In November 2025, Cardinal Christophe Pierre delivered his final address to the US bishops as apostolic nuncio, arguing that the Second Vatican Council remained the “guiding light” of the Church’s path forward. He had been delivering this message for nearly a decade. Not everyone was listening — and some were openly mocking him for it. Only weeks later, Pope Leo XIV proved his words to be prophetic.

On March 7, 2026, the resignation of Cardinal Pierre as apostolic nuncio to the United States was accepted and his successor, Archbishop Gabriele Giordano Caccia, was named. Pierre turned 80 on January 30 — the age at which a bishop’s retirement typically becomes automatic — but he had already been serving well past the customary retirement age of 75, kept in place because Popes Francis and Leo considered him too important to let him retire.

That judgment has been vindicated in ways neither pope could have fully anticipated. When Francis elevated Pierre to the College of Cardinals in September 2023, he was 77, with less than two and a half years of conclave eligibility remaining. He used it. At age 79, he was one of the electors in the Sistine Chapel in May 2025 when the cardinals elected the first American pope — a man whose vision of the Church is very closely aligned to that of the man Pierre spent nearly a decade trying to explain to the US bishops. These have been some of the most consequential years in the history of the US Church. In a January 30 interview with EWTN marking his birthday, Pierre reflected on his years in Washington as “very beautiful years, difficult years” — “full of tensions at times.” Indeed, the US Church has been plagued with scandal and division in recent years, and Cardinal Pierre has spent much of his tenure working to bring unity to the Church in this country.

I must admit my bias. Cardinal Pierre and I have spoken frequently over the years, and I consider him a dear friend. He has been to my home and met my family. We have broken bread together. Over the years we have discussed the state of the Church in the US and around the world — including the Catholic media landscape. He had strong opinions, but I will keep most of them to myself. But I will say that our relationship has helped me develop a greater understanding of the Church and of the Catholic faith. The message he shared has helped me grow closer to Jesus. And I will offer some advice: if you want to better understand Pope Leo’s and Pope Francis’s vision for the Church, the words of Cardinal Pierre are a treasure.

Pierre has lived all over the world. He grew up partly in Madagascar, where his father, a lawyer, moved his family when he was three. After studying for the priesthood for his home diocese in France, he was enlisted into the Vatican diplomatic corps. Over nearly 50 years of service, his postings took him across Africa and the Americas — from Mozambique, Zimbabwe, and Uganda to Cuba, Haiti, Brazil, and Mexico. It was a point of pride for him that he had never worked in Rome in his entire diplomatic career. He learned about the Catholic Church by living the faith daily in the midst of the People of God to the ends of the earth, most often in places that Pope Francis described as “the periphery.” His years in Africa left their own mark — but it was his final two decades, serving in Mexico and then the United States, that placed him at the heart of the ecclesial vision he would spend the rest of his career championing.

Pierre’s assignment immediately before he was sent to the US — as the papal nuncio to Mexico — made a strong impression on his faith and his outlook on the Church. He told America’s Gerard O’Connell in October 2023 that he arrived in Mexico in 2007 just as the CELAM conference at Aparecida was concluding. The bishop who met him at the airport had just returned from Brazil the day before. Pierre described the resulting Aparecida document as laying out “a new pastoral approach” that, when put into action, “changes the Church.”

Then-Cardinal Jorge Bergoglio headed the committee that drafted the Aparecida document, which became the foundation of his vision for the Church, laid out in his first apostolic exhortation, Evangelii Gaudium. When Bergoglio was elected pope and took the name Francis six years after Aparecida, the Latin American vision would be brought to the entire world.

Navigating tension in the US Church

When Archbishop Pierre arrived in the United States in 2016, he found a Church that was still largely unaware of the synodal vision born in Latin America and which Pope Francis was implementing at the global level. Pierre said he was “astounded” that many US bishops had no idea what had happened at Aparecida, had no idea that Evangelii Gaudium was based on its vision, and had no idea that the pope who confused them (and whom they were quietly resisting) was asking them to embrace the transformative ecclesial vision that has shaped the Church in Latin America for decades.

