BENEDICT XVI: NEWS, PAPAL TEXTS, PHOTOS AND COMMENTARY

The following list is obviously UK-oriented, but mutatis mutandis, such as substituting, say, 'our government' for 'Parliament, it stands up...

Six things to pray for in 2013
By Fr Alexander Lucie-Smith

January 3, 2013

This is the period when newspapers publish their round-ups of important events of the year that had passed, and their predictions for the year that is to come. Rather than try something similar, I thought I would recommend things to pray for or about in 2013, which involves some degree of prediction.

So here it goes: six things to keep in mind before the Lord in the year of our Lord 2013.

1. The pro-life cause in Ireland. There is almost certain to be a brutal fight ahead in Ireland in the coming year over abortion. This matters perhaps more than anything else that the Church will face in 2013. The pro-lifers in Ireland will need our prayers, and because of Ireland’s proximity to the UK, and its close ties to this country (and of course America), the outcome of the battle will have a huge impact on us here.

2. Marriage; please note, marriage, not ‘same sex marriage’. Marriage is becoming less and less popular year in, year out, and 2013 is not likely to be any different. We need to pray for engaged couples, and for all those who are living together, with or without children, so that they may discover their vocation to marriage, if indeed God is calling them to it. And we need to pray for adolescents so that they may have marriage as their goal, rather than an aimless emotional life ahead of them.

3. Parliament. This once great institution seems less and less relevant to our lives each year that passes. Few watch the debates on television; the newspapers barely report them. Most important decisions are made, not in Parliament, but on some sofa somewhere in Downing Street. Our legislators need to take back their rightful place in the British constitution, and fast.

4. The Pope. As Catholics, we all love the Holy Father; it is shocking and distressing to see him subjected to abuse in the newspapers, and online. I doubt the Pope reads the infantile and ignorant comments that follow any article on Catholicism on the Guardian’s website, or reads anything by Johan Hari, George Monbiot or Oliver Kamm and other anti-Catholics, but though these things cannot upset him, they sure do upset us.

So, let us pray for the Pope, that God may surround him with comfort; and in so doing, let us renew and redouble our love and loyalty for the Throne of Peter.

5. Atheists, not just Richard Dawkins, all of them. May the God who they do not believe in, be good to them in 2013! It is sad that Richard Dawkins believes that a Catholic education is on a level with child abuse; it is sad that he believes that millions of people, including myself, have been subject to such abuse, and without realising it too.

We must pray that these atheists get used to the idea that the Catholic Church exists in this country and elsewhere, not as a thing that is tolerated, but by right, and that we are not going away, and that we are proud of our faith. And on that basis we are prepared to enter into dialogue with anyone. But it has to be rational dialogue: so let us pray for the restoration of a shared rationality.

6. And finally: peace and justice in the world; but once more, to have both, we first of all have to have a restoration of rationality. Peace won’t be attained in Syria by the British government supporting Jihadist rebels; and justice won’t be done, in the Jimmy Savile case, for example, unless there is an abandonment of overheated rhetoric.

We need to look at things as they are and put aside our anger. This calls for humility all round. So perhaps that might be the best prayer of all for 2013, and for every year. O God, makes us humble, and make us remember that we are weak human beings, who do not know it all!



On the other hand, here's John Allen's contribution to a review of the Vatican's 2012 - and as usual, he gets my critical juices flowing:

Top five under-covered
Vatican stories of 2012

January 4, 2013

Now that the dust has settled on the New Year's holiday, it's time for my annual run-down of the most under-covered Vatican stories. By that, I mean those stories that fell through the cracks in the last year or that didn't quite generate the buzz they really deserved.

To be clear, this is not a countdown of the most important Vatican storylines. That list would certainly include the arrest, trial, conviction and eventual pardon of papal butler Paolo Gabriele and the crackdown by the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith on the Leadership Conference of Women Religious.

Both stories, however, were abundantly covered throughout the year. In a similar fashion, the Synod of Bishops on new evangelization and the Year of Faith didn't get a lot of traction in the secular press, but the Vatican's communications channels routinely beat the drum on them during 2012.

Instead, this is a run-down of five stories that made a brief appearance on the radar at some point but, for a variety of reasons, faded before their real importance could be adequately appreciated.

Here, then, are the top five Vatican storylines from 2012 that deserve another moment in the sun.

