BENEDICT XVI: NEWS, PAPAL TEXTS, PHOTOS AND COMMENTARY

Meet the journalist who decided
to come aboard and be the Vatican's
senior communications adviser
by Barbie Latza Nadeau

JunE 24, 2012

The Daily Beast is the online news and opinion website that has been operated by Newsweek since November 2010.


Right photo, Burke covering the Pope's visit to the UK in 2010.

ROME - One week after the Pope’s butler was arrested for allegedly leaking private Vatican documents to the press, Fox News’s Rome correspondent, Greg Burke, got what he refers to as “a curious call” from the Vatican.

Burke was in the United States at the time, celebrating his father’s 90th birthday, and had turned off his Italian cellphone. When he turned it back on, he had several messages from the Holy See. “The Pope’s chief of staff would like to see you,” said one.

“I knew it was something important,” Burke, 52, told The Daily Beast. “I figured it wasn’t to talk about the best restaurants in Rome.”

When Burke returned to Rome, the Vatican’s deputy secretary of state, Archbishop Angelo Becciu, asked Burke to become the Holy See’s senior communications adviser, a job created especially for him in an effort to help guide the institution out of an increasingly difficult public-relations quagmire.

“I waited 24 hours and then said no,” Burke said. “It seemed too much of a mess and too big for me and way out of my comfort zone.” Burke then left for Spain to cover that country’s economic crisis, putting the idea behind him.

The Vatican called again. “I said no again,” Burke remembers, “but then after a few days, I thought maybe I should just man up and step up to the plate.”

A native of St. Louis, Missouri, Burke is a practicing Catholic and member of Opus Dei — but by no means a Vatican apologist. He moved to Rome in 1988 as a correspondent for the National Catholic Register, a job that eventually ended when the newspaper ran out of money.

He then moved to Time magazine as its Rome bureau chief for 10 years before eventually accepting an offer to be Fox News’s European and Middle East on-air correspondent. In his previous jobs, he covered the illness and death of Pope John Paul II, the election of Pope Benedict XVI, the pedophile scandal, the VatiLeaks saga, and the crackdown on American nuns.

“A scandal is a scandal, and I’ve reported on them all,” he says. “It all has to be told, and as much as things are true, it’s good they’ve come out.”

He believes he was chosen for the Vatican job for a combination of factors. “Being American certainly plays into it. If you want conspiracy theory, it’s the American Fox News and Opus Dei connection,” he joked. “But if you want the experience factors, I have a solid career in journalism, and I do know essentially what journalists want. I am a faithful Catholic, and I can bring a certain level of American practicality to the job.”

Hiring an American to interface between the Church hierarchy and the press is a giant step into the brave new world of transparency for the Holy See. Burke says he sees the job as a role similar to that of the White House director of communications, so he knows it won’t be easy.

He won’t be the official spokesperson — that job will stay with Father Federico Lombardi — but he will have authority to speak to reporters on background (meaning the press can report the general sentiment of what he says without using direct quotes), a development that may open up roads that have previously been blocked.

One of the most challenging responsibilities of the new job will be to reach out to the press and get them back “on message,” Burke says.

The recent scandals have overshadowed much of the positive work the Church has done, and Burke says it’s time for an effort to refocus attention to some of the more positive aspects of the Catholic Church.

Since he is a respected journalist among the often-cynical Rome press corps, he may be able to make an impact — at least on the surface. When the Vatican takes issue with unfair reporting, for example, he’ll be able to call up reporters and speak to them as a peer, in a way the Church has never been able to do before.

“Anything that can show an openness and willingness to meet the press is a step in the right direction,” he says. “But more than an attempt to humanize it, I would say it’s an attempt to modernize it. It’s going to be a slow process. The Vatican is not going to change in a day.”

Because no one has ever had a job like this before, Burke says he will have to find his way through a system few outside the clerical set have ever trespassed. But he’s realistic about what lies ahead.

“I am going to have no power,” he says, “but I certainly will be at the table with people who do have power. Will I make a point forcefully enough to get my point across? I really have no idea.”

Andrea Tornielli comments on the Burke appointment... though I disagree with his use of the term 'spin doctor' for Burke's role, because 'spin doctors' go to work after the fact - a media event that has to be maximized for positive use or minimized for the least possible damage. Burke's role begins with the decision on what to announce and how to announce it, so that the announcement does not have to be spun afterwards!


