Let’s start with a loaded question. But it’s a question that journalists really need to ask, because of trends during recent events in Catholic life.
So here goes: Is the Vatican’s press office helping to push a progressive agenda that could forever change the Catholic church?
Here’s the background: The Pan-Amazonian Synod that ended over a week ago wasn’t without controversy, to say the least. The recommendations put forth regarding bestowing Holy Orders to women in the form of making them deacons is something Pope Francis has to make a decision on by the end of the year. Toss in the theological debate over the Pachamama statues present at the Vatican and at a nearby Rome church and there was no shortage of fodder for reporters and columnists.
That takes us to the Vatican’s press office, the people on the front lines of getting out the pope’s message to the world’s media.
Like the White House in the age of Trump, so too does the Holy See’s messaging need some further examination. Former White House Press Secretaries Sean Spicer, followed by Sarah Huckabee Sanders, were all placed under the news media’s microscope for their statements and actions — and rightly so. The PR men and women behind Francis also deserve similar examination by the press.
Long gone are the days of Joaquin Navarro-Valls. A “suave, silver-haired Spaniard,” as the Los Angeles Times described him in their 2017 obituary, he was both a close confidant of Pope John Paul II and served for more than two decades as chief Vatican spokesman. He defined what it was to be the pope’s press man. And he defended church teachings while doing it.
Navarro-Valls, a lay member of the conservative Catholic movement Opus Dei, had worked as a foreign correspondent for the Spanish newspaper ABC when the Polish pope offered him the job as director of the Vatican press office. He was the first journalist to hold the post. He was the right man at the right time for a globe-trotting pope at a time when mass media was growing.
Fast-forward to the present. The backlash to Francis by traditionalists is based on convictions that he has politicized the church, wanting to transform it into a social service agency, while also pressing for changes in crucial doctrines linked to moral theology. His supporters on the progressive side argue that this pope is trying to adapt the church — this has happened before in its 2,000-year history — to the people at this moment in time. It is also true that the church has been involved in politics, including on issues such as abortion, the death penalty and use of labor unions.
Obviously, the Vatican’s press office has to be involved in damage control from time to time. How they have done it, however, leaves much to be desired.
It's no surprise given what’s transpired over the past year. Vatican spokesman Greg Burke, announced on Dec. 31 that he and his Spanish deputy, Paloma Garcia Ovejero, had quit to let Pope Francis appoint a new team in what was a “time of transition.” A Vatican source, according to Reuters, said “both Burke and Ovejero had wanted more autonomy from the Vatican department that oversees all communications, known as the Dicastery for Communications.”
It’s also possible that Burke, a former Fox News reporter, and Ovejero headed out the door for other reasons, including having to handle the Theodore McCarrick scandal. As a result, there was a shakeup in the Vatican press office over the summer, which included naming Matteo Bruni director of the Holy See Press Office.
Last month’s synod was further proof that the Holy See’s spin doctors have only added to the doctrinal ambiguity coming out of Rome these days.
The reality is that these issues pre-date the synod. One place the Vatican’s press office has run afoul is in the Italian media. Newspapers in Italy cover the Vatican like reporters in Washington cover the White House. It’s a big deal. Not only is Italian one of the official languages of the Holy See, but the Vatican’s geography location — a city state within Italy — make it vital to cover.
The one newspaper that has had a long-simmering back-and-forth with Francis is the left-leaning La Repubblica. On the eve of the synod, Francis’ longtime atheist/socialist friend, La Repubblica founder Eugenio Scalfari, claimed the pontiff told him that once Jesus Christ became incarnate, he was a “man of exceptional virtues” — but “not at all a God.”
That raised eyebrows in Italy since the Catechism of the Catholic church states — and most Christians of other denominations also believe — that Jesus was the Son Of God, incarnated as both fully man and fully God.
Scalfari wrote in the October 9 edition of La Repubblica, in Italian and behind a paywall, the following:
Those who, as it has happened many times with me, have had the luck of meeting him and speaking to him with the greatest cultural intimacy, know that Pope Francis conceives Christ as Jesus of Nazareth, man, not God incarnate. Once incarnate, Jesus stops being a God and becomes a man until his death on the cross. … When I had the chance of discussing these sentences, Pope Francis told me: 'They are the proven proof that Jesus of Nazareth, once having become a man, was, though a man of exceptional virtues, not at all a God.’
