John L. Allen Jr. died on January 22, 2026, after a lengthy battle with cancer. The legendary Vatican beat reporter and Church affairs analyst was 61 years old. He is survived by his wife, Elise Ann Allen, who is Crux’s senior Rome correspondent.

Allen was a force of nature, certainly as a journalist who was not only our principal but also a model for us, whose counsel and whose company we already and forever shall sorely miss.

Allen was a patient mentor, a generous colleague, and the consummate newsman.

Keenly as we feel his absence in the newsroom, we also mourn the loss of a man who had been our dear friend for the better part of three decades.

We recall many convivial gatherings with Allen in restaurants and at his home in Rome, where he enjoyed exercising his formidable culinary prowess and was a prodigiously gracious host.

While we treasure the memories we made with Allen at table – some of them admittedly fuzzy – we clearly remember with powerful gratitude the countless kindnesses he visited on us in secret, through more than twenty years of friendship that began in the Eternal City and will, we fondly hope, continue in happy eternity.

Leading voices from across the spectrum of opinion in the Church praised Allen as “the journalist other reporters – and not a few cardinals – look to for the inside story on how all the pope’s men direct the world’s largest church,” to say it with Kenneth Woodward.

Allen spent seventeen years with the National Catholic Reporter, during which he became “the most authoritative writer on Vatican affairs in the English language,” according to The Tablet, and “the best Anglophone Vatican reporter ever,” according to conservative biographer of Pope St. John Paul II, George Weigel.

In 2014, Allen joined the Boston Globe’s Crux team, where he served for two years as associate editor before the Globe spun Crux off, leaving Allen to pilot the organization as CEO and editor-in-chief.

Under Allen’s editorial leadership, Crux has continued undaunted and undistracted in its mission of newsgathering and reporting, amid momentous changes in the Church and in global politics.

Through thick and thin, fat years and lean, Allen tenaciously preserved Crux’s editorial independence, always with both eyes firmly fixed on the work of getting the story, getting it right, and getting it out.

“Crux does the news,” Allen would say, and he led by example, relying on a core of dedicated and capable journalists and fostering an editorial culture infused with his newsman’s ethos.

Buttressed by new and dynamic business leadership in the creation of which Allen was instrumental, Crux is equipped to carry forward its mission: to provide – as Allen liked to say – the very best in smart, wired, and independent coverage of the Vatican and the Catholic Church around the world.

We ask your prayers for our friend, John L. Allen Jr., for his widow, Elise, for all who loved him, and for the work he advanced with whole-hearted and single-minded devotion, work we shall surely continue.

Charles Collins and Christopher R. Altieri
The Editors