Pierre stepped into an ecclesiastical culture shaped in part by his predecessor at the nunciature, Archbishop Carlo Maria Viganò, who had cultivated wide respect among the US bishops before his 2016 departure. (Viganò would later become known as a notorious conspiracy theorist and schismatic, resulting in his formal excommunication in 2024.) The clerical culture and the wider world of US conservative Catholicism had not come to embrace Pope Francis’s message, and — following the April 2016 promulgation of Francis’s apostolic exhortation on marriage and the family, Amoris Laetitia — were increasingly viewing the pope with suspicion.

In his speeches to the USCCB and his public interventions over the years, Pierre consistently articulated a vision of the Church shaped by Vatican II and the missionary approach taught at Aparecida. He spoke about evangelization through encounter, accompaniment, and listening. He preached Pope Francis’s vision of a Church that goes out into the world — a synodal Church that seeks out the periphery and encounters those on the margins.

Quite often, that vision stood in quiet contrast to the emphases of USCCB leadership. The polarization surfaced clearly at the contentious June 2021 bishops’ meeting (held remotely due to the pandemic), when a debate over “Eucharistic coherence” threatened to fracture the conference. At the bishops’ next assembly in Baltimore that November, the bishops’ indifference to Francis’s key initiatives was on full display when the USCCB’s own Eucharistic revival occupied center stage. The global, multiyear synod that Francis had formally launched just weeks earlier went entirely unmentioned in the address by USCCB president Archbishop Jose Gomez — not even in passing.

By contrast, Pierre’s address outlined a vision of unity rooted in synodality — something desperately needed in a Church wounded “by the abuse crisis, the lingering effects of the pandemic, and the polarization afflicting society.” He explained that by undergoing the synodal process, “we develop a mindset essential to common apostolic discernment: listening and engaging reality.”

Pierre described synodality as the answer to the confrontations and divisions plaguing our world and our Church. He noted that many people “are unaware they are engaged in this confrontation, staking out positions, rooted in certain truths but which are isolated in the world of ideas and not applied to the reality of the lived faith experience of the People of God in their concrete situations.” His treatment of pro-life issues was characteristic: he insisted the Church must be “unapologetically pro-life,” but then he immediately asked why women seek abortions, what the root causes are, and held up Walking with Moms in Need as a model of what a truly pro-life Church looks like in practice. On the Eucharist, he warned against “the temptation to treat the Eucharist as something to be offered to the privileged few” and against an “ideology of the sacred” that obscures real encounter with Christ.

The address by Archbishop Gomez struck a different note. Gomez organized his address around engaging a secularizing culture that had lost its “founding story,” and a Church called to proclaim the true story of Christ with renewed missionary urgency. It engaged the Church’s internal polarization only glancingly, whereas recognizing those divisions was at the root of Pierre’s call for reform and interior conversion. Writing in the National Catholic Reporter, Michael Sean Winters described the gap between the two speeches as “stark.”

What Pierre articulated repeatedly, with patience and diplomacy, was simply Pope Francis’s vision for the Church. 2021 was the eighth year of Francis’s pontificate, and since his 2016 arrival the apostolic nuncio had repeatedly tried to explain this to the US bishops. Unfortunately, many of them had never stopped treating Francis as a problem to be managed rather than a shepherd to be followed. Effectively, the differing approaches symbolized the dispute over what kind of Church we are called to be: one that goes forth trumpeting its message to the world, and one that goes out with humility and bearing its wounds, listening to people and discerning the movement of the Holy Spirit.

The discordance all came to a head at the USCCB’s Baltimore meeting in November 2023. Pierre’s remarks to O’Connell in America had landed hard — he had suggested that many US bishops meant well but were still struggling to understand the missionary and synodal vision that had been unleashed by the Holy Spirit at Aparecida. In his presidential address, Archbishop Timothy Broglio delivered a barely coded rebuttal, as the assembled bishops nodded along and responded with enthusiastic applause. Later, asked directly whether he recognized Pierre’s portrait of the Church in the US, Broglio pushed back: “Certainly, our churches are not empty — yet,” adding, “He’s open to his opinion, and I’m open to mine.” As America reported, the two offered “competing visions of synodality.” Yet Pierre had simply told the truth.

