Gerard O’Connell and Elisabetta Piqué have between them covered four pontificates, reported on three conclaves and travelled to close to 100 countries, a good number of it with the Holy Father, Pope Francis.
This week the husband-and-wife correspondents brought six decades of that reporting to Perth.
Mr O’Connell has covered the Vatican since 1985 and is senior correspondent for America, the magazine published by the Jesuits in the United States.
Ms Piqué has been a Vatican correspondent for the Argentine daily La Nación for more than two decades and has filed from Iraq, Afghanistan, Ukraine and Libya as a war correspondent.
The pair were invited to Australia by Notre Dame’s Global Centre for Catholic Leaders and will travel across the country to share their experience.
In Perth they met clergy and representatives from across the Archdiocese, speaking about Leading in a Synodal Church and The Election of Pope Leo XIV.
In his address to clergy and Archdiocesan representatives, Mr O’Connell was direct about what the two had come to offer, and what they had not.
“We’re not theologians. We’re not canon lawyers,” he said. “We’re journalists who have tried to record history as we have seen it.”
That work has become harder in an era of manufactured stories, Mr O’Connell highlighted, and false accounts about Pope Leo XIV have already circulated.
Ms Piqué’s years in conflict zones taught them both how quickly an account can be bent. “One of the first casualties of war is truth,” Mr O’Connell explained.
Much of what they shared came from friendship rather than a press pass. Cardinal Jorge Mario Bergoglio married the couple and baptised their two children, having known him since 2001, after Ms Pique interviewed him when he became a Cardinal and was visiting Rome.
Mr O’Connell recalled going to congratulate the new cardinals in Rome and finding then Cardinal Bergoglio in a corner with his sister and her husband while queues had formed around others. “This man can be pope,” he remembered thinking. “And it never left me.”
Twelve years later, Cardinal Bergoglio arrived at their home for dinner minutes before the gates of Castel Gandolfo closed on the pontificate of Benedict XVI, and the three watched it on television.
Over the meal, the conversation turned to the coming conclave, and Ms Piqué told him that if he spoke that way in the pre-conclave meetings, the cardinals would elect him as the next Pope.
“Little did we think that night that standing beside us was the next pope,” Mr O’Connell said.
On the 2025 conclave, Mr O’Connell noted that around a quarter of the 133 electors from 70 countries belonged to religious orders, a share not seen before, and that five had led their orders.
Among them was Cardinal Robert Prevost, prior general of the Augustinians from 2001 to 2013, elected on the fourth ballot with 108 votes.
The new Pope is a different character, Mr O’Connell highlighted.
Pope Francis regularly abandoned a prepared text to speak from the heart, while Pope Leo, a canon lawyer, almost always reads his.
He is more reserved, a monastic, where Francis was Jesuit. On the substance the two are close, and Mr O’Connell cited April’s visit to Algeria, the first by any pope, as one pontificate building on the other.
For the Perth clergy, the closest link ran through their own Archbishop Timothy Costelloe SDB.
Pope Francis appointed Archbishop Timothy Costelloe SDB one of nine president delegates to preside over the Synod on Synodality, and Mr O’Connell said Australia had come to the global consultation with a head start because of the Fifth Plenary Council.
He also pointed the room towards Rosemary Goldie, the Sydney-born layworker who was among the first women appointed as auditors at the Second Vatican Council and later the first woman in a senior executive post in the Roman Curia.
Pope Leo XIV has made his own position plain.
At a meeting of the synod council in June last year, weeks after his election, he arrived with a notebook and said he had come to listen.
When the questions started, Mr O’Connell recounted, the Pope stopped them. “I am not the lone ranger. We’re in a synodal church.”
The visit coincides with the couple’s book, The Election of Pope Leo XIV: The Last Surprise of Pope Francis, published by Orbis Books in March. They have already presented it in New York with Fordham University and America Media, and in Rome at Notre Dame’s Cushwa Center. From Perth they travel to Melbourne on 25 August and Sydney on 27 August, and will give a public lecture in Parramatta hosted by Bishop Vincent Long Van Nguyen OFM Conv.
The Election of Pope Leo XIV: The Last Surprise of Pope Francis can be purchased from online book stores.