The changing of the (Swiss) Guard

The Swiss Guard crumpled to the marble floor, his face pale over his ruffled collar. It was August 2022, and the young man had been standing sentinel on stage with Pope Francis until he collapsed. “It can happen,” a seasoned colleague would tell Rome Reports. “Since you don’t move, you have to wiggle your hands and feet a bit to keep the blood flowing.”

That seasoned colleague was Cpl. Nicola Crivelli, vice instructor of the Swiss Guard, who, in his role training the world’s oldest army in modern security methods, knows well the importance of keeping what many perceive as a museum display always moving, even if imperceptibly.

After the pope, the Swiss Guards are arguably the most recognizable people in the Vatican, with their bright yellow, blue and red Renaissance-style uniforms, black berets and tall halberds—medieval weapons that are half-spear and half-axe. At Christmas and Easter Masses, they don 22 pounds of intricate Austrian-made armor, the helmets topped with red and yellow plumes.

Their choreography during papal Masses is also deeply moving: They stand perfectly still until the consecration at Mass, when they drop to one knee, halberds inclined in a salute. Beneath the stillness and armor, though, they remain hyper-aware of any possible threats, always prepared to leap into action to protect the pope—and to die for him, if need be.

Founded in 1506, the Pontifical Swiss Guard is the world’s longest continually operating army, and, with a maximum of 135 members, one of the smallest. Although the Guard has shifted between ceremonial and protective duties at various points in its history, today it definitely performs the latter: a transformation solidified after the assassination attempt against John Paul II in 1981. Swiss Guards jumped on the pope to shield him—one of them still works as the Guard’s archivist today—but it was too late; a bullet already was lodged in the pope’s abdomen.

Since then, according to David Alvarez, author of The Pope’s Soldiers: A Military History of the Modern Vatican, the Guard’s training has focused more on self-defense, unarmed combat and firearms training, with new recruits training for six weeks at a Swiss police academy while their iconic uniforms are sewn in Rome.

There is, admittedly, some measure of romance that draws young men to the Swiss Guard: The uniform, the location, the history, the proximity to the pope and the oath to die for something greater than oneself appeal to men just entering adulthood. The three Guards who spoke to America for this story all described the Guard as a childhood dream.

The requirements to join the Guard’s small ranks are strict: One must be unmarried, Swiss, a practicing Catholic and male. Guards must be between the ages of 19 and 30 at the time of recruitment; stand at least 5 feet, 8.5 inches tall; have completed mandatory Swiss Army training; and have earned a high school or professional diploma. 

Halberdier Sven Rechsteiner, aged 20 when we spoke to him in fall 2024, explained that his father had always dreamed of joining the Guard but never did. When Halberdier Rechsteiner saw the Guards standing sentinel on a trip to Rome as a child, he adopted his father’s dream—and now, his two younger brothers, ages 17 and 10, have done so as well.

“He’s now very proud that I joined the Guard,” Halberdier Rechsteiner said of his father. His 17-year-old brother is more hesitant to join, he said. “He’s saying he has a girlfriend, but well, same as I, and I joined it, so there’s no problem. That’s not a good argument,” he said, laughing. The youngest brother, he said, is “absolutely fascinated” with the Guard and dreams of becoming one. Halberdier Rechsteiner’s advice? “You have to be good at school, you have to learn the languages, you have to be disciplined, you have to listen to the parents. He tries his best. It’s very sweet.”

Halberdier Rechsteiner, who had taken his oath to protect the pope only a few months before he spoke to America, was formerly a sniper in the Swiss military.

The requirements—as well as the relatively low salary compared with what civilians in Switzerland earn—make recruiting enough men to fill the ranks difficult. So too does the minimum two-year service requirement, which, as Halberdier Rechsteiner alluded to, can dissuade young men unwilling to leave friends, family or romantic partners for that long.

In recent years, the Guard has ramped up its recruitment efforts and social media presence, yet it remains short-staffed. In fall 2024, when several Guards spoke to America for the “Inside the Vatican” podcast on which this article is based, they already anticipated that many men would be asked to pick up extra shifts on their days off to cover the added security demands of the 2025 Jubilee Year. When Pope Francis died in April 2025, their resources were stretched even further.

The death of the pope and the subsequent conclave meant that the Guard’s swearing-in ceremony, which takes place on May 6 every year, had to be moved to Oct. 4. The May 6 date is significant for the Guard, because it was on that day in 1527 that 147 of the 189 Swiss Guards died fighting off the army of Holy Roman Emperor Charles V on the steps of St. Peter’s Basilica as Pope Clement VII was whisked away to safety in Castel Sant’Angelo nearby (accompanied by the few remaining guards).

