Vatican II’s secret priest-journalist: The story of Xavier Rynne
(iStock)When the church historian Massimo Faggioli was doing research at America Media last week, he uncovered a treasure trove of “poems on postcards” in the magazine from the 1960s by John Cogley, the former managing editor of Commonweal and later the religion editor of The New York Times. One, “Literary Intelligence,” offered quick and pithy IDs of many prominent writers (“Hans Küng is only thirty-five/ Upton Sinclair is quite alive”), but finished with a question on everyone’s mind during the Second Vatican Council:
I know their habits, their next of kin
But who the hell is Xavier Rynne?
Cogley wasn’t the only one asking. Writing in The New Yorker, the mysterious Xavier Rynne was spilling all the tea during Vatican II. His “Letter from Vatican City” ran from 1962 through 1965, and offered an unvarnished, mostly uncensored take on the internal operations of the council. His columns played a major role in the Catholic public perception of the council—including the description of opposing camps of traditionalist bishops and reformer bishops that became a major takeaway for many readers, Catholic and not. But no one could quite figure out who the author really was. He was obviously an American, but he was trading gossip with Italian reporters and recording observations made in Vatican stairwells like the wiliest of Romans.
Because much of Murphy’s reporting on the Vatican was on sensitive and non-public matters, he and Shawn decided he would use a pseudonym formed from his middle name and his mother’s maiden name.
So who was he, really? Francis X. Murphy, C.Ss.R., an American Redemptorist priest who was serving as a theological adviser (a peritus) to a Redemptorist bishop at the council, Bishop Aloysius Willinger. Murphy had written for American Catholic periodicals for years, including America, and leading up to the council his writing drew the attention of Robert Giroux, the legendary editor from Farrar, Straus & Giroux, who approached The New Yorker editor William Shawn about running him as a columnist in the magazine.
Because much of Murphy’s reporting on the Vatican was on sensitive and non-public matters—often the ecclesial gossip he overheard in elevators and in meals with reporters and other theological advisors—he and Shawn decided he would use a pseudonym formed from his middle name and his mother’s maiden name.
The New Yorker scored quite a coup with Rynne’s columns, especially as it became clear that the Vatican Curia was dominated by traditionalist bishops and cardinals who opposed many of the council reforms but were eventually sidelined by the sheer number of bishops from around the world seeking reform—and by the latter’s theological experts, many of whom became household names for Catholics in the years after the council: Rahner, Ratzinger, Congar, Schillebeecx, Küng, de Lubac and more.
Some bishops and Vatican officials attempted to suss out the true author behind Xavier Rynne during the Council, and he later claimed that he had been called in at one point by the secretary of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith after he had described the man, an Italian archbishop, as “a strange personality who has few friends and sees heresy everywhere.”
In the years after the council, America took to describing Murphy as “well-accredited in the field of Roman documents” and “a long-term observer of the Roman scene.”
Could America have kept Rynne for its own? After all, he had been writing for the magazine since 1948, and had contributed a number of essays and book reviews over the years. In fact, the week the council started, America published Murphy’s “The Council Opens,” a long introduction to the inner workings of the council that set the stage for much of his writing to follow. It was published on Oct. 20, 1962—the same day that The New Yorker published the first “Letter from Vatican City.”
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