Pierbattista Pizzaballa

Pierbattista Pizzaballa OFM (Italian pronunciation: [ˌpjɛrbatˈtista pittsaˈballa]; also Petrus Battista Pizzaballa; born 21 April 1965 in Italy) is part of the Order of Friars Minor (commonly called Franciscans) founded by Francis of Assisi and a Catholic cardinal who has been serving as the Latin Patriarch of Jerusalem since 2020.

After being received into the Franciscan Order, he spend his novitiate at the Franciscan Shrine of La Verna in Arezzo, Italy. In 1990, he was called to service in the Holy Land, specifically Jerusalem. Having obtained his diploma in classical studies at the Archiepiscopal Seminary of Ferrara, in Jerusalem, he went on to study Biblical Theology at the Studium Biblicum Franciscanum and taught biblical Hebrew at the Franciscan Faculty of Biblical Science and Archeology in Jerusalem.

From 2004 to 2016, as a leading Franciscan, he was elected and reelected twice as the Custos of the Holy Land, the head of the Franciscans watching over the Holy Places. In 1342, the Franciscans were officially declared by two papal bulls as the Catholic Church's custodians of the Holy Places. The title of Custos goes back to the Custody of the Holy Land founded in 1217 by Saint Francis of Assisi as a province of the Holy Land.

In 2016, he was appointed as the Apostolic Administrator of the Latin Patriarchate in Jerusalem and in 2020 became the Latin Patriarch in Jerusalem, the head of Christianity's mother church. Three years later, in 2023, he was made a cardinal by Pope Francis. Following Francis' death, he was considered papabile (a possible candidate to be elected pope by the College of Cardinals) at the 2025 papal conclave despite his relatively young age.