Each May 6, in the presence of the pope, their families, diplomats and Swiss political figures, the new Swiss Guards approach the flag of the corps one by one, gripping it, often with visible emotion, as they swear their oath to protect the pope in Swiss-German, French, Italian or the mountain language of Romansh. Cpl. Eliah Cinotti recalled that at his own swearing-in ceremony, in May 2020, only parents were allowed to attend. Corporal Cinotti, who in addition to his Guard duties also serves as press spokesman for the Guard, said that after the ceremony, his parents told him they finally understood how much the job and the sacrifice he had sworn to make meant to him.

The ceremony is a palpable moment of the weight of history, felt by each Guard in the weight of the ceremonial armor he has trained to wear every Wednesday afternoon for the month before the ceremony, and in the gravity of the oath he or one of his brothers in the corps is making. And yet, in the face of a greater need of the pope—in this case, the election of a new one—even a steel-clad history must bend.

Changing Responsibilities

“It’s so beautiful that each morning when you wake up, you’re in the Vatican,” Corporal Cinotti told me over espresso on a sunny Roman day in October 2024, the kind of day the Italians have a word for: the ottobrata. “But you have to understand, at the same time, we see a lot of not-beautiful things,” he said.

Since the Covid-19 pandemic and in the years since, when Rome has seen record numbers of visitors, Vatican security has noticed a marked increase in people with mental health issues coming to the entry points where the Guards stand. Corporal Crivelli and Halberdier Rechsteiner explained that they often encounter visitors who claim to be Jesus or the Virgin Mary and who demand to see the pope. Corporal Crivelli, the vice instructor, explained that the Guard has brought in experts to train them in de-escalation. Normally, a Guard will ask the visitor for identity papers and then listen to the person—sometimes for hours—while standing on duty.

“Some people just want to be heard,” Corporal Crivelli, 37, said. “They don’t want to cause any damage. They’re angry about something, or maybe they’re under the effect of some narcotics or alcohol…. But we cannot let them go inside the Vatican.” He says he has spent hours listening to people explaining their problems to him. “I’m just saying, ‘Yeah, I’m gonna pray for that. Yeah, I’m sorry.’ It’s a lot of hearing and de-escalation.”

In his role as vice instructor, it is Corporal Crivelli’s job to ensure that the Guards’ training remains up-to-date with the challenges they face. In recent years, this also has meant training to protect the pope on his foreign visits, on which Swiss Guards began accompanying the pope in 2015. With the election of Pope Leo XIV, a globetrotting Augustinian who already has visited 50 countries in his lifetime and loves to travel, this relatively new Swiss Guard duty will not likely ease up anytime soon.

Ahead of the papal trips, Swiss Guards visit the pope’s destination, or the local police forces visit the Vatican, so that they can train and strategize about security together. Such collaboration between security forces is vital for papal safety. In 2021, during Francis’ trip to Iraq, U.K. intelligence alerted Iraqi police of two suicide bombers heading toward papal events. The Iraqis had intercepted them and “blown them up,” Francis revealed in 2024; they had also alerted Francis’ on-the-ground security detail.

Corporal Crivelli said that the possibility of accompanying Pope Francis on trips was what motivated him to remain in the corps long past his initial two years of service, because only more experienced Guards can travel with the pope. Corporal Crivelli went to Malta, Canada and Sudan with Francis before the pontiff’s death.

Another nascent area of concern that Corporal Crivelli now has his eye on is cybersecurity. The Holy See is regularly subject to cyberattacks, like a phishing attempt from China during Vatican-China negotiations over the appointments of bishops there in 2020. The Vatican website also went down in 2022 and 2024, with cybersecurity experts commenting that each crash had the hallmarks of a cyberattack.

Vatican cybersecurity is currently managed piecemeal by an international group of volunteers set up in 2022 by a Coptic Orthodox layman in the Netherlands. While the Swiss Guard has what Corporal Crivelli called a “cyber unit,” it only covers cybersecurity within the Swiss Guard. In the case of a cyberattack on the pope, “We’re not ready,” he said, because it has been only a small part of their training.

Joseph Shenouda, the layman who runs Vatican Cyber Volunteers, recently told the Dutch newspaper Nederlands Dagblad that, “In Rome, it just doesn’t seem to sink in that they need to wake up” to cyber threats.