Pierre was attacked at times by Pope Francis’s more outspoken and reactionary critics. Around the time of that 2023 USCCB meeting, after Bishop Joseph Strickland was removed from the diocese of Tyler, rumors spread through Catholic social media that Pierre had privately told him that there is “no deposit of faith” in a conversation with Strickland. The claim collapsed immediately under scrutiny, as Where Peter Is demonstrated at the time. Eventually Strickland himself acknowledged the alleged quote did not represent Pierre’s actual words, admitting, “He didn’t use those words, but that’s what I heard.”

Competing narratives

Over the years, the media outlet that most frequently covered Pierre’s tenure, The Pillar, constructed an image of him as well-meaning but effectively an overwhelmed water-carrier for a pontiff whose vision for the Church was an aberration — rather than a change in direction — in the great scheme of things. When he was named a cardinal by Pope Francis in 2023, Pillar editor JD Flynn suggested that Pierre’s elevation would give him “more muscle to flex in Rome,” suggesting that as a mere archbishop his influence over episcopal appointments was “dwarfed in that process by the presence of the outsize American personalities who serve on the Vatican’s Dicastery for Bishops — Cardinals Blase Cupich, Joseph Tobin, and — more recently — Robert Prevost.” In his tribute to Cardinal Pierre, Winters rejected the Pillar’s framing of the relationship between Pierre, Tobin, and Cupich, writing, “This is nonsense. Of course there were tensions: The three men are vastly different in temperament and played different roles in the process of recommending candidates to the pope.” He rejected the notion of “deep-seated difficulties” between the three cardinals.

During the USCCB’s November 2025 meeting in Baltimore — following Pierre’s final address to the bishops as nuncio — Pillar editors Flynn and Ed Condon hosted a live podcast in a local bar. They invited the audience to play a Price Is Right–style guessing game: how many times had Pierre mentioned Pope Francis by name in his speech? Six. (The fact that Pope Leo was mentioned 15 times in the address was not raised.)

Later, when Pierre was quoted explaining that the way forward for the Church “does not diverge, but advances on the path of Francis,” someone in the audience shouted “OK, Boomer,” and the hosts laughed along. Flynn then mused aloud, apparently in earnest, whether Pierre even knew how to understand himself apart from his relationship with Francis. Personal jabs at Pierre came frequently from the Pillar. A somewhat patronizing column marking his 80th birthday two months later described him as “a bit patrician, even slightly hautain” — “a man caught between two worlds” who was “increasingly out of his time.”

Condon, in particular, wrote repeatedly in The Pillar about synodality as nothing more than a Francis-era project and criticized Pierre’s characterization of synodality as the roadmap for the future of the Church. What Pierre’s critics could not (or would not) see was that his insistence was not his own hobby horse or an expression of personal devotion to Francis. He sees synodality as a genuine movement of the Holy Spirit in the Church. As he stated plainly in his America interview: “The Holy Spirit inspired this synodal approach at Aparecida.”

When Pope Leo XIV stepped onto the loggia of St. Peter’s on May 8, 2025, he effectively ratified Pierre’s position, saying in his very first address, “We want to be a synodal Church, a Church that walks, a Church that always seeks peace, always seeks charity, always strives to be close especially to those who suffer.” In an October address, Leo was more explicit that embarking on the path of synodality is the Church’s response to a divine call: “The action of the Holy Spirit lies at the heart of synodality. It is not a question of the rules governing meetings. Instead, it is about making room for God’s action by listening to the Spirit.” Leo served for twenty years in Peru, including for nearly a decade as a bishop in a Church largely shaped by Aparecida.

Unlike Pope Francis, Leo did not participate in the Aparecida meeting. Yet in Dilexi Te, he wrote of the great Latin American conferences — Medellín, Puebla, Santo Domingo, and Aparecida — “For my part, having served as a missionary in Peru for many years, I am greatly indebted to this process of ecclesial discernment” (DR 89). He added that “the life of the universal Church was enriched by the discernment of the Aparecida Conference” (DR 99).