A 'spin doctor' for the Vatican
by Andrea Tornielli
Translated from the Italian service of

June 25, 2012

VATICAN CITY - During the peak of the media storm over pedophile priests in the spring of 2010, Fr. Federico Lombardi, who succeeded Joaquin Navarro-Valls as Vatican press director, said in an interview published by BBC online that he was "a spokesman who relies on the Secretariat of State" from whom he gets his instructions.

"It's the Secretariat of State that decides the line, and I try to communicate it the best way I can", he said. "No one ever gave me the task of coordinating a media strategy for the Holy See".

It is precisely this failure to entrust him with the task, or better still, the lack of a unifying communications line, as well as in the fact that Fr. Lombardi is not included in the decisional processes about what is to be communicated and how, that is the principal reason for the 'media crises' that have characterized some episodes of this Pontificate.

Crises about which it is simplistic to be always and only attributed to journalists as they have been, by the Vatican at every level. [That's also an incomplete statement. While these 'crises' do not generally start out to be generated by the media, the initial communications failure by the Vatican inevitably leads to great license taken by the media in misrepresenting, mis-interpreting and mis-reporting subsequent related events, often with embellishments that have no bases in fact. That has been best illustrated by the fanciful spin-offs from Vatileaks']

The appointment as 'communications adviser' of the American journalist Greg Burke, an excellent professional newsman who has been bureau chief of Time magazine in Rome, and then for Fox News in the past 10 years, appears to indicate that finally, someone in the Secretariat of State has perceived their communications problem adequately, after the past several weeks characterized by a series of mediatic self-penalties.

Starting, for instance, with the deliberate disclosure of internal notes regarding the dismissal of Ettore Gotti Tedeschi from the IOR. Regardless of the merits of that decision, it was sheer moral and professional destruction of a person whose appointment three years earlier was flaunted with great praise of his merits and trust in him.

It was an event unprecedented in the modern history of the Holy See, subsequently compounded by the release of a 'diagnosis' of psychological instability written by a psychiatrist to Gotti Tedeschi's major internal rival in IOR, who had asked the doctor to observe Gotti Tedeschi's behavior during a Christmas party for IOR employees.

Then the statement made by the Vatican after Gotti Tedeschi's homes and office were raided by Italian police who confiscated all the documents they could find was infelicitous: The statement, prepared by the Secretariat of State, was intended primarily to assert the sovereign rights of Vatican State over anything that had to do with the Vatican among Gotti Tedeschi's papers.

But it ended up sounding as if the Vatican feared any disclosures that might arise from perusal of those Vatican documents by Italian magistrates.

Even Cardinal Tarcisio Bertone's interview with Famiglia Cristiana - which gave the Secretary of State an occasion to understandably vent himself about the fact that he seemed to be the principal target of Vatileaks - had no significant effect.

For him to have put all the blame on journalists, especially Italian journalists, whom he described as 'imitating Dan Brown', and branding "lies and calumnies" everything that has been written about the Vatican traitors and about IOR, was an over-simplification, with respect to what the leaked documents actually contained, including the internal tensions at the Vatican that emerge from reading the documents. [First of all, for Bertone to even use Dan Brown's name was mighty 'stupid', as why would he call new attention to that charlatan at all! And as I have maintained, you cannot expect the perceived major 'villain' in the Vatileaks papers to be able to put a good face on it, especially since he is not exactly the best communicator that the Vatican has, nor the brightest bulb on the shelf, for that matter. Nor did he offer anything new, except the almost insulting anodyne that "we are one great happy family and everything is wine and roses" when it clearly isn't so. Some common-sense honesty is at least expected. Nor did he even think to apologize for the barbaric treatment of Gotti Tedeschi! And he says that he means to be 'a minister of the Church not a minister of State'. You cannot be selectively Christian in how you treat people. That's not what we are taught.]

So now we have the Secretariat of State deciding to make up and repair the situation, creating the new post of 'communications adviser', as a kind of supervisor similar to the communications director at the White House.

Burke, 52, is a member of Opus Dei, like Lombardi's predecessor, Joaquin Navarro-Valls. The 'Work' founded by St. Josemaria Escriva, in its academic extension, has always paid special attention to communications, and this is proven by the highly popular communications programs offered at the Pontifical University of Santa Croce, and their annual communications seminars for Church people engaged in the media.

Describing the job of the new adviser, Fr. Lombardi said: "He will contribute to integrate attention to all communications questions in the Secretariat of State and to take care of its relationship to the service of the Press Office and other communications institutiosnnsf the Holy See".

One assumes that Burke will have the chance to intervene from the start of the communications process, about what and how much should be communicated, and how and when to make these statements.