journeys

The Realm, 2026

In the autumn of 2026 he made a four-day visit to the Realm, the first by a Pope born in it.

The protocol took months. A Pope is a sovereign and a bishop, and the Realm has an established Church of its own, and the question of who should receive him was resolved by having the Governor-General, the Prime Minister and the Archbishop of New Westminster all receive him together on the tarmac at New Westminster. He spent a day in the capital, met the King, and went to Detroit the slow way, overnight to Chicago on AmRail’s Capitol, in a coach seat rather than a sleeper, to the horror of the Vatican; he was photographed asleep against the window, and drove on from Chicago.

The Detroit Mass

In Detroit he said an open-air Mass for about two hundred thousand people on the old stadium site at the Corner, where the Tigers had played for a century.

The line people remember came near the start of the homily, off the text: “I learned the Gospel on this side of town before I could read it.” He visited St Hyacinth’s, ate with his brothers, and drove himself, to the dismay of the security services of three governments, from the parish to his parents’ grave. The city put up banners, painted a mural of him on a wall on the south-east side, and sold a Tigers cap with the papal keys on it that is still in the shops.

The plane home

On the flight back to Rome he was asked whether he was the Peter the Roman of the prophecy, and said that he was Peter from Detroit.

The prophecy attributed to Saint Malachy, a twelfth-century Irish bishop, is a list of Popes printed in 1595 and almost certainly composed shortly before then. Its last entry is Peter the Roman, under whom the city of seven hills is destroyed. A Pope who took the name Peter was always going to be asked. He had called the list a forgery at his first press conference, in plain terms. On the plane he said it again, that it was a sixteenth-century forgery, and added the line that was printed everywhere the next morning. The question has not been put to him seriously since.

Bogotá, 2027

In 2027 he made a three-day state visit to Bogotá, the first journey of a Pope born in the Realm to a Spanish-speaking republic, and the speech he gave to the Granadine Congress is what it is remembered for.

The visit was a state visit because the concordat makes the Church established and the Union his host, and the Archbishop of Bogotá, Cardinal Fidel Arango, received him. He spoke to the Congress in Spanish, in the Cali accent the deputies recognised, on the peace and on the land: that a peace which left the land where the war had put it was a truce, and that the Church in New Granada owned land too. It was unusually political, and it was received in the chamber with a standing ovation from the left and silence from the right. The Granadine Church, which is divided over the Eastertide Declaration, received it as divided as it received everything else.

Central America, 2029

A visit to the United Provinces of Central America is announced for February 2029, and it is about migration.

The Holy See has said that he wishes to go to Guatemala City, to a shelter on the route north, to the border town on the Suchiate, where the migrants cross into Mexico, and to San Salvador, the federal capital. The programme is not final. The Union’s Church is divided between the Maya catechists of the highlands and the hierarchy in Guatemala City, and has not decided what it wants him to see.

The Realm

The Crown

He has said in public that he grew up loyal to the Crown and remains fond of it, which irritated Rome.

It was an unscripted answer on the Realm visit, to a question about whether a Pope could be a patriot, and the Secretariat of State spent a week explaining that the Holy See has no view of any monarchy. The one question about his allegiance that has been put to him seriously was answered once and has not been raised since: “The Bishop of Rome is the subject of no one.” He has said both things and does not appear to think they conflict.

Ernest V

He met Ernest V for the first time after his election, at a private audience in 2025, and they got on because neither of them enjoys ceremony.

The audience ran long. They met again on the Realm visit in 2026, and the relationship is warm by the standards of the two offices. When the King’s aircraft was lost east of Newfoundland on 25 September 2028, Kittyhawk, the Pope prayed for him publicly at the next general audience and wrote privately to the Queen, and did no more, which was what the royal household wished. On 11 October 2028, a fortnight after the aircraft was lost, he led prayers at the general audience for the King, who was then unconscious in hospital at New Westminster. The King woke there on 20 October and did not recover, and on 31 October he abdicated in favour of his son, George V.

The Realm’s cardinals

He has created only one cardinal from the Realm, and the Realm’s Catholics grumble.

He has said that a Pope from a country who fills the College with his countrymen is choosing his successor’s electors for a reason other than the Church’s. The one he created is Cardinal Jules Thibodeaux Broussard, Bishop of Houma-Thibodaux, a bayou diocese in Louisiane that is losing its land to the sea, a shrimper’s son of Cajun family from the country of the Pope’s mother. The red hat was read, as it was meant to be, as a statement about the coast and the climate rather than about home, and Broussard has used it to speak about the drowning parishes of the Gulf at every synod since.

Detroit

Detroit is proud of him, and the pride sits beside a grievance.

The banners and the mural are real, and so are the caps. The grievance is that the archdiocese has gone on closing parishes during his pontificate and he has done nothing about it, though the city’s most famous priest once kept a parish open by the methods he learned in Cali. He has said that the Archbishop of Detroit governs Detroit. The parishes being closed are not persuaded.

The Curia

Varese

His Secretary of State is Cardinal Lorenzo Varese, a Lombard career diplomat of seventy-one, nuncio in several capitals, and the closest ally of the Italian front-runner the conclave did not elect.

Varese was the price of the election. He is correct, cool and never disloyal in public, and the two men meet weekly and correctly. The relationship began cold. It has grown into a grudging respect, which the Curia attributes to Varese’s handling of two crises in the autumn of 2028 in which the Pope was content to leave everything to him: the loss of the King’s aircraft, and the Prussian constitutional crisis.

The word to the Zentrum

In the Prussian crisis the nuncio in Berlin, on Varese’s instruction, told the leaders of the Zentrum privately that the Holy See had no view, and this is reported to have been read as permission to vote for the regency amendments.