5. The sex abuse summit

In early February, Rome's Jesuit-run Gregorian University staged a major international summit on the sex abuse crisis, titled "Toward Healing and Renewal," in tandem with several Vatican departments. It brought together roughly 100 bishops and religious superiors from around the world ahead of a May deadline from the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith for bishops' conferences to submit their anti-abuse policies.

The big picture was that the old debates in the Vatican regarding the crisis are finished and the reformers have won.

When the scandals in the United States broke a decade ago, reaction in the Vatican was clearly divided between what one might loosely call the "reformers" and the "deniers." The fault lines broke down in terms of these sorts of debates:

- Is the crisis largely a media- and lawyer-driven frenzy, or is it a real cancer?
- Should the church cooperate fully with civil authorities, or is that surrendering the autonomy the church has fought titanic battles over the centuries to defend?
- Should the church embrace the use of psychology in screening candidates for the priesthood, or is that smuggling in a secular mentality in place of traditional spiritual principles of formation?
- Should the church support aggressive programs of abuse prevention and detection, or does that risk "sexualizing" children along the lines of secular sex education?
- Is the crisis truly a global phenomenon, or is it the fruit of a "moral panic" largely restricted to the West?
- Should the Vatican sign off on "zero-tolerance" policies, or does that rupture the paternal relationship that's supposed to exist between a bishop and his priests?

The Gregorian conference confirmed that those debates are finished, as the Vatican's most senior officials repeatedly weighed in in favor of reform positions on the questions listed above. Some of the deniers may still be around, but they've been driven underground.

To be sure, the conference also confirmed that the response to the crisis remains a work in progress. Several speakers acknowledged that holding bishops accountable is still a challenge -- a tension neatly illustrated by the United States, where Bishop Robert Finn of Kansas City, Mo., remains in office despite becoming the first bishop criminally convicted of failure to report a charge of child abuse.

Nonetheless, the Gregorian symposium showed the Vatican has moved a considerable distance in a decade. [I disagree, however, that it was under-reported in the Catholic media, or by Italian Vaticanistas, judging by the number of items I was able to post about it on this thread.]

4. The Vatican and Syria

It may be one measure of the difference between John Paul II and Benedict XVI that nobody seems to have noticed the Vatican has yet to offer a coherent line on the Syrian crisis, especially the crucial question of whether international intervention would be justified to protect the civilian population. [Excuse me, but has Benedict XVI not called on the international community for precisely such intervention everytime he has made an appeal regarding Syria????]

John Paul II helped coin the phrase "humanitarian intervention" to argue for the use of force in the Balkans in the early 1990s, and he was the biggest moral opponent of the U.S.-led intervention in Iraq in 2003. In both cases, people paid careful attention because John Paul had a proven capacity to drive opinion. Benedict XVI is seen as less politically consequential, so perhaps it's natural that people are less focused on the Vatican's diplomatic line.

In any event, it largely escaped attention in 2012 that the Vatican has said shifting and nebulous things about Syria and that its efforts to get involved were occasionally ham-handed and amateurish.

In June, the Vatican spokesperson, Jesuit Fr. Federico Lombardi, quoted the pope's ambassador as saying the country is experiencing a "slow descent into hell," but also called the prospect of armed international intervention "very worrying." In September, Msgr. Miguel Ángel Ayuso Guixot, a Colombian and the No. 2 official at the Pontifical Council for Interreligious Dialogue, outlined the Vatican's position on Syria during an Istanbul conference:

- An immediate end to violence "from whatever part"
- Dialogue "as the necessary path to respond to the legitimate aspirations of the Syrian people"
- Preserving the unity of the Syria "regardless of ethnicity and religious affiliation"
- An appeal to the international community to commit itself to a peace process

That statement still left key questions unanswered, such as whether the Vatican believes the government of President Bashar al-Assad should stay or go and whether an armed international response would be warranted to impose a cease-fire. [Allen is clearly applying a double standard in 'judging' John Paul II's interventions compared to Benedict XVI. Although the Vatican is always clear about what it opposes - the US war against Saddam Hussein, for instance - the Vatican does not propose concrete political measures to deal with these thorny issues. Did it say anything at the time about what the international community should do regarding Saddam's reported weapons of mass destruction? Why should Allen now expect Benedict XVI to speak openly against the regime of Assad - and even worse, to advocate 'international armed intervention to impose a ceasefire' (a ludicrous self-contradiction!). Besides. the leading Catholic and Orthodox bishops of Syria are mostly supportive of Assad as being the lesser evil compared to the threat of the fundamentalist Islamist powers in Iran who are behind the rebels (but that is the bishops' position, not one that anybody in the Vatican has articulated, or could speak against either, because how can they know better than the bishops who are living this ordeal?).]

