Pope Francis After One Year

Paul Vallely is the author of Pope Francis: Untying the Knots, which has been called “indispensable” by The New Yorker, “riveting” by The Guardian, and “in terms of seriousness of purpose and depth of understanding, head and shoulders above the rest,” by The Sunday Times.

He is Visiting Professor in Public Ethics and Media at the University of Chester and Senior Honorary Fellow at the Brooks World Poverty Institute at the University of Manchester. He is also the editor of The New Politics: Catholic Social Teaching for the Twenty-First Century and A Place of Redemption: a Christian Approach to Punishment and Prison.

He has produced award-winning reports from more than 30 countries in the developing world for over three decades. He has also chaired the Catholic Institute for International Relations (now Progressio) and he has been an editorial adviser to the Catholic Bishops Conference of England and Wales.

He has worked with Bob Geldof as an advisor for both Live Aid and Live 8, and has lobbied negotiators and heads of government at the Gleneagles G8 summit with Geldof and Bono

John Allen, Jr. is the prize-winning associate editor of The Boston Globe and the senior Vatican analyst for CNN. He is the author of six best-selling books on the Vatican and Catholic affairs, and writes frequently on the Church for major national and international publications.

The Tablet has called Allen “the most authoritative writer on Vatican affairs in the English language,” and papal biographer George Weigel has called him “the best Anglophone Vatican reporter ever.” Veteran religion writer Kenneth Woodward of Newsweek described Allen as “the journalist other reporters—and not a few cardinals—look to for the inside story on how all the pope’s men direct the world’s largest church.”

Two of Allen’s most recent books are The Catholic Church: What Everyone Needs to Know (2013) and The Global War on Christians: Dispatches from the Front Lines of Anti-Christian Persecution (2013).