See preceding page for earlier posts today, 10/12/10.
Pope takes biggest initiative
to revive Christianity
in secularized nations
by NICOLE WINFIELD
VATICAN CITY, Oct. 12 (AP) — Pope Benedict XVI on Tuesday outlined his most tangible initiative yet to try to revive Christianity, creating a Vatican office for re-evangelizing Europe and other traditionally Christian regions where the faith is falling by the wayside.
In an official decree, Benedict said the new office would work with bishops to promote Church doctrine, use modern communication methods to get the Church's message out and mobilize missionary-type activities using members of religious orders and new religious movements.
But even on its first day of existence, the Pontifical Council for the New Evangelization ran into an all-too-typical Vatican snag: The four-page decree instituting the office was issued only in Latin and Italian, even though the Pope announced the office's creation four months ago.
[This was really DUMB! Not to be able to provide translations for such an important decree that is only four pages long is INEXCUSABLE for any press office of consequence!]
Asked how the Pope expected to bring the Church's message to the world in such relatively unknown languages, the head of the new office, Monsignor Rino Fisichella said he hadn't been in charge until Tuesday and wasn't responsible for how the decree was issued.
[He should have been on top of it, nevertheless. The briefing today has been pre-announced regularly in the Press Office bulletins for about a month now. Fisichella is a brilliant intellectual - yet he can take it for granted that the motu proprio would be duly translated on the day it is first issued? Has he not learned from the horrible experience with Summorum Pontificum - which, to this day, has no official English translation, to my knowledge! And is he not aware of the infamously erratic - to be charitable - record of this Press Office on many signal occasions????]]
He stressed that he planned to have language sections in his department to deal with the faithful in English, Spanish, French, Portuguese, Italian, German and Slavic languages. And
the Vatican spokesman said the decree would eventually be published in other languages.
[Eventually! He should have promised it by the end of today, at least!]
Fisichella denied the creation of the office was a mere bureaucratic attempt to fix a complex cultural phenomenon, saying Benedict had made an astute, pastoral decision to focus attention on a growing problem that had preoccupied Popes for decades.
Benedict has made reviving Europe's Christian roots a priority of his papacy and has concentrated his foreign travels on the continent. While the decree listed no specific geographical areas where it will concentrate, the evangelization office is also expected to pay attention to Latin America, where evangelical movements are making inroads in traditionally Catholic countries such as Brazil.
In the decree, Benedict lamented that with tremendous scientific, social and cultural progress over the past century, parts of the world that once had strong Christian roots had grown to believe that they can exist without God.
"While some greeted this as a freedom, they soon realized the interior desert that is born when man — thinking himself the architect of his own nature and destiny — finds himself lacking that which is fundamental to everything," Benedict wrote.
Four of the story's nine paragraphs are about the failure of the Vatican Press Office to provide an English translation! Of course, many of the Anglophone correspondents covering the Vatican can (and did) translate it themselves unofficially but accurately, but who can blame Winfield for hammering home yet another blatant example of a real lack of communications sense in the Vatican, not just in the Press Office but even by someone like Fisichella who has been otherwise one of the most media-savvy prelates in the Vatican, one who was very sophisticated in communicating his own messages when he was at the Lateran University!
Yet, he is quoted by dpa from today's briefing as saying this:
The new Vatican office will employ “all the progress of the science of communications” in a bid to restore religion to the secular world. “My first concern is to get a computer on my desk so that I can have Internet access,” Monsignor Rino Fisichella, the head of the new office, said at a Vatican briefing today. [DUH!!!]
[Modificato da TERESA BENEDETTA 12/10/2010 22:09]