Throughout the year, the Vatican's ambivalence was tweaked in various quarters.

A leading Turkish daily called the pope's line "elusive." A well-known Italian Jesuit who spent 30 years in Syria, Fr. Paolo Dall'Oglio, lampooned the unwillingness to support international intervention. If the Vatican doesn't believe foreign troops have a role to play in keeping the peace, Dall'Oglio asked, what are the Swiss Guards doing in St. Peter's Square? [And we're supposedc to judge Benedict XVI by what a Turkish newspaper and a sarcastic Jesuit have to say???? In both cases, they had self-serving reasons for saying what they did.]

During the Synod of Bishops in October, the Vatican's Secretary of State, Cardinal Tarcisio Bertone, dramatically announced the synod would dispatch a high-level delegation to Syria consisting of five senior prelates representing each continent, including Cardinal Timothy Dolan of New York. It was a powerful expression of the concern of the universal church, not to mention a precedent that a synod can do more than talk.

It quickly became clear, however, that the Vatican hadn't done its homework. They didn't know how the delegation would get into the country, or who they'd meet once they arrived. The plug was pulled just 48 hours after the announcement, leaving behind a residue of embarrassment. [This was clearly a most unfortunate grandstand play, in which Cardinal Bertone, who ought to have known better, once again did a disservice to the Pope, who must have presumed the necessary legwork had been done if he was presented with what looked to be a plan that only required the cardinals on the mission to get on the next plane to Damascus!]

No doubt, the Pope and his Vatican team have their hearts in the right place. They're deeply concerned about Syria, especially the fate of its Christian minority. It remains to be seen in 2013, however, whether those good intentions can be matched with effective diplomatic action. [What 'effective diplomatic action' does Allen expect, anyway, from the Vatican, which has absolutely no material resources to put into play except what Catholic charities are able to do to help the suffering civilians that they can? If the United States with all its might and national interests at stake in Syria has been unable and unwilling to go out on a limb there, what can the Vatican do? As great as John Paul II's reputation was for diplomacy, even he was not able to stop the war against Saddam Hussein which was prosecuted by a coalition of more than 40 nations! Does Allen point that out? No!]

3. Benedict the cosmopolitan

Benedict XVI has been characterized as a deeply "Eurocentric" Pontiff, and in some ways that's probably true, perhaps especially in his tight focus on secularism as the pre-eminent danger facing the faith in the early 21st century. [But secularism is not just a European phenomenon - it is a widespread Western phenomenon which, in the globalized village, has spread its tentacles worldwide!]

If all one had to judge by was the Pope's itinerary in 2012, however, the case for Eurocentrism would be much harder to make. [What a shallow criterion to use! It so happened there was no European nation for which a papal trip was absolutely necessary in 2012!]

Consider that the Pope made only two foreign trips in the last year, and neither took him to a European destination. He visited Mexico and Cuba in March, laying out a pastoral strategy for the church in Latin America during the Mexican component and engaging in some post-Castro diplomacy while in Cuba. He then visited Lebanon in September, providing a vision for the Church in the Middle East.

Consider too that Benedict held two consistories, the event in which a Pope creates new cardinals, in 2012. The first, in February, was a rather conventional affair -- 12 of the 18 new voting age cardinals were Europeans, and 10 were Vatican officials. There were, however, also new cardinals from China and India, the two emerging new superpowers of the 21st century.

Benedict's smaller consistory in November was remarkable because for the first time in living memory, there wasn't a single European in the bunch, and only one Westerner, American James Harvey. The other new princes of the church hailed from Lebanon, India, Nigeria, Colombia and the Philippines. At least two of those nominees seemed to have some real traction as possible papal candidates, Cardinals Luis Antonio Tagle of Manila and John Onaiyekan of Abuja, Nigeria.

