John L. Allen Jr. is the President and Founder of Crux, an independent Catholic news site, after serving as Senior Correspondent for the National Catholic Reporter and Associate Editor for the Boston Globe. He also serves as Senior Vatican Analyst for CNN. He’s the author of twelve best-selling books on the Vatican and Catholic affairs, and he writes frequently on the Church for major national and international publications. He’s also a popular speaker on Catholic affairs, both in the United States and abroad.

The London Tablet has called Allen “the most authoritative writer on Vatican affairs in the English language,” and renowned papal biographer papal biographer George Weigel has called him “the best Anglophone Vatican reporter ever.” Veteran religion writer Kenneth Woodward of Newsweek described 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.” In 2019, Angelusdescribed Allen as “the most well-known and trusted American ‘Vaticanista’.”

Allen’s work is admired across ideological divides. The late liberal commentator Fr. Andrew Greeley called his writing “indispensable,” while the late Fr. Richard John Neuhaus, a conservative, called Allen’s reporting “possibly the best source of information on the Vatican published in the United States.”

Allen grew up in Western Kansas, and holds a Master’s degree in Religious Studies from the University of Kansas. He’s received honorary doctorates from the University of St. Michael’s College in Toronto, Ontario; Lewis University in Romeoville, Illinois; St. Michael’s College in Colchester, Vermont, and the University of Dallas, Texas. Allen lives in Rome with his wife, Elise, who’s also a widely read correspondent for Crux.