I've seen at least 4 interviews (AP, Newsweek, Corriere della Sera and Vatican Insider) with Greg Burke since he was named senior communications adviser to the Secretariat of State on Saturday, and I was a bit apprehensive that he might be over-exposed [as if he hadn't already been sufficiently exposed in 10 years of being a Fox News TV correspondent]. But L'Osservatore Romano's double issue for June 25-June 26 plays him up by way of introduction, in a way that Giovanni Maria Vian, say, was not introduced when he was named OR editor back in 2007. We really didn't know about his personal life before now, and now we know he is not just an Opus Dei member but a 'numerary', one among the 30% of Opus Dei members who are celibate by choice (they do not take vows), give a large part of their earnings to the movement, and live in Opus Dei centers. (I checked - Joaquin Navarro-Valls is also a numerary.] The other 70% lead traditional family lives. So Burke won't be entirely a stranger in the world of priests. Vatican Insider says he wil formally begin his job at the Vatican on Monday, July 2.
Greg Burke and his new job:
It took him five days to go
from 'No' to 'Maybe' to 'Yes'
by GIULIA GALEOTTI
Translated from the 6/25-6/26 issue of
"In June 2009, I called muy friend Carlo Ancelotti who had just signed up with Chelsea and I offered to be his English teacher," says Greg Burke smiling reminiscently. Evidently, that didn't go through at all, and Fox News' Rome-based correspondent for Italy, southern Europe and the Middle East went on reporting.
For another few years, until about a month ago, Burke, 52, from St. Louis, Missouri, received a telephone call that would prove to be near-historic.
It may not have been accidental that the new senior communications adviser to the Secretariat of State was a baby learning to speak when the United States elected its first Catholic President.
He was born on November 8, 1959, in an Irish-German neighborhood of St. Louis to an observant Catholic family and went to a Jesuit school before earning a degree in comparative literature from Columbia University in New York. That was when he joined Opus Dei, which became one of the firm points in a professional life that would bring him to various parts of the world.
"I was very interested in building a career, but also in the spiritual dimension of life," he says. Having decided to go into jouralism, he rose through the ranks. First as a crime reporter for a small newspaper in New York, then a punishing apprenticeship at United Press International in ChicaGo ("I worked the night shift - and that was no life"). After a brief time with Reuters and the magazine Metropolitan, he got his big break when he was hired by National Catholic Register and sent to Rome as its correspondent.
Paradoxically, since then, Burke never left Rome for good - despite hopping in and out of planes frequently. Perhaps the city struck him much more than he would admit now (he even roots for the Roma football team).
In 1990, he joined the Rome bureau of Time magazine, and four years later, he became bureau chief and Time's chief correspondent in Italy. It was also the year that TIME named John Paul II its Man of the Year.
[In the interview with Luigi Accattoli, the latter recalls that his colleagues knew at the time it was Burke who had originally suggested the Pope to be nominated by Time.]
Of those days, he recalls with particular emotion when the Pope's secretary showed him the Pope's prie-dieu in his private chapel. "He asked me to lift the knee-pad - under it were all the requests for intercession from all parts of the world, which were the object of his prayer intentions. It's how the faithful of the world were all present concretely in the Paul's meditations".
After his years of experience with news agencies and with the press, he joined Fox News after September 11, 2001. "It was a paradox, because basically, I had always looked askance at broadcast news".
Just as he recalled his journalistic career with a smile, so he speaks of "the hope and the joy which come from my faith", when we ask him if his Catholicism had ever been a source of conflict with the secular news organizations he worked with.
He shakes his head, "Not even in the most critical times", he says. "For instance, in reporting about the sex abuses by priests in the Archdiocese of Boston, I always reported from 'the middle of the road'. My bosses appreciated that. I did have a 'cultural clash' with my editors in TIME about the population conference in Cairo".