The same pattern holds for Vatican II. In Pierre’s final address — the same speech that prompted the mockery in Baltimore — he argued that the Council remained the enduring Magisterium of the Church, not a preference of any particular pope. Flynn and Condon treated his emphasis on Vatican II as a dated reflex and his repeated references to Francis as embarrassing overfamiliarity. The audience member who shouted “OK, Boomer” was, in the room’s judgment, making a fair point.

Flynn argued that the Francis pontificate was “essentially a referendum” on whether the John Paul II–Benedict interpretation of Vatican II would stand definitively, adding that “most of us thought it was settled.” Condon went further, characterizing Pierre’s position as insisting that “there can be no deviation” from Francis’s pastoral vision — “an extraordinary thing for an ambassador to say when he’s just had a change of superior.”

Apparently, in the eyes of the Pillar hosts, the interpretation and implementation of Vatican II came to a close in 2013 with the resignation of Pope Benedict XVI, and the 12-year Franciscan pontificate was a temporary distraction. They seemed to be holding out hope that Leo would toss out everything Pope Francis taught about the Council and return things to the way they were before.

But only weeks later, on January 7, 2026, Leo XIV stood before a general audience and announced a new catechetical series dedicated to Vatican II and a rereading of its documents. “It is the Magisterium,” he said, “that still constitutes the guiding star of the Church’s journey today.” I noted at the time that Pierre — who had been mocked for saying exactly this just weeks earlier — had clearly known what he was talking about. The connection was not subtle.

A pastor’s heart

Pierre was recruited into the Vatican’s diplomatic corps as a young diocesan priest from the French Archdiocese of Rennes. Any parish or diocese would have benefitted from his strong faith, pastoral wisdom, kind heart, and intelligence. Fortunately, his pastoral heart had many opportunities to shine through in the midst of his high-profile duties. I experienced this firsthand on many occasions, two of which I will share.

Cardinal Pierre and I had our first in-person meeting in May 2021. Later that month, my sister died unexpectedly at the age of 42. A few days later, I was surprised to receive a personal note from him that was especially compassionate and warm. In the weeks and months that followed, he would occasionally ask how I was dealing with the loss. My own longtime pastor had just left the country to serve as a missionary abroad, and Cardinal Pierre provided pastoral accompaniment during that especially difficult time. A couple of years later, in early 2023, following a frightening health scare that landed me in the emergency room, he was one of the first people to call me in the hospital. He wanted me to know his concern and that he was praying for me. These are just small anecdotes, but I’ve spoken with many people who have known Pierre for a long time, and many have shared stories of his generous and pastoral heart.

I know firsthand that trying to uphold the Magisterium while pushing back against the drift of popular conservative Catholicism in America can be a genuinely lonely undertaking. The critics are loud and confident and, in some cases, well-funded. Cardinal Pierre, through his encouragement and his tireless support for the mission and vision of the Holy Father, made that undertaking feel less isolated. He accurately sized up the ideological currents in the US Church and the Catholic media landscape, and those of us who strove to stand with and defend the pope and the Magisterium benefitted greatly from his wisdom and friendship.

Cardinal Christophe Pierre was, I believe, the greatest apostolic nuncio the United States has ever had, but not because he was popular with the bishops and not because every episcopal appointment made during his tenure was perfect. It is because he remained a steadfast servant of the Church and a faithful ambassador of the Holy Father — whether Francis or Leo — in the midst of the storm. He came to this country formed by decades of service on multiple continents, shaped by a pastoral tradition the US Church had mostly ignored, and spent nearly a decade trying to help a resistant episcopate find its footing within a vision of the Church that is finally beginning to bear fruit. He planted seeds that Leo XIV is continuing to water.

Cardinal Pierre is in good health and has said he will go wherever the pope sends him — as he always has. His next assignment will likely be his first in Rome after a half-century of service in the field. It would be foolish to assume that Leo XIV is finished with him. A prophet’s work is rarely done.

---

Image: Cardinal Christophe Pierre delivers the homily at New York Encounter 2025. YouTube screenshot.