In the early 21st century, more than two-thirds of the 1.2 billion Catholics on the planet live in the developing world, a share that's expected to reach three-quarters by mid-century. It always takes a while for the concerns at the top of the Church to reflect its demographic realities on the ground, but 2012 may come to be seen as one of those moments when the wheels began to turn. [However, it is not a question of 'concerns at the top of the Church' - you would think the Vatican considers Third World Catholics as second-class citizens compared to Westerners - but of the availability and 'preparedness' of bishops in the Third World to become Princes of the Church, as the local hierarchies, most of whom have developed in the past few decades, are still catching up with the hierarchies in places where Catholicism was the dominant cultural force for centuries. Since Allen prides himself in having researched 'the Church of the future' extensively, let him cite any outstanding Asian, African or Latin American prelate whose merits the Vatican has failed to recognize appropriately! There is a reason the Pope meets weekly with the Prefect of Bishops - which is a continuing review of all the priests in the world who have the potential for episcopal leadership! ]

2. The 'what' of Vatileaks

The sexiest [a trendy but thoroughly inappropriate buzzword in this case!] storyline out of the Vatican in 2012 was the Vatileaks scandal, fueling Da Vinci Code-style images of power struggles and palace intrigue.

It also cemented impressions that the papacy of Benedict XVI may be a teaching triumph, but it's also something of an administrative mess [And can Allen cite any recent Papacy that Vaticanistas like him did not consider 'an administrative mess' - think of all the criticism about the final years of John Paul II, when he was effectively not running the Vatican at all!] making it likely that governance will be a voting issue the next time the cardinals elect a Pope. [Yeah, sure, the cardinals will trawl around for someone whose best drawing card would be a reputation for efficient administration! Gee, I wonder who would qualify! Besides, a Conclave's objective is not to elect a Curial administrator (i.e., Secretary of State), but a Pope as a total package, who will be Vicar of Christ, Successor of Peter, Supreme Pontiff, Bishop of Rome, Sovereign of Vatican City State. None of the papal titles calls for him to run the Curia as well. Jesus himself named someone like Judas Iscariot to handle the finances of the Twelve!]

Strikingly, it was the "who" and the "why" of Vatileaks that dominated attention as opposed to the "what": What exactly did we learn from the tidal wave of secret documents that flowed out of the Holy See?

In part, that's because some of these documents were either of minor importance or just downright silly. (Remember the alleged plot to kill the pope? Seriously, even if you're prepared to believe that a cardinal in the 21st century would plot to murder the pontiff, do you honestly think he'd discuss it over a business dinner in Beijing?)

Other documents, however, were far more serious and revealed some things well worth knowing.

For instance, we now know that Fr. Rafael Moreno, private secretary to the late Mexican Fr. Marcial Maciel Degollado, founder of the Legionaries of Christ, tried to inform Pope John Paul in 2003 about charges against Maciel, but the Pope "didn't want to hear them, didn't believe." (Maciel was eventually sentenced in 2006 to a life of prayer and penance over acts of sexual and financial misconduct.) [Allen has picked out the one previously-unreported 'news' in Nuzzi's book - and we must thank Mons. Gaenswein for making notes on his contacts with Fr. Moreno about this. All the other items Allen cites below were previously known and reported rather extensively, even if without the documentation Vatileaks provided, by Italian Vaticanistas.]

We also know that a high-profile Italian journalist [Dino Boffo, then the head of the Italian bishops' conference's newspaper, radio and TV network, who was the target of calculated calumny in one of the most despicable trials by media headline in memory - his 'case' provided Italian media with fodder for months until his chief non-anonymous accuser, the editor of a leading Italian newspaper, retracted his charges and admitted he used documents that do not even meet the minimum standards of credibility] directly accused both the Cardinal Secretary of State and the editor of the Vatican newspaper of orchestrating a plot against him, which, he alleged, included falsifying a legal document.

We know, too, that the leader of the Communion and Liberation movement wrote personally to the Pope in March 2011 to accuse the two previous Archbishops of Milan, Cardinals Carlo Maria Martini and Dionigi Tettamanzi, of promoting a "rupture" in the faith and "a sort of 'alternative magisterium' to Rome and the Holy Father."

Perhaps most importantly, we learned that deep concerns circulated in the Vatican about financial mismanagement and corruption. The leaked documents include a lengthy memo from an unnamed official, presumably at the Prefecture for Economic Affairs, written in spring 2011. It ticks off a series of alleged problems, including ignoring the Vatican's own internal checks and balances, "demoralization" of personnel, and the appointment of people "who lack the adequate competence." [All of which point to bureaucratic ineptitude and the earlier culture of 'non-transparency' regarding financial matters, but none of which is equivalent to 'evil and corruption' in the sense that Mons. Vigano and Paolo Gabriele bandied those words around (and became heroes to the Vaticanistas who could attribute the accusation to them while freely perpetrating their unsubstantiated charges as 'fact').

