Earthquake in the Vatican Media. The Winter Campaign of Bergoglio’s Stalwarts

Dij, 3/01/2019 URL article: http://magister.blogautore.espresso.repubblica.it/2019/01/03/earthquake-in-the-v…

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What never went right in three years for the flighty monsignor Dario Viganò, head of the Vatican dicastery for communication from 2015 to 2018, has come off in a few days, around Christmas, for his methodical successor, Paolo Ruffini.

The two bastions of “L’Osservatore Romano” and the press office of the Holy See, which seemed to be unassailable because they were overseen by the secretariat of state, have both fallen under the control of the dicastery, which in turn is more firmly than ever in the hands of Pope Francis’s stalwarts.

The first barrage of this winter blitzkrieg hit its mark on December 18, with the brusque removal of Giovanni Maria Vian as director of “L’Osservatore Romano,” replaced by Andrea Monda, and with the appointment of Andrea Tornielli as head of the editorial board of the dicastery for communication.

The second barrage was fired on December 31, with the sudden resignation of the American Greg Burke and the Spaniard Paloma García Ovejero, respectively since 2016 the director and deputy director of the Vatican press office, and with the appointment as the new “ad interim” press office director of Alessandro Gisotti, until now the coordinator of social media for the dicastery for communication.

But let’s take things in order.

1. L’OSSERVATORE ROMANO

1 In eleven years of management, Giovanni Maria Vian, a specialist on ancient Christian literature, gave the official newspaper of the Holy See an original profile.

The first three of its eight pages provided an accurate and objective panorama of international events, such as no other newspaper in the world gives today, with information also on the countries more overlooked by the current news outlets, while the fourth and fifth pages were dedicated to culture, with particular attention to the history of the Church and to Christian art, and with prominent authors, from the historians Gianpaolo Romanato and Roberto Pertici to the specialist on Christian antiquities Fabrizio Bisconti.

The final three pages and part of the first were instead occupied by, in addition to documents and analyses concerning the Catholic Church on the five continents, above all the statements, acts, journeys of the pope, related and reported in their entirety and with varying prominence depending on their importance. All with sobriety, without emphasis. with rare and balanced commentary on the front page, signed by the director.

The layout of the newspaper, including the careful selection of photos and illustrations, was clean and elegant, intended and designed that way not only by art director and deputy editor Piero Di Giacomantonio, but by Vian himself.

With Benedict XVI, a newspaper made this way was entirely suited to the style of that pontificate. But not with Pope Francis.

Vian - whose family was over the span of the twentieth century close to that of pope Giovanni Battista Montini - never entered into the good graces of Jorge Mario Bergoglio. Nor did he ever give in to the temptation to make “L’Osservatore Romano” the frontline newspaper of the current pope and his acts, not even of those that are unfailingly exalted as “historic,” “epochal,” revolutionary” by the journalists in his retinue.

The result is that, with Francis, “L’Osservatore Romano” ceased to be read as an expression of the stance of this pontificate. Confirmation of this comes, for example, from the general disinterest - broken only by Settimo Cielo - that last July surrounded the important publication on the Vatican newspaper’s front page of an editorial of powerful and detailed defense of Paul VI’s encyclical “Humanae Vitae,” at the fortieth anniversary of its publication, against the “revisions” of its teaching today, broadly underway in Bergoglio’s entourage as well.

With “L’Osservatore” shunted to the wayside, the role of expressing the stance of the current pontificate was taken up, in reality, by another press organ, the magazine “La Civiltà Cattolica” directed by the Jesuit Antonio Spadaro.

Dario Viganò, the controversial prelate to whom Francis in 2015 entrusted the general reorganization of the Vatican media, therefore believed it would be child’s play to aim at nothing less than the closure of “L’Osservatore Romano,” reducing it to a meager bulletin of official communiques, to be distributed within the curia.

Vian reacted to this frontal attack by shielding himself with the secretariat of state, which in effect was in the curia the real authority of reference to which “L’Osservatore Romano” reported.

And the secretariat of state, directed by Cardinal Pietro Parolin, assured him its

2 constant support. Thanks to which Vian was able not only to resist Viganò’s offensive and keep “L’Osservatore Romano” alive, but also to hire more journalists, develop and extend the weekly supplements in various languages, give form and notoriety to the monthly supplement “Donne Chiesa Mondo,” the director of which, Lucetta Scaraffia, was also an editorialist and influential personality of “L’Osservatore Romano” itself.

An emblem of this counterattack was the launch at the Vatican, on May 3, 2016, of the new series of “Donne Chiesa Mondo,” with Cardinal Parolin giving the official presentation, with Vian and Scaraffia at his side, and with Monsignor Viganò passing through for just a few minutes, mixed in among the audience at the back of the hall.

On that same occasion it was made known that “Donne Chiesa Mondo” would keep going in full autonomy, thanks to financial contributions from the Italian postal system.

So when in March of 2018 Pope Francis had to demote Viganò from prefect to assessor of the dicastery for communication, on account of the disastrous manipulation - unmasked by Settimo Cielo - that he carried out on a letter from pope emeritus Benedict XVI, the match seemed to have ended with “L’Osservatore Romano” in the lead.