Corporal Crivelli agreed that there is resistance to change in the Vatican, particularly when it comes to changes put forward by Swiss Guards: “The fact that we are a historical corps can go a little bit against modernity. We try to become more and more modern and to see the future with our training, our equipment and our skills, but it’s not always easy. Sometimes we have to go against the wall of tradition, the way of working that they have in the Vatican.”

Historic Uniforms

Perhaps the most contentious push for change centers on the Swiss Guards’ famous Renaissance-style uniforms. The Guards have a number of different uniforms—two were released in recent years, one fatigues-style for training and another dress uniform for formal dinners—but the striped “gala” uniforms remain best known, although they bring with them their own security risks.

“Actually working with this uniform, it’s not always so easy,” Corporal Crivelli said. He added that there had been an unsuccessful attempt to make changes to the uniform, but he would not elaborate. 

Still, the Guard’s uniform has been changed in the past—and it doesn’t date to the Renaissance, nor was it designed by Michelangelo, as popular legend has it. Corporal Cinotti broke the news to me as we stood in the uniform room in the barracks. “No, no,” he said, laughing. “It’s really a big, huge mistake of the tourist guides.”

The real story of the uniforms, though, reveals how the Swiss Guard has historically balanced reverence for its tradition with the requirements of modern military service. In the early 1910s, the legendary Swiss Guard commander Jules Repond embarked on a series of reforms: He limited the Guard to only Swiss-born men (rather than mostly Romans of Swiss heritage) and implemented strict military training for the corps, which had become purely ceremonial. Repond’s goal was to bring the Swiss Guard back to its roots as a security force—and he wanted to pay tribute to this history with a uniform modeled on that of the first Swiss Guards but adapted to a modern military.

Repond undertook a lengthy research project, discovering frescoes by Raphael that depicted early Swiss Guards. He adapted their costumes for ease of movement and had them produced in the colors of the Medici family, because the pope whose life was saved in the Sack of Rome had been a Medici.

For the last 28 years, the uniform has been produced by the tailor Ety Cicioni and a handful of his family members. Mr. Cicioni takes seriously the historic patrimony entrusted to him: He has signed documents saying he will not change the appearance of the uniforms. Shortly after his arrival at the Vatican, though, he did make one change: He noticed that the Guards’ uniforms were deteriorating quickly at the seams because of sweat, so he changed how the seams were sewn to make them more durable.

“My main goal was to prevent the Guards from constantly needing repairs,” he told me in Italian. The uniforms are custom-made for each Guard from 145 pieces, requiring 39 hours of labor to assemble. “Since each Guard has only one uniform, they don’t have time to wash it, so we have to take care of it. When they finish their shift, they come to us, we make the necessary repairs and adjustments, and then they go back on duty.”

Mr. Cicioni told me he had also made one aesthetic change to the uniform, but that no one noticed it except for “our dear Major Hasler”—Peter Hasler, the Guard archivist who had jumped on John Paul II after he was shot in St. Peter’s Square. “No one else has figured it out,” Mr. Cicioni said. 

Still, he is considering future changes. The newer Guards, he said, struggle with time management and take a long time to fasten the 14 buttons on each gaiter. “Maybe we could find a system with a zipper,” he mused, “try it out and see if it works.” Leaning against a cabinet in the barracks’ uniform room, Corporal Cinotti said most Guards’ speed of getting dressed improves with practice. “Normally when you are young, it’s 10, 15 minutes until you’re ready. Now? It’s 42 buttons in five minutes,” he laughed.

The bigger challenge for Mr. Cicioni is that durable fabric for the uniforms is becoming increasingly difficult to find. “We actually need stronger, more resistant fabrics, but today’s fashion trends focus on softness and aesthetics instead,” meaning that fabric suppliers rush to meet that need. “It’s very difficult to find the right materials,” he said. A key difficulty: The world’s smallest army is too small to justify a custom fabric order.

As a result, Mr. Cicioni salvages whatever fabric he can from the uniforms of departing Guards. “Unfortunately, it’s the young Guards who do this,” he said of the salvage work. If a Guard arrives late for work or curfew, his punishment is two hours of cutting up old uniforms. Corporal Cinotti jumped in: “It’s horrible! Trust me, you are there for maybe two hours, cutting and cutting.” Has he had that experience? “No,” he said, “I’m such a good Guard for the moment.” (Later, when I asked if he could add a stop in the Sistine Chapel to our tour of the nearby Swiss Guard barracks, Corporal Cinotti responded: “Only if you want me cutting uniforms!”)