In a March 2018 interview with Scalfari, Francis reportedly told him the following: “There is no Hell, there is the disappearance of sinful souls.” In that case, as in last month’s interview, the Vatican’s press office scrambled to come up with an answer.
In the 2018 comments, the Vatican said what the pope had reportedly said was a “reconstruction” of a conversation, not directly “quoted.” The Vatican never denied what Scalfari had reported, saying it could not “be considered as a faithful transcription of the words of the Holy Father.”
Nonetheless, the article never ran with a correction and remains a part of La Repubblica’s online archive.
In last month’s comments, a Vatican statement said:
As has been affirmed in other occasions, the words that Dr. Eugenio Scalfari attributes between quotes to the Holy Father during his colloquies held with him cannot be considered as a faithful account of what was effectively said, but represent more a personal and free interpretation of that which he heard, as appears entirely evident from what was written today concerning the divinity of Jesus Christ.
If that’s the case, then why allow Francis to meet with a 95-year-old journalist who takes liberties with what he says? It’s easy damage control to tell the pope that it may not be a great idea to speak freely with a man who repeatedly misquotes you, especially on theological matters that impacts the faith of millions of people around the world. It’s also true that this pope hasn’t been interested in meeting with bishops and cardinals with whom he has had doctrinal disagreements.
Few have taken the press office to task. Writing recently in the National Catholic Register, Monsignor Charles Pope made the following observation:
Even well before the Synod assembly there were claims in the media that the pope holds annihilationism (that God simply annihilates the souls that choose hell). And even worse, that the Eternal Son, Jesus was not divine. Do not such wild claims that the Pope holds such views, touching on the deepest roots of our faith, deserve immediate disavowal from the Pope himself? At the very least we deserve more than the vague assertions by the Vatican that these remarks attributed may not be accurate. Really? Is that the best we can get? Do not the faithful need and require a clear reiteration of the truth? And should not such a disavowal of error and reiteration of the truth also include a clear rebuke of Eugenio Scalfari, the journalist for his deeply erroneous reporting? Yet, not only is he not corrected and rebuked, he remains esteemed and is granted repeated access to the Holy Father — an access some of his own cardinals and bishops are refused. The point is that matters like these are not handled forthrightly and clearly. Instead, they are left in a fog of ambiguity.
Pope also tied Scalfari to the Pachamama issue, noting the following:
Add to all this the appalling event in the Vatican Gardens, attended by the Holy Father and a number of Synod participants and fathers. There are pictures of some of them, bowing fully prostrate before a wooden statue of a naked, pregnant woman. After weeks of silence we are told by the Pope that this was not idolatry and there was no idolatrous intention. But then why did people, including priests, prostrate before it? Why was the statue carried in procession into churches like St. Peter’s Basilica and placed before altars at Santa Maria in Traspontina? And if it isn’t an idol of Pachamama (an earth/mother goddess from the Andes), why did the Pope call the image “Pachamama?” What am I to think? And why am I not reassured by the ambiguous and contradictory statements?
The Pachamama drama wasn’t the only distraction during the synod.
L’Espresso, an Italian news magazine similar to Time or Newsweek, reported on a series of financial irregularities — including five Vatican employees have been suspended and are under investigation. Those employees included the suspension order published by l’Espresso features Msgr. Mauro Carlino, head of information and documentation at the Vatican Secretariat of State, and Tomasso Di Ruzza, director of the Financial Intelligence Authority. The magazine had been leaked a documents with the details.
“Hundreds of millions of Euro destined for the least and the poor are still administered opaquely and with no transparency, as if the Vatican were a merchant bank in an offshore country,” the October 2 report claims, according to Crux.
A Vatican spokesman issued a “no comment” regarding the people being investigated. Again, this was a chance for the press office to show that the pope would not tolerate such behavior. After all, l’Espresso had documents to back up their report. Ambiguity and missed opportunities seems to be what the Vatican press office is all about these days.