Desire for goodness attracts world’s attention to conclave, Vatican newspaper editor writes
May 08, 2025
In a front-page editorial in the Vatican newspaper’s May 7 edition, Andrea Monda, the editor-in-chief, pondered why “since April 21, all the eyes of the world have been focused here, on the smallest State in the world.”
Monda recalled a remark an Italian writer made to Pope St. Paul VI: “intelligence inspires admiration and culture draws applause, but only goodness attracts people to God and leads them to convert.”
“Goodness attracts,” Monda continued, adding:
Perhaps this is what explains the attention and curiosity of the entire world towards the Church. There is in all these people who look at Rome these days the feeling, perhaps hidden deep in their hearts, that beyond all those rites, those liturgies and those procedures so out of sync with the world, and therefore fascinating, there is something that has to do with goodness (and with the possibility of a conversion). And so they hope that the man who will be chosen as a leader is not so much the most cultured or the most intelligent, but the most good.
He concluded:
Those who condemn the Church often do so because they love it but are as it were wounded, because they would adhere to that message but no longer believe in it because of the bad testimony of Catholics.
Ultimately, if these people consider hypocrisy the worst of sins, they do so because it is Jesus himself in the Gospel who clashes harshly precisely with the hypocrites of his time and therefore also of ours, precisely because that high, noble message—which we all admire and would like to follow, despite everything, despite Catholics themselves, through their fragile, stained, dirty hands—has somehow reached us.
Precisely thanks to the Church, Christ’s unfaithful bride. To this unfaithful bride, to this useless and inadequate servant, the eyes of the whole world turn, perhaps to perceive even today, in the turmoil of a confused world, a sign of hope.
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