Vatican spokesman and deputy
resign over strategy differences
by Philip Pullella
VATICAN CITY, December 30, 2018 Reuters) - The Vatican spokesman and his deputy resigned on Monday over disagreements on strategy, ending a year of upheaval in the Holy See’s communications structure.
[Pulella omits to say that the resignations were immediately accepted without the usual formulas of 'thanks for their good service', etc. One would almot think the resignations were urged on them.]
A brief Vatican statement gave no reason for the resignations.
Spokesman Greg Burke, an American, tweeted 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 said both Burke and Ovejero had wanted more autonomy from the Vatican department that oversees all communications, known as the Dicastery for Communications.
They quit two weeks after Pope Francis appointed a personal friend, Italian journalist Andrea Tornielli, to become editorial director of all Vatican communications.
The source said it was believed to be the first time both posts (spokesman and deputy) had changed hands simultaneously, underscoring the differences of opinion.
“Paloma and I have resigned, effective Jan. 1. At this time of transition in Vatican communications, we think it’s best the Holy Father is completely free to assemble a new team,” Burke tweeted.
The 59-year-old former Rome-based reporter for Fox News joined the Vatican in 2012 as an advisor in its Secretariat of State and become spokesman in 2016. He is a member of the conservative Catholic group Opus Dei.
Ovejero, 43, a former reporter for the Spanish radio network COPE, was one of the few high-ranking women in the Vatican.
During Burke and Ovejero’s tenure, the top two jobs in the Vatican press room were, unusually, held by non-Italians.
Tornielli is now the third-ranking person in the communications department but his closeness to the pope, whom he has known since before the pontiff’s election in 2013, will likely make him particularly influential.
Monday’s resignations capped a year of tensions in Vatican communications.
Monsignor Dario Vigano resigned as overall head in March after a scandal over a doctored letter, a public relations fiasco two months after the pope warned of the dangers of fake news.
Vigano released part of a letter by former Pope Benedict that was to have remained private, using it to promote a book on the theology of Pope Francis.
A promotional photo for the book released by Vigano blurred a part of the letter in which Benedict declined to write an introduction, saying he was unhappy with one of its contributors.
Vigano was replaced in July by Paolo Ruffini, ex-head of a Catholic television station.
The Vatican said Alessandro Gisotti, an Italian journalist who has handled the Vatican’s social media, would be interim spokesman.
Edward Pentin's account:
Holy See Press Office director
Greg Burke resigns
December 31, 2018
Pope Francis today accepted the resignations of Greg Burke and Paloma García Ovejero after almost two and a half years’ service as respective director and vice director of the Holy See Press Office.
The Vatican announced the news in a brief statement, adding that Alessandro Gisotti, currently coordinator of social media for the Vatican Dicastery for Social Communication, would temporarily take over the running of the office until a new structure is put in place.
In comments on Twitter, Burke, an Opus Dei numerary and native of St. Louis, said “at this time of transition in Vatican communications, we think it’s best the Holy Father is completely free to assemble a new team.”
He added in another tweet: “I joined the Vatican in 2012. The experience has been fascinating, to say the least. Thank you, Pope Francis. Un abrazo muy fuerte [a very big hug].”
Burke, a former Rome correspondent for Fox News, Time Magazine and the Register, was hired as the Vatican’s strategic communications adviser in 2012, before being appointed deputy director of the Holy See Press Office in 2015, and then director in 2016.
Garcia, a former radio host and Rome and Vatican correspondent for various television and news services, tweeted: “Thank you, Holy Father, for these two and a half years! Thank you, Greg, for your trust, your patience and your example.”
Their resignations came as a surprise to many in the Vatican press corps, but follow two significant recent appointments in Vatican communications.
On Dec. 18, Pope Francis chose Italian Vaticanist Andrea Tornielli to be editorial director of the Dicastery for Communication. He also appointed author and journalist Andrea Monda as editor-in-chief of
L'Osservatore Romano, replacing Giovanni Maria Vian. Both are likely to take Vatican communications in a different direction.
The departures of Burke and Garcia follow an extensive overhaul of Vatican communications, including a major five-year structural reform program and the appointment earlier this year of a lay prefect of the dicastery, Paolo Ruffini.
In a statement,
Ruffini expressed some surprise at the news, saying he had learned of Burke’s and Garcia’s decision, that it was an “autonomous and free choice,” but one he respected.
He praised their professionalism and said he had full confidence in Gisotti, who has also served as deputy chief editor of Vatican Radio.
“The year ahead is full of important appointments that will require maximum communications efforts,” Ruffini said.
Gisotti thanked the Pope for “the trust he has placed in me at such a delicate time for the communication of the Holy See” and thanked Burke and Garcia for their service.
“I know that my job, even if temporary, is particularly demanding but I am comforted by the great merits of my colleagues in the Press Office, whose professionalism and dedication I have been able to appreciate on many occasions,” Gisotti said.
The Italian journalist is the author of “God and Obama: Faith and Politics in the White House,” a 2010 book that examined the faith of the former U.S. President. [Well, what a qualification! Gisotti is clearly a Bergoglio-UN globalist.]
The appointments come after a difficult year in Vatican communications with the sudden departure of Ruffini's predecessor, Msgr. Dario Viganò, in March. Msgr. Viganò resigned after the 'Lettergate' affair, in which he misrepresented a letter written by Pope Emeritus Benedict XVI and concealed a photograph of it.
