R.I.P. PAUL BADDE, “GOOD AND FAITHFUL SERVANT”

R.I.P. PAUL BADDE, “GOOD AND FAITHFUL SERVANT”

I leave tomorrow for Manoppello, Italy, a small town of 6,751 inhabitants in Italy’s Abruzzo region, about 20 or so miles from the Adriatic Sea. The German writer Paul Badde really put Manoppello on the map for so many people given his great passion for and the focus of so many of his writings, the Holy Face of Manoppello. Paul died on November 10 in his beloved Manoppello and his funeral will be celebrated there on Saturday, thus the reason for my trip.

Over the years I promised Paul many times I’d let him be my guide to the shrine of the Holy Face, a promise I sadly never kept.

Paul had so many, so very many friends and admirers. One of them is Robert Moynihan who published a lengthy letter on November 11, writing of his friendship with Paul and Ellen Badde, adding a piece by CNA and a beautiful look at Paul’s life and legacy by another dear friend and respected German researcher and writer, Michael Hesemann.

Right now, I am incapable of expressing my thoughts on the life of dear, wonderful, delightful, wise Paul Badde, with whom I have shared many precious moments, many of which were prayerful hours with Our Lady, Advocata, and many others, yes, sharing some sparkling, chilled white wine at La Vittoria!  For now, I thank Bob Moynihan and Michael Hesemenn for their beautiful, though-provoking tributes to Paul!

Here is a photo Bob posted, noting “German Vaticanist Paul Badde, looking at the original of the image of the Holy Face of Manoppello.”

And Bob’s report on their friendship:

My friend Paul Badde died yesterday at the age of 77.

He died in the small Italian village of Manoppello, near the Shrine of the Holy Face, built to house an ancient veil containing the mysterious image of a man’s face, an image apparently made without any paint of any kind.

Paul thought the image was made out of “light,” and was the actual face of Jesus, created at the moment of Jesus’ resurrection in Jerusalem nearly 2,000 years ago.

Paul wrote a popular book about the veil, The Holy Veil of Manoppello: The Human Face of God (link), arguing for its authenticity.

A month ago, Paul, already suffering from a grave illness, moved from his Rome Vatican apartment to Manoppello, where some years ago he had purchased a little apartment. There he was planning to live with his wife, Ellen, and to visit the shrine each day, to gaze on the face contained on the gossamer-thin silk of the veil he had studied so long and written about with such passion.

“It’s Him, Bob,” Paul often said to me about the image on the veil. “It’s Him.”

A month after his transfer from Rome, Paul’s already fragile health took a turn for the worse, and he died yesterday morning, November 10.

His funeral will be in Manoppello at 10:30 a.m. on Saturday, November 15.

Paul’s body of work will remain: 20 years of reports on life in Jerusalem and more than 20 years of reports on life in and around the Vatican, in Rome.

Paul knew Pope Benedict XVI personally from decades ago in Munich, and when Benedict became Pope, Paul made every effort to support the work and vision of the German pontiff.

Following the election of the German Pope in April, 2005, and with the financial support of an American Catholic benefactor, Leon Toups, of Largo, Florida, Paul and I worked together for almost two years as he, along with others, launched the German-language magazine, Vatican: Schoenheit und Drama der Weltkirche, as a “more European” and “more German” version of my own Inside the Vatican, in an effort aimed at helping the German Pope to spread his vision and message in the German-speaking countries.

Then, a little more than three years ago, Paul and his wife Ellen became leading members of an internet (Zoom) rosary prayer group of more than 200 members praying the rosary nightly for peace in the world, unity in the Church, and for the physical and spiritual healing of sufferers from cancer and other debilitating diseases, which still continues to this day.