But few noted that in the letter announcing his role change, Pope Francis reiterated that Viganò should carry through the “fusion” of the Vatican newspaper “within the single communication system of the Holy See.”

And in fact it is precisely this operation that the new prefect of the dicastery, Paolo Ruffini, brought into port shortly before Christmas, with the defenestration of Vian on December 18, without a single word of thanks from the pope, belatedly and stingily granted by letter on December 22, made public the 27th.

On December 19 the affair at “L’Osservatore Romano” was already over. In his first editorial on December 20 the new director, Andrea Monda, wrote that he wanted to give voice to an “outsider” Church. A typically Bergoglian adjective and in compliance with the mandate entrusted to him by prefect Ruffini in the act of appointment: to give “a response to the appeal of Pope Francis to be a Church that ‘goes forth’ and to ‘initiate processes’ that are original in communication as well.”

Ruffini knows Monda well. He had him as conductor of a docu-reality on the teaching of religion in the schools, on TV 2000, the channel of the Italian episcopal conference, of which Ruffini was director from 2011 to 2018.

But above all, Monda is closely tied to the director of “La Civiltà Cattolica,” Spadaro, who is Bergoglio’s great confidant and the éminence grise of all these maneuvers concerning the Vatican media. Monda has been for years one of the most assiduous frequenters of Spadaro’s literary blog, “Bomba carta.”

Moreover, as his direct superior in the new organizational chart of the dicastery for communication, Monda now finds Andrea Tornielli. the vaticanista closest to Bergoglio and his friend long before he was elected pope.

Tornielli, formerly the coordinator of “Vatican Insider” and since January 1 at the head of the editorial board of the dicastery for communication, is by statute

3 responsible for “the course and coordination of all the editorial lines” of the Vatican media.

After the change of leadership, there have not yet been noteworthy alterations in “L’Osservatore Romano.”

But these will be noted soon, because otherwise there would not have been all of this mayhem. And it is likely that they will emphatically reflect the stance of Francis’s pontificate.

2. THE PRESS OFFICE

The sudden resignation of Greg Burke and Paloma García Ovejero from the leadership of the Vatican press office also mark a loss of power for the secretariat of state, to the benefit of Pope Francis’s “inner circle.”

A problem that is not new, seeing that already with John Paul II the director of the press office at the time, Joaquín Navarro-Valls, was the direct spokesman of the pope, his friend, more than of the diplomats of the secretariat of state.

Burke, 59, American, a former reporter for Fox News and Rome correspondent for Time magazine, was literally brought up at the secretariat of state in view of his future role as official spokesman of the Holy See. In 2012 a position was created specifically for him, as “senior communication advisor” right inside the secretariat of state, and in 2015 he was made Fr. Federico Lombardi’s deputy, until he replaced him on August 1, 2016 as director of the press office, with the Spaniard García Ovejero as his deputy, the first woman to hold this position at the Vatican.

From the normative point of view as well, the press office reports directly to the secretariat of state. It is enough to read what is stipulated in article 10 of the statutes of the dicastery for communication, still in effect.

But evidently this must no longer be the case.

Already during the synod of last October there were signs that something was changing. While at the synod of 2015 it was not Monsignor Viganò, at the time the prefect of the dicastery for communication, but press office director Lombardi who gave the daily informational briefings to the journalists on what had happened in the assembly, at the synod of 2018 this task was instead performed not by Burke, Lombardi’s successor, but by the new prefect for communication, Ruffini. Who among other things excels at the rarefied art of sidestepping for an entire month any sort of information or response the least bit capable of making news, at a synod, that on young people, that in itself was already one of the most useless in history.

Of course the resignation of Burke and García Ovejero, whose work so far had been quite appreciated by the journalists accredited to the Holy See, came after the earthquake created on November 18 with Vian’s defenestration and the appointment of Tornielli as boss of all the Vatican communications media, press office included. Both saw their room for autonomy in such great danger as to get them to leave.

Here too without the secretariat of state building a wall in their defense, as had repeatedly happened in the past.

4 Curiously, in the ten days of the greatest upheaval Cardinal Pietro Parolin was far from Rome. First in the African republic of Mali, then in Taranto, at the biggest steel mill in Europe, then in Iraq, where he was even photographed in a tunnel dug by the Islamic State.

Meanwhile, however, at the Vatican there were others who were tunneling under his secretariat of state.

Parolin’s three trips mentioned above were carried out with an agenda similar to that of a papal journey, and contributed to confirming him as still the only cardinal capable of getting enough votes to be elected, in a hypothetical conclave in the not-too-distant future, as a man of balance after a pontificate characterized by confusion.

But before that the enigmatic accord reached with Beijing - the effects of which have so far been negative for the Catholic Church - had lowered his rating as a papabile.

And now this other sudden giving way on the twofold front of “L’Osservatore Romano” and of the press office, both of them abandoned by the secretariat of state to the enemy camp, certainly does not accrue in his favor.

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