When the archbishop of Bologna, Matteo Zuppi, received the red hat of his cardinal on October 5, 2019, his day ended with a mass held in the Plaza de la Basilica or Santa María in Constvere, a neighborhood in the center of Rome, where he found the direction in adolescence and then served as a proniest.
“My life, or rather life itself, is always composed of so many pieces that have given us and are part of me,” said Cardinal Zuppi, now 69 years old, his duration of his homily that night. “Today I can see, and I think we all see it, the joy of being together as a piece of our common life, exactly the opposite of individualism.”
Many of those who gathered to wish him well the duration that Mass knew him from his days as a teenage volunteer for the community of Sant’Egidio, a Catholic beneficial organization known for working with the poor, for the interreligious dialogue and by mediating international conflicts.
After becoming a priest, he hears of becoming a vicar in the Basilica and for years, he was a spiritual leader of the community of Sant’Egidio, who prays in Santa María in Trastevere.
It is now among the cardinals mentioned frequently by the observers of the Vatican as a contender to be Pope. As a priest and bishop, he embraced a pastoral vision of the ministry similar to that of Francis, and he would be expected to continue his approach if he was chosen.
For many novels, Cardinal Zuppi is known as “Don Matteo”, the name of a priest who solves the crime on Italian television.
When Francis hit him to become a cardinal in 2019, he seemed perfect for a pontiff who tried to welcome the fold Catholics who felt geographically, pastorally and idologically alienated.
Cardinal Zuppi was cozy for Roman Catholics LGBTQ and wrote an introduction for the Italian edition of a 2017 book about approaching the Gay Catholics of Reverend James Martin, a Jesuit priest and writer.
By sharing Francis’s aversion to the traps of his position, Cardinal Zuppi set up a bicycle around Bologna after becoming the archbishop of the Italian city in 2015, just like Francis mounted the public bus while he was archbishop of Buenos Aires. And like Francis, who decided to live in a modest house of guests of the Vatican instead of the opulent apostolic palace, Cardinal Zuppi moved to a house for retired priests in Bologna.
Cardinal Zuppi also developed an international reputation, entering some of the bloodiest conflicts in the world. With Sant’Egidio, he was a chief negotiator in conversations that led to the 1992 Peace Agreement that ended a civil war in Mozambique. He participated in many other peace conversations, not all of which produced results.
In 2023, Pope Francis chose Cardinal Zuppi to be an envoy of peace between Ukraine and Russia. Although peace could not achieve, many Ukrainians found that the mission was a success. They saw him as “one of the greatest expressions of support for Ukraine by the Holy See,” said Andrii Yurash, an ambassador of Ukraine in the Vatican. He encouraged other countries to support dialogue and helped facilitate the exchange of prisoners and children, said Yurash.
On Francis’s funeral day, Cardinal Zuppi with President Volodymyr Zensky or Ukraine, who “expressed our gratitude, our gratitude”, so the Vatican had done, Mr. Yurah added.
But the Association of Cardinal Zuppi with the community of Sant’Egidio could power against him in the elections for the next Pope, according to Sandro Magister, an expert in the Vatican. “An increasing number of cardinal voters vary from a pontificate that would be serious a risk of being executed by an external oligarchy,” Magister said, referring to the group, calling him a “formidable machine” that Bajo Francis reached the power of great size within the Vatican.
Other critics have pointed out that Cardinal Zuppi’s connections helped accelerate his career in his career: his father worked within the Vatican, and through his mother, Cardinal Zuppi is the nephew grandson of an Italian cardinal who was once powerful.
Francis appointed him president of the Italian Bishop Conference in 2022, choosing him from a group of three candidates voted by bishops. One of his first acts was to open an investigation into the sexual abuse of the Catholic clergy in Italy.
The first investigation report was disappointing because it lacked in scope and independence, said Francesco Zanardi, founder and president of Ret L’A abuse, a group of rights of Italian victims. Mr. Zanardi partially blamed the Italian law, which does not require the Church to denounce crimes of abuse to the civil authorities, so Cardinal Zuppi was “following the letter of the law,” he said.
However, even Cardinal’s critics said the investigation was more than their predecessors had done in a country where the sexual abuse of the clergy has not had a public calculation. Mr. Zanardi said that Cardinal Zuppi had him on numerous occasions and did not avoid the confrontation.
That doesn’t surprise people who know him. Mario Marazziti, or Sant’Egidio, said that over the years, Cardinal Zuppi had “developed a dialogue experience between those who fight among the opposition worlds” and, with that, a capacity for reconcility.