A New Barracks—and Female Guards?

Just inside the Vatican’s Saint Anne’s Gate, past two Swiss Guards in blue cloaks and black berets, is the Swiss Guard barracks. One wing houses the soldiers, another the commanders, and the last the officers and administrative offices. The three wings surround a courtyard, where on the sunny day I visited, children rode around on tricycles, shrieking joyfully.

Although Swiss Guards must be unmarried to join the corps, they are allowed to start families once they begin their service—a privilege that used to be limited only to corporals and higher ranks. However, there is no more room in the barracks for families, so these days, getting married means a Guard must move out. The space has been at even more of a premium since 2018, when Pope Francis increased the number of Guards from 110 to 135.

In response to the housing shortage and the deterioration of the historic building, a Swiss foundation was established to fund a $60 million renovation of the barracks. The plans for the new barracks, designed by a Swiss firm, would give most Guards single rooms. These days, there are only 12 single rooms in the entire 150-year-old barracks. The additional space would allow more Guards to live in the Vatican with their families. It could also open the door to women Guards.

In 2008, Swiss Guard commander Col. Daniel Anrig told reporters he would love to admit women to the Guard, but first there would need to be sufficient facilities for male and female Guards to live separately. With the new barracks set to be opened on May 6, 2027—the 500th anniversary of the Sack of Rome—the possibility of opening the Guard to women could be on the table again.

Still, Corporal Cinotti explained, admitting women would not necessarily solve the Swiss Guard’s recruitment problems: The same factors—low salaries, time away from home—that make recruiting male Guards difficult also apply to women. Likewise, Guards need to have completed their Swiss army basic training, which is required for men but which few Swiss women elect to do, so the candidate pool is relatively small.

The military historian David Alvarez predicted that when the all-male Vatican police force begins to include women, which he thinks is likely in the near future, there will be increased pressure on the Swiss Guard to allow women as well. He said, “The only thing that would hold them back is the same thing that holds the Vatican back in all kinds of areas: tradition.”

The Weight of History

Layered with the sound of children playing in the barracks courtyard is the sound of construction equipment moving dirt and stone. “It’s not construction,” Corporal Cinotti explained, “It’s more archaeology.” As with most construction projects in Rome, digging into the ground will likely lead to some archaeological discoveries. “They’re finding if we have some special things down there,” Corporal Cinotti said, adding flatly, “We will have some special things.”

Such is the law of progress in the Swiss Guard. Each step forward must be preceded by a reckoning with history. Before construction, excavation. Before new uniforms, a study of Renaissance frescoes. Before improved training, an assassination attempt against the pope. It’s a tension the Guards can feel in their bodies: Hyper-aware that they may need to spring into action to protect the pope, they keep their eyes open to threats from beneath their heavy, plumed helmets.

In this way, the Swiss Guard is a microcosm of the entire Catholic Church. The Guards, like many Catholics, regard the weight of tradition differently. Some, like the youngest Guard we spoke to, Halberdier Rechsteiner, viewed it primarily as a treasure to be guarded and respected; others, like Corporal Crivelli, appreciate the historic richness but wish the Guard could respond more nimbly to current challenges.

In the end, as the Second Vatican Council determined, the answer is neither one side nor the other but a fusion of both: ressourcement and aggiornamento—a “return to sources” and a “bringing up to date.”

Navigating this balance is difficult to ask of anyone, and perhaps particularly for young men dealing with their own questions of faith and identity in the heart of the Vatican. “When I joined the corps,” Corporal Crivelli said, “I was joining the Guard to see at what point my faith was, and to challenge it a bit.”

“It is a challenge for me every day now, after six years here, to understand at what point my faith is. I pray, not a lot, not always. Sometimes I pray and remember God just when I need something. But actually, in the environment where we are, it’s very important stuff,” he said. “I have some colleagues who arrive with no faith at all, and they maybe become a priest or [return] to Switzerland very faithful. Others arrive very faithful and [go back] to Switzerland losing their faith, not putting a foot in a church anymore.”

“For me, it’s still a challenge,” he said. “I also have to train [my faith]. I will try to work on it. It’s still a challenge. We’re not done yet.”

⸺

For more, listen to our “Inside the Vatican” podcast episode “Deep Dive: The Swiss Guard, Between Tradition and Reform” at americamagazine.org/swissguard.

This article appears in February 2026.

• Facebook
• X
• Mail