Burke appears to be happy with his decision to step down. In follow-up comments on Twitter today, he said simply: “New Year, New Adventures.”
I hope Greg Burke, famously an Opus DEi supernumerary as was the late Joaquin Navarro-Valls, finds time now to examine himself seriously as to whether his work for Bergoglio was within what Opus Dei founder St. Josemaria Escriva Balaguer considered the 'work of God' to which the society's members ought to devote themselves. Or has he gone the way of the present Opus Dei leadership?
I suppose this ends the 2018 'news year' for the Bergoglio Vatican - it was most definitely an annus horribilis for the pope and his followers.
It really does not matter who is the Vatican press spokesman in name - because no one speaks for the Vatican and himself more often and more directly than the reigning pope himself. Often with disastrous consequences, of course. Which he seems to blithely ignore. And so the so-called spokesmen are usually left with nothing to do but try to un-spill the milk and/or pick up the broken pieces, in other words - no matter how zealous and skilled the PR meister is, damage control is impossible with the kind of damage that Bergoglio habitually wreaks. Yet by all accounts, he thinks of himself as a Great Communicator. Fr. Brian Harrison has an appropriate commentary:
Francis undermines the credibility of the Papacy
by Father Brian Harrison
December 31, 2018
Pope Francis’s own never-ending barrage of jabs and swipes against settled Catholic doctrine troubles Catholics.
Just a week ago, in his Christmas address to Vatican officials, the Pope nonchalantly tossed off a denial of Our Lady’s Immaculate Conception by remarking that nobody – not even Joseph or Mary – “is born as a saint”.
Most notably this year, Francis has rewritten our official Catechism so as to condemn capital punishment with a severity that arguably contradicts the Bible-based teaching of all his predecessors.
This kind of thing – and many other examples could be adduced – undermines the papacy’s credibility, which depends on the consistency of its formal teaching down through the centuries.
The newest, and perhaps the best, of various recent books criticizing the present pope’s left-liberal orientation is by Chilean scholar José Antonio Ureta:
Pope Francis’s “Paradigm Shift”: Continuity or Rupture in the Mission of the Church? (Spring Grove, PA, 2018: TFP).
A paradigm shift is a profoundly different change in overall direction.
Traditional anti-Catholic dissenters like Pelagius, Arius, Luther and Calvin fiercely opposed the Church’s doctrine; but at least they shared her basic assumption that correct doctrine is something supremely important.
But now – alas! – we have a Pope who appears to have shelved that assumption in favor of what might be called a meta-heresy: his general [neomarxist] philosophical view that ‘life’ and action (praxis) take precedence over doctrine. As Francis likes to put it, “reality is greater than ideas”.
But since “reality” constantly changes, this approach gives metaphysical precedence to becoming over being, so that Catholic truth itself gets relativized by political correctness.
Whatever our post-Christian cultural, political and media elites declare to be ‘progress’ for humanity becomes a new and overriding ‘reality’ to which the Church’s hitherto ‘static’ and ‘inward-looking’ doctrine must somehow adapt itself.
We thus find ourselves with a Pope who is neglecting St. Paul’s warning: “Can Christ agree with Belial? Can there be a compact between the temple of God and the idols of the heathen?” (2 Cor. 6: 15).
Fr. H has a terse prognostication for 2019, but I thought the comments on his combox are worth sharing:
Prognostications for 2019
December 31, 2018
I am sure that my admirable friend and brother priest Fr Zed will have some intelligent forecasts to make. I offer only the following humble and baseless guess:
That the abuse crisis will move even closer to PF himself.
Paul Hellyer:
I think the abuse crisis is only the tip of the iceberg. The Church is under diabolical attack. It is being slowly destroyed by evil clergy who ignore the teachings of Christ and His Church. The Novus Ordo was the Trojan horse. Homo-protestantisation is the doctrine.
Cease these intellectual games while Rome burns. God bless you all for 2019.
GOR:
My prediction would be that the abuse and cover-up issues will not ‘go away’ as many in the hierarchy, apparently, would like to happen.
Currently, in the US – and probably in many other countries – the bishops have little if any credibility left. That extends also to the Vatican and Pope Francis. I see little hope that things may change any time soon and in all likelihood things will get worse.
The stonewalling by the Pope and his heavy-handed intervention in the USCCB’s annual meeting are telling. Appointing Cdl. Cupich to the organizing committee for the February confab is a further indication. It would be like appointing Judas to audit the charitable receipts. There is a need for a thorough housecleaning – starting at the top.
James:
Pope FRANCIS is a big ZERO.
Prayerful:
Pope Francis as Archbishop Bergoglio and President of the Argentine Episcopal Conference oversaw the publication of two volumes which aggressively questioned the testimony of the orphan victims of Fr Grassi and his fake charity. This was at the time the jury was considering its verdict, and the lawyer for the victims considered it gross interference in a trial.
Someone even put that question to Francis personally (as with the Barros case Latin Americans might be more inclined to do something outside the blogosphere) and he denied that.
There are quite few cases where the role played by Francis passed from the usual malign advocacy for the accused priest (Cardinal Cocopalmiero is claimed to intercede often for Fr Inzoli and other convicted abuser priests) to a form of meddling in the case, which in many places is a crime.
Francis mocks his us when he calls his critics clerical, when there is no one more clerical. My point is that there is already so much available showing his poor attitude to sexual wrongdoing by priests, and nothing has happened except online expressions of annoyance.
[Modificato da TERESA BENEDETTA 31/12/2018 22:16]