So, with the death of Paul, I lose a friend, a kindred spirit, a fellow writer, with whom I worked, discussed, argued, reconciled, and prayed, and whom I now commend to the Lord: “Eternal rest grant unto Paul, O Lord, and may perpetual light shine upon him. May his soul and the souls of all the faithful departed, through the mercy of God, rest in peace.  —RM

Bob followed his letter with a Catholic News Agency report on Paul Badde’s death:

    Journalist and author Paul Badde dies following long illness

By CNA Deutsch

CNA Staff, Nov 10, 2025 – Paul Badde, author of many well-known books such as “Benedict Up Close,” “The Face of God,” and “The True Icon,” died early Monday morning at the age of 77 after a long illness. Badde was also a veteran contributor to EWTN and CNA Deutsch, CNA’s German-language news partner.

Badde was born on March 10, 1948, in Schaag, Germany, a small village on the Lower Rhine. He studied philosophy and sociology in Freiburg as well as art history, history, and political science in Frankfurt. Before embarking on a journalistic career, Badde worked as a teacher for several years.

As a journalist, he was known for his work at the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung and later at Die Welt. Badde served for many years as a Jerusalem correspondent before moving to Rome. He was also one of the founding editors of Vatican Magazine.

As reported by Die Tagespost, Badde died in his beloved Manoppello in the Italian Abruzzo region. Paul and his wife, Ellen, had five children.

And here is a piece in memory of Paul by German writer Michael Hesemann:

Rediscoverer of the Face of Jesus: Paul Badde (1948–2025)

    He Found the Face of Jesus!

By Michael Hesemann on Paul Badde

In his Divine Comedy, Dante describes in beautiful verses the story of a pilgrim from Croatia who travels to Rome for the Holy Year and cannot get enough of gazing at the legendary Veil of Veronica, bearing the imprint of the Face of Jesus.

Again and again, he exclaims in wonder: “O my Jesus Christ, true God, so this was once Thy holy countenance!” For him, the encounter with the image of Christ was a marvelous opportunity to meet, here on earth, the One who one day, in heaven, would be his Judge.

Such a pilgrim—though from Germany rather than Croatia—was Paul Badde.

A pilgrim all his life, a seeker of God, and one who indeed found what he sought: a mystic of holy images, two of which he rediscovered, causing a sensation throughout the world—a true “hunter of the lost treasures” of our Catholic Church.

Yet he was no sensationalist, no “Indiana Jones” (even if the hat was his trademark), but rather, on the contrary, a deeply devout man—more poet than journalist—whose books are hymns glorifying God and the Blessed Virgin, our Advocate (“Advocata”).

Like Pope Benedict, he sought the human face of God—and he found it.

Indeed, he even persuaded the theologian-pope to make a pilgrimage to the mountain village of Manoppello, where Benedict encountered the Holy Face so profoundly that, even in his retirement residence at the Monastero Mater Ecclesiae, a copy of the Volto Santo stood on his living-room table.

That image, after his death, was even passed on to Badde himself.

Thus, the Welt reporter became not only a chronicler but also a guide to the profoundly spiritual German pontificate.

Those who knew Paul Badde—those who spent long evenings with him at his favorite restaurant, La Vittoria—knew his warmth, humanity, joy of life, and deep piety.

He was so very different from the cold, critical journalists of the generations that followed him.

Yet the last time I met him on this earth, it was not over a glass of his beloved white wine, but deeply absorbed in adoration, together with his wife Ellen, in the Blessed Sacrament Chapel of St. Peter’s Basilica, which had become his “home chapel.”

He attended Holy Mass daily at St. Anne’s, the Vatican parish church, and every evening spent a good hour before the Eucharistic Lord.

What a life this extraordinary journalist lived, and what a body of work he has left us!

Born in 1948 in Breyell on the Lower Rhine, the son of a barber, Paul Badde studied philosophy, sociology, and art history in Freiburg and Frankfurt—right in the midst of the student revolution, when all established things were being questioned, by him as well. “He who is not left-wing in his youth has no heart; he who remains so in old age has no brain”—one could well say that of him.

