Robert Mickens is a Rome-based journalist who has been reporting and commenting on the Vatican and the Catholic Church the past three decades. He is currently editor of Global Pulse, an online magazine launched in late 2014 by the Union of Catholic Asian News (UCAN) in collaboration with the French daily, La Croix, and the US bi-weekly, Commonweal.

Robert MickensThe site features his popular, “Letter from Rome,” each week. And his column, “A Roman Observer,” appears twice a month in the National Catholic Reporter.
Mickens was Rome correspondent for the international Catholic paper, The Tablet, for over a decade.

And before that he worked eleven years (1989-2000) at Vatican Radio as a journalist, producer and on-air presenter. He has long been a Vatican-affairs analyst for the BBC in the United Kingdom, ABC in Australia and National Public Radio (NPR) in the United States. Born in Toledo, Ohio in 1964, he has lived in Rome since 1986.

He studied philosophy at the Benedictine-run St Meinrad College in Indiana and theology at the Jesuit-run Pontifical Gregorian University in Rome.