The conclusion is unequivocal: "The problematic situations are numerous and of notable gravity, above all because they could have devastating effects in the future, even if they can't be seen right now and everything looks fine. My direct superiors, with whom I've spoken repeatedly, for now don't believe it's opportune to do anything. They say that our principal point of reference is the Secretary of State, yet in many cases he's precisely the problem. Conscience requires that I present these matters to the Holy Father." {Well, the fact is that he did - and he did so at a time when Benedict XVI was already into his campaign to render all financial transactions at the Vatican 'transparent', not just for the Moneyval people, but because it was the right and necessary thing to do! If Benedict XVI had not done everything he has done so far in this respect, then Allen and his ilk have cause to cry out in protest. But the Pope was ahead of the curve, it would seem! He signed the framework legislation for it as early as December 2010! Months before Mons. Vigano wrote his pharisaical letters that made it seem he was the only one in the Vatican who had a conscience about financial irregularities!

A second point Allen glosses over is that none of the 'problematic situations' cited by the unnamed prelate in his letter was apparently serious enough to cause any Vaticanista, including Allen, to pursue an independent investigation to disclose these 'situations' and name names, i.e., there seemed to be 'no there there' worth journalistic (much less, criminal) investigation. Or was everyone just unaccountably too lazy to their job?... And why does Allen not point out all the egregious instances when Benedict XVI obviously overrode Cardinal Bertone's unwarranted 'power-grabbing' moves? Which proves that it is still only the Pope who makes the decisions that matter, no matter how much he trusts and likes his Secretary of State.]

In the Anglophone realm, deeper appreciation of the "what" of Vatileaks may have to await an English translation of the book His Holiness: The Secret Papers of Benedict XVI, published by journalist Gianluigi Nuzzi, the primary conduit for Gabriele's leaks. [But the Anglophone media will only have themselves as a background reference, since, other than Vigano's letters, most of the significant stories purveyed in the Nuzzi book and previously reported and commented upon ampky in the Italian media, pre-Vatileaks, were hardly covered by them!]

1. Financial reform

Scandal has the tendency to breed reform, and even before the Vatileaks mess, there were important steps toward financial glasnost under Benedict XVI. [A belated admission that contradicts Allen's sanctimony in the previous discussion about Vatileaks, but an admission onetheless!]

Based on developments in 2012, obituaries of Benedict may have to be rewritten [An admission by Allen that perhaps his own 'prepared' obit on Benedict XVI already wrote off this Pontificate as an administrative shambles, but compared to what?] -- his papacy has had some serious administrative shortcomings, but he also arguably shapes up as a "great reformer" [Why the quotation marks? Are not the two fronts he has reformed major enough??? Somehow, Allen always finds a way to be condescending to Benedict XVI, but how dare he, or anyone for that matter!!] on two key fronts, the sex abuse crisis and finances.

Vis-à-vis finances, two developments from the last year lend credence to Benedict's profile as a reformer.

The first came in July, when the Vatican got the results of its first inspection for financial transparency by an independent secular body, in this case an outfit called Moneyval, the Council of Europe's anti-money-laundering agency. The verdict was a mixed bag, suggesting the Vatican "has come a long way in a very short period of time" toward transparency, but also raising questions about the role of the Vatican's new financial watchdog agency and about oversight of the Institute for the Works of Religion, the so-called Vatican Bank.

Specifics aside, the fact the Vatican was willing to undergo this test at all was a watershed. Never before has the Vatican opened its financial and legal systems to this sort of external, independent review with the results made public. In centuries past, had secular authorities shown up to conduct such a review, they would have been fought off tooth and nail in the name of defending the autonomy and sovereignty of the papacy. For Moneyval, the red carpet was rolled out instead. [In fact, the Vatican asked to be audited, as it were, by Moneyval, in order to get on the European 'white list' of financial institutions meeting international standards of financial transparency.]

Second, in September, the Vatican hired a 40-year-old Swiss lawyer named René Brülhart, who for the last 10 years had led anti-money-laundering efforts in the tiny European principality of Liechtenstein, as a consultant for its response to the Moneyval evaluation.

Brülhart brings an impeccable pedigree. He joined Liechtenstein's financial intelligence unit as deputy director in 2001, and took over the top job in 2004. Since 2010, he served as vice president of the Egmont Group, the global network of financial intelligence units, which are national-level bodies that coordinate the policing of transparency requirements.