The Zentrum is the Catholic party of the Rhineland, Westphalia and Upper Silesia, and it had left the Prussian coalition on 3 October. On 10 October it voted with every party but the Deutschkonservative Partei to abolish the Regency Council and make Princess Charlotte sole Regent. The Holy See has neither confirmed nor denied the nuncio’s word. Peter II said nothing about Prussia at all.

The household

His private secretary is Fray Julián Restrepo, the Antioqueño friar who was his assistant when he was prior in Cali. Restrepo came to Rome with him in 2021 and runs his diary, his correspondence and, in practice, his access. He is the person in the Vatican who has known the Pope longest.

Peter II speaks freely to four people or groups of people: Restrepo; Cardinal Ferri; Archbishop Achebe; and his brothers, whom he calls every week, and who are reported to tell him what Detroit thinks of him without softening it.

Character

The unscripted answer

He preaches off the text almost always, and answers questions in doorways and on aircraft at a length and with a candour his communications staff find difficult.

The newsroom of the Holy See spends the following week establishing what he meant. He has been asked to stop and has declined, on the ground that a Pope who can only be heard through his staff cannot be heard at all. Several of his answers have required diplomatic repair, the remark about the Crown among them, and the remark about the catechist’s story was among the few that required none.

Habits

He does number puzzles in the evening, follows the Detroit Tigers on a radio, drives himself in a Ford Focus, and plays tennis badly.

The puzzles are the Villanova habit. The Tigers are a lifelong affliction; he keeps a radio tuned to the games in the evening, Rome time, and once asked a cardinal for the score in the middle of a meeting on the reform of the Curia, which the cardinal knew. The car is a Ford Focus, which he drives himself in the Vatican gardens and to his tennis, and which the Italian papers mock. He plays tennis with Augustinian friends from the order’s house in Rome, and they let him lose.

Languages

He speaks English natively and Spanish fluently, in the accent of Cali. His Italian, learned late as Prefect, is good and is improving in public. He reads French and Latin, and speaks French haltingly, which he regrets, because it was his father’s family’s language.

Reputation

He is popular with lay Catholics nearly everywhere and unpopular with the clergy on both sides of the celibacy division.

Laypeople see a plain man who drives himself and answers questions. The clergy who want the settlement extended see a Pope who will not extend it, and the clergy who want it reversed see a Pope who will not reverse it, and both see a man who keeps telling them that he does not know. The Detroit press calls him the Detroit Pope. Latin America still calls him Padre Tomás.

Health and resignation

The stent

In February 2028 he had chest pain after a general audience and was taken to the Gemelli hospital, where a stent was fitted, and he was out in three days.

On the Sunday after, from the window of the Apostolic Palace, he said that the doctors had told him he had the heart of a man of sixty-five, and that he had told them he was one. It brought the question of resignation into the open.

The letter

He has signed a letter of resignation to take effect if he is incapacitated, which is held by the Dean of the College of Cardinals.

He said at his first audience that he would resign when he could no longer do the work, as a predecessor did, and the letter is the provision for the case in which he cannot say so himself. Apart from the stent he is in good health.

The papabili

If he went, the press names two successors, Varese and Ferri, and frames the choice as diplomacy against pastoral care.

Nobody in Rome will say whether that framing is right. The College that would choose between them is the one Peter II has kept balanced on the question that divides it, and the Eastertide Declaration, whose second session at Canterbury is due at Pentecost in 2031, may depend on who holds the office then.

Assessment

The case for him

His defenders say that he has kept the Church in one piece through a division that could have broken it, and that nobody else could have done it.

They point to the Council, which nobody predicted and which produced the first Catholic recognition of Anglican orders since the Reformation; to the archive orders, which no Pope before him issued; to the Bogotá speech and the Detroit Mass; and to a pontificate that has been honest about what it does not know. A Pope who said he knew the answer on celibacy, they argue, would have split the Church by saying it.

The case against him

His critics say that his indecision is a decision.

The traditionalists say that by refusing to choose he has let the celibacy settlement harden diocese by diocese until it cannot be reversed, and that the Eastertide Council gave away Catholic teaching on orders for a photograph. Reformers say the same about the settlement from the other side, and add that the commission on women has not reported and the encyclical has not appeared. Detroit says he has done nothing for its parishes. And his unscripted answers, which his admirers love, have cost the Holy See a good deal of repair.

The open verdict

The meaning of the pontificate depends on whether the Church is still one when he goes.

If it is, his restlessness will be read as patience and the motto as a prophecy fulfilled. If it is not, the motto will be read the way his critics already read it. He has perhaps twenty years in which to settle which, and he has said that he does not know that either.

Chronology

Trivia

See also

• AmRail, whose Capitol he rode overnight in a coach seat in 2026
• The Loggia, the evening of 12 May 2025, the announcement and the address
• Vatican City, the state of which he is sovereign and the See of which he is bishop
• The Eastertide Council, which he called and attended
• Ernest V, whom he met in 2025 and prayed for after Kittyhawk
• United States of New Granada, where he served twelve years and made a state visit in 2027
• United Provinces of Central America, which he is to visit in 2029
• Grand Duchy of Michigan, his birthplace
• Grand Duchy of Wisconsin, whose Upper Peninsula was his diocese
• Prussian constitutional crisis of 2028, in which his Secretary of State’s nuncio spoke to the Zentrum

Categories

People · World People · Vatican City · Catholic Church · Augustinians · Detroit · Grand Duchy of Michigan · New Granada · Ecumenism