He began his professional career as a teacher and freelance contributor to various newspapers, including the leftist satirical magazine pardon, whose logo was a bright red devil’s head tipping its hat. But his literary talent was soon recognized, and he changed course. From February 1988 onward, he worked as a reporter and editor for the magazine of the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung. In 2000 he moved entirely to the Springer publishing house, for which he had already freelanced, joining Die Welt. By then he had become a star reporter—one of the finest pens in German journalism. From 2000 to 2013, he served as Die Welt’s foreign correspondent, first in Jerusalem, then in Rome and at the Vatican.

During these years in the two holiest cities of Christendom, he flourished—and, more than that, he became truly devout. In Jerusalem, he met the then-Abbot of the Dormition Abbey, Bernhard Maria Alter, OSB, where German Benedictines guard the site of the Virgin Mary’s Dormition. The renowned expert on icons not only accepted Badde as an oblate (a lay associate) of his abbey but also led him to his two greatest discoveries. He told him of the original icon of Mary, painted by St. Luke and kept in Rome—the Advocata—which Badde later found on Monte Mario in the Dominican convent of the Rosary. Its fascinating story became the subject of his last major work, The Luke Icon – Rome’s Hidden World Wonder.

In searching for this icon, Badde came across, through Jesuit Fr. Pfeiffer, the Veil of Manoppello—the image that art historians have identified as the original Roman “Veronica.” Badde followed this trail, examined Pfeiffer’s theses, and wrote the world bestseller The Face of God: The Rediscovery of the True Face of Jesus, known in German as Das Muschelseidentuch (“The Sea-Silk Veil”). It was his greatest work, read on every continent, making him the “missionary of the Holy Face.” He led not only thousands of pilgrims but also bishops and cardinals (including Cardinals Meisner, Sarah, and Koch) to the shrine in the Abruzzi. After Benedict XVI’s visit there, it was elevated to the rank of a Basilica Minor—a papal basilica. And, “in passing,” while seeking authentic Marian images, he had also introduced the Tilma of Guadalupe to German-speaking readers.

During the “German hour of the world Church” under Benedict XVI, Badde’s star shone brighter than ever. Inspired by the Ratzinger pope, he co-founded—together with his colleague Guido Horst and publisher Bernhard Müller (FE-Medien)—the Vatican-Magazin, which not only featured his literary masterpieces but also “Badde’s images,” his distinctive photographic art. When the Springer Group sent him into well-deserved retirement, it was far from the end: he began writing for the Catholic News Agency (CNA), appeared on camera, and produced programs for the Catholic TV channel EWTN, where he took a whole generation of young Catholic journalists under his fatherly wing.

They, too, are part of the rich legacy he leaves behind. Above all, however, there are his books—works full of poetry and faith—whose beauty inspired Benedict XVI himself, and which, I am convinced, will still delight readers a hundred years from now. They are treasures for anyone who owns them. In them, he lives on—this sometimes challenging, always passionate, and profoundly good-hearted colleague who bore his own cross in the years following his retirement. Two strokes and a long illness caused his wife Ellen, his five children, and his many friends deep concern for years—and indeed, he himself sensed that heaven was calling.

When his book The Luke Icon appeared in 2024, he announced it as his “final report,” and his two contributions to my Pilgrim Guide to Rome in the Holy Year as the last pieces he would ever write. These, too, are part of his legacy—in which, as in our hearts, he lives on.

When I learned in September that he had left Rome to settle permanently in his beloved Manoppello, where he owned a house and was an honorary citizen, I knew that he was setting out for the final stage of his earthly pilgrimage—wishing to be as near as possible to his heavenly Judge: there, where he could encounter Him not “only” in adoration, but look directly into His Face.

    “Death is a gift to the dying, purchased with the tears of those left behind.” For him, this is truer than ever. For Paul Badde has now, I am convinced, reached his goal. He now gazes upon the Face of his and our Lord—the Face he sought all his life. As this Holy Year draws to a close, his earthly pilgrimage too has ended—and the One whose image the veil of Manoppello reveals has now shown Himself to him in His full glory.

Paul Badde will be laid to rest on Saturday, November 15, in the cemetery of his adopted home, Manoppello.