Brülhart achieved brief fame in 2003 when he helped return a Falcon 50 business jet worth several million dollars to the new Iraqi government after the fall of Saddam Hussein. The plane had been grounded in Jordan shortly before the 2003 U.S.-led invasion, and it was registered to a shell company in Liechtenstein controlled by Hussein. Brülhart helped unravel the paper trail, and eventually the plane was returned -- the first case in which an asset held by Saddam outside Iraq was repatriated.

Not long after he arrived in the Vatican, Brülhart was reassigned as the new head of the Vatican's Financial Information Authority, the watchdog unit created by Benedict XVI to ride herd over other Vatican departments and to ensure compliance with global standards of transparency. It was a natural move, since the effectiveness of the Financial Information Authority was one of the central points of the Moneyval review.

In effect, the Brülhart hire was a way of telling financial experts and regulators that the Vatican is serious about getting its act together, since he's a known quantity in that world. It's also a way of "de-Italianizing" the financial operations of the Vatican by bringing in leadership with a more cosmopolitan formation and outlook.

Whether a sea change in accountability results from all this remains to be seen, but even the prospect of it ranks as the biggest untold story about the Vatican in 2012. [Once again, Allen chooses for some reason not to acknowsledge all the media focus there was in Italy on this matter (just because the Anglophone media severely underplayed it) - precisely because this was all previously unheard of and unprecedented in the Vatican! In fact, the side play was that in the weeks before the Moneyval report came out, the secular Italian media openly and gloatingly anticipated a drastic blackballing of the Vatican efforts to come up to international financial standards, and then had to eat their words when the actual Moneyval report came out. That attitude reflects the doggedness with which, for some reason, the Italian central bank appears to be carrying out a vendetta against the Vatican = exemplified by the recent move to prevent credit cards from being used at the Vatican.]

As a footnote, why didn't this momentum toward financial house-cleaning get the play it deserved? In part, perhaps, it didn't fit the normal media script of crisis and scandal. In part, too, it was muddied by confusing subplots, such as the firing in May of Ettore Gotti Tedeschi, the erstwhile Vatican Bank president, whose hire in 2009 was trumpeted as a major breakthrough. Even if it's true that Gotti Tedeschi proved to be an erratic and self-promotional disappointment, it's always tough to sort out the rights and wrongs of a personnel move. [The Gotti Tedeschi case was an unfortunate red herring tossed off by the Vatican Secretariat of State, and then caught, drawn out, quartered and seasoned with gusto by lip-smacking Italian prosecutors and bank officials to embarrass the Vatican and discredit the IOR.]

However, failure to perceive that Benedict has moved the ball on financial reform is also due, in part, to the Vatican's customary inability to tell its own story. {The Vatican communications machinery had its usual share of maddening and inexplicable fumbles in 2012, but under-reporting the Pope's financial transparency efforts and the Moneyval inquiries was not one of them! They cannot be blamed if the Anglophone media chose to under-report because it goes against the MSM narrative of a 'corrupt and secretive' Vatican. And, be consistent now! - How can one expect the Vatican's unwieldy Rube Goldberg communications contraption to be a PR machine as well when it cannot even get its basic communications skills right?]

Despite Benedict's launch on Twitter and the debut of a "Pope App" for the iPhone and Android, the Vatican still struggles to navigate routine communications challenges. To this day, for instance, Brülhart still hasn't appeared at a Vatican news conference to answer questions about the transparency campaign, despite the fact that he's smart, articulate, multilingual and, in the eyes of most of the women I know in Rome, awfully handsome. [And that's supposed to be a consideration???? Yet Georg Gaenswein gets flak for looking the way he does!]

The Vatican's PR woes, however, are not among the under-covered stories of 2012 or any other year.

And the MSM's 'fascination' with the Pope on Twitter and other initatives whereby the Vatican is trying to avail of the new communications technologies is all out of proportion to the event. Of course, the lack of proportion is aided and abetted by the ambiguous Pontifical Council of Social Communications itself, which has devoted an unwarranted amount of time and verbiage to touting the Twitter initiative, instead of, say, devising a way whereby all the parish priests and bishops of the world could get a direct e-mail that immediately, regularly and reliably conveys to them the homilies, catecheses and reflections of Benedict XVI, in a language they understand. Frankly, I have yet to see what meaningful work this Council has ever done to truly propagate the words of the Pope and the Church. And I will be very glad to stand corrected on that!


BTW, in the second part of the column, Allen informs us of the death of his 98-year-old maternal grandmother.
May she rest in peace. Condolences and prayers for Allen and his bereaved family.