When the Archbishop of Bologna, Matteo Zuppi, received his cardinal’s red hat on Oct. 5, 2019, his day ended with a Mass celebrated in the square of the Basilica of Santa Maria in Trastevere, a neighborhood in central Rome where he found his direction as a teenager and later served as a priest.
“My life, or rather life itself, is always made up of so many pieces that have shaped us and are part of me,” Cardinal Zuppi, now 69, said during his homily that evening. “Today I can see, and I believe we all see it, the joy of being together as a piece of our common life, exactly the opposite of individualism.”
Many of those gathered to wish him well during that Mass knew him from his days as a teenage volunteer for the Community of Sant’Egidio, a Catholic charity known for working with the poor, for interreligious dialogue and for mediating international conflicts.
After he became a priest, he went on to become a vicar at the basilica and for years, he was a spiritual leader of the Community of Sant’Egidio, which prays at Santa Maria in Trastevere.
Now he is among the cardinals frequently mentioned by Vatican watchers as a contender to be pope. As a priest and a bishop he embraced a pastoral vision of ministry similar to Francis’, and he would be expected to continue his approach if elected.
For many Romans, Cardinal Zuppi is known as “Don Matteo” — the name of a crime-solving priest on Italian TV.
When Francis tapped him to become a cardinal in 2019, he seemed a perfect fit for a pontiff who was trying to welcome back into the fold Catholics who felt geographically, pastorally and ideologically alienated.
Cardinal Zuppi was welcoming to L.G.B.T.Q. Roman Catholics and wrote an introduction for the Italian edition of a 2017 book about reaching out to gay Catholics by the Rev. James Martin, a Jesuit priest and writer.
Sharing Francis’ aversion to the trappings of his position, Cardinal Zuppi rode a bike around Bologna after he became the Italian city’s archbishop in 2015, just as Francis rode the public bus while he was archbishop of Buenos Aires. And like Francis, who chose to live in a modest Vatican guesthouse instead of the opulent Apostolic Palace, Cardinal Zuppi moved into a home for retired priests in Bologna.
Cardinal Zuppi, too, developed an international reputation, stepping into some of the world’s bloodiest conflicts. With Sant’Egidio, he was a chief negotiator in talks that led to the 1992 peace accord that ended a civil war in Mozambique. He participated in many other peace talks, not all of which produced results.
In 2023, Pope Francis chose Cardinal Zuppi to be a peace envoy between Ukraine and Russia. While he was unable to bring about peace, many Ukrainians considered the mission a success. They saw it as “one of the greatest expressions of support for Ukraine on the part of the Holy See,” said Andrii Yurash, Ukraine’s ambassador to the Vatican. It encouraged other countries to support dialogue and helped facilitate the exchange of prisoners and children, Mr. Yurash said.
On the day of Francis’ funeral, Cardinal Zuppi met with President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine, who “expressed our appreciation, our gratitude,” for what the Vatican had done, Mr. Yurash added.
But Cardinal Zuppi’s association with the Community of Sant’Egidio could work against him in the election for the next pope, according to Sandro Magister, a Vatican expert. “An ever-greater number of cardinal electors are wary of a pontificate that would be at serious risk of being run by an external oligarchy,” Mr. Magister said, referring to the group, calling it a “formidable machine” that under Francis achieved outsize power within the Vatican.
Other critics have pointed out that Cardinal Zuppi’s connections helped to fast track his early career: His father worked inside the Vatican, and through his mother, Cardinal Zuppi is the grandnephew of a once-powerful Italian cardinal.
Francis named him president of the Italian Bishops’ Conference in 2022, choosing him from a group of three candidates voted by bishops. One of his first acts was to open an inquiry on sex abuse by Catholic clergy in Italy.
The first report of the inquiry was disappointing because it lacked scope and independence, said Francesco Zanardi, founder and president of Rete l’Abuso, an Italian victims’ rights group. Mr. Zanardi partly blamed Italian law, which does not require the church to report abuse crimes to civil authorities, so Cardinal Zuppi was “following the letter of the law,” he said.
Yet even the cardinal’s critics said that the inquiry was more than his predecessors had done in a country where clergy sexual abuse has not had a public reckoning. Mr. Zanardi said that Cardinal Zuppi had met with him numerous times and did not shy from confrontation.
That does not surprise people who know him. Mario Marazziti, of Sant’Egidio, said that over the years, Cardinal Zuppi had “developed an experience of dialogue between those who are fighting between opposing worlds” and, with that, an ability for reconciliation.