Francis, one year on: the hacks’ tears and the weight of a fractured legacy

A year has passed since the morning of 21 April 2025, when Cardinal Farrell announced to the world the death of Pope Francis. Twelve years had passed since that balcony on a rainy March afternoon, since the “buonasera” that went round the world, since the request for a blessing turned on its head, the people blessing the Pope before the Pope blessed the people. Twelve years which the official hagiography, already in full and predictable bloom, is now turning into epic. The task of Catholic journalism, however, is not to write the lives of saints before their time. It is to look the Church in the face as she is, to listen to her laboured breathing, to register her wounds. And it is precisely in the name of that task - to which Silere non possum has remained faithful in years when keeping silent was by far more convenient than speaking - that, one year after the Holy Father Francis returned to the Father’s house, it is necessary to state clearly what rhetoric leaves unsaid: that …