By Fr. Raymond J. de Souza

A Good Friday death – even for a Catholic giant of the last fifty years – meant that less attention was paid than deserved. On the other hand, it was fitting for the author of Patì sotto Ponzio Pilato? – Did He Suffer under Pontius Pilate?

Vittorio Messori, a few days shy of his 85th birthday, died on Good Friday evening last month, drawing to a close one of the most important Catholic lives of recent generations, a life that shaped how people think about Christ and about His Vicar on earth. Messori gave definitive shape to how the voices of popes are heard, and thus to the papacy in our time.

Catholics know well the impact that the convert-journalist can have, even more than the gifted theologian. English-speakers have G.K. Chesterton and Malcolm Muggeridge and Richard John Neuhaus, and French-speakers Andre Frossard.

Messori grew up in a Communist and anti-clerical Italian family, a student of rationalism who professed agnosticism. In 1964, during the summer break from his university studies, he had something of an instantaneous conversion after reading Matthew's Gospel.

He applied his rationalism to his newly professed Catholic faith. What could reason tell us about Catholic claims, and their coherence? At a time when apologetics was falling out of fashion, Messori devoted himself, with a journalist's frame of mind and skills, to a project that would consume more than a decade.

In 1976 he published Hypotheses about Jesus in Italian, the fruit of his work, appealing to history, reason, data, and experience to make arguments for the faith. It was a sensation, selling more than a million copies in Italy – and translated all over the world. (English here.) It made Messori a major cultural figure – a Catholic journalist, not just a journalist. He became the Church's leading apologist in the 1970s, a lay witness who engaged atheists, materialists, and Communists on the reasonableness of the faith.

In 2002, he adopted the same approach to the passion, examining the extra-biblical evidence for the crucifixion and death of Jesus in Did He Suffer under Pontius Pilate?

Messori's greatest influence, however, was not made in his own voice, but in two book-length interviews he conducted, The Ratzinger Report: An Exclusive Interview on the State of the Church (1985) and, with Pope John Paul II, Crossing the Threshold of Hope (1994). The interview book format, now routine for senior prelates, was a genre that Messori did not invent, but elevated.

In 1984, Andre Frossard had published Be Not Afraid (in French), the fruit of lengthy conversations with St. John Paul the Great. The book had little impact.

At the same time as Frossard's book was being released, Messori persuaded Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger to sit over several days for interviews on the state of the Church, some twenty years after Vatican II. The prefect of doctrine, and most important figure in the Roman Curia, was unsparing in his frank criticisms of a range of lamentable trends, rejecting what he would later call the "hermeneutic of rupture," and even using the combustible word "restoration".

John Paul had summoned an "extraordinary synod" for October 1985 to evaluate the lights and shadows of the post-conciliar period. It would give rise to the 1992 Catechism of the Catholic Church. Messori's interview with Ratzinger set the terms of debate – to the frustrations of those progressives who realized that Ratzinger's book was a turning point.

"This is a synod about a council, not a book!" protested Cardinal Godfried Daneels of Belgium. It was, but the book provided the synod's script.

Messori proposed an unprecedented television interview with John Paul for the fifteenth anniversary of the pontificate in 1993. The Holy Father agreed but the interview never came off. John Paul kept the questions Messori wanted to ask and gave him written responses to do with as he thought best. Crossing the Threshold of Hope was the result, a publishing phenomenon tha...