[The interviewer does not background this reference, but it was a UN-sponsored international conference on population and development in 1994, in which one of the four main agreements was about access to 'reproductive services' including family planning and abortion. For the first time, some governments and non-governmental organizations used the term 'reproductive rights' to imply that abortion was a human right.]
The offer that has made him the center of attention today was first made to him around the end of May, "at first not quite clearly, but formalized on June 4. The next day, I said 'No, thanks'. On the one hand, it is a great professional challenge, but on the other, I was doing work that I loved very much, with an organization that continues to grow, and a road ahead that continued to be stimulating. But as I thought more about it, it became a 'Maybe' and finally, on June 10, I said Yes".
And so this American journalist who combines the enthusiasm of his great nation and his deep Catholicism with a sunny Roman disposition [quite coincidentally, he acquired Italian citizenship a few weeks ago, before this new development] has taken on an unprecedented role in an environment where, in the past, some American prelates have played a role. Between 1948-2007, three archbishops have been in charge of the pontifical Council for Social Communications - Martin John O'Connor, Edward Louis Heston and John Patrick Foley.
[To this day, I am not clear how this Council meshes, if at all, with the regular communications outlets of the Holy See - the Vatican Press Office, Vatican Radio, CTV, and L'Osservatore Romano. What does it actually do, since it seems to have nothing to do at all with those four major outlets. It's an autonomous Curial office, so how will it factor in Burke's work at SecState?]
So did you accept the offer for the professional challenge or because you felt a responsibility as a believer?, we asked him.
«Fifty-fifty», he said, and his smile becomes more contemplative. "Twice in my professional life, I found myself, by chance and by luck, in the right place at the right time - in 1994, at TIME, and in 2001, with Fox. It feels like that now, though it is also very different, of course".
Burke smiles a lot, but one does not doubt his consciousness of the responsibility and significance of his new role. "I know how newsmen think, I know how they would react to certain things, and I know something about how the mechanism of information functions," he adds, saying this is what he brings to his new assignment.
He has no illusions that he will be a 'savior' of the Vatican's communications problems: "Small steps in the right direction will help. Because there is a message and a good one about the Church - the challenge is to communicate it well".
Here is an interview of Burke by his former colleague, Luigi Accattoli.
Interview with Greg Burke:
'I could help make the Vatican
more Internet-friendly'
by Luigi Accattoli
Translated from
June 25, 2012
“I hope I can do something, I am aware of the difficulties, and I have no illusions I can be a hero”, says the American journalist Greg Burke, 52, who has been named senior communications adviser in the Vatican Secretariat of State.
Burke was until last week the Rome-based correspondent for Fox Newas in southern Europe and the Middle East since 2001, and he had been Rome bureau chief for TIME for ten years before that.
A suggestion of his, when he was at TIME, eventually led to John Paul II being named TIME’s Man of the Year in 1994. Shortly afterwards, I was sitting next to Burke on the airplane that was bringing the Pope and us to Manila, when someone cried out to Papa Wojtyla, “Holiness, you have been named Man of the Year…” And the Pope smiled, mischievously, “That’s old news!” Burke, meanwhile, was brushing off compliments from his colleagues, saying, “It wasn’t me who made the decision”.
It is reasonable to think that someone at the Vatican remembers that incident, indicative of Burke’s excellent relations with his colleagues, when they were seeking a remedy to the ‘bad communications' that have been plaguing the Vatican. Burke is a man of the Opus Dei, a professional newsman and an American.
Would you have been chosen because you are American and the first criticisms of Vatican communications errors have always from Americans?
It’s true that I am American, but it’s also true that I have been an Italian citizen for a few weeks now. There is no connection between the two events, of course. When I applied for Italian citizenship – after 24 years living in Rome – I had no idea at all about this possibility! I received my citizenship on May 4, and the offer from the Vatican came a month later. I decided to accept it on June 10.
What do you propose to do?
I see the communications effort of the Holy See like a big ship that moves slowly. I am certainly not getting into it like a Marine attack force. I know I have to be prudent, and that this is a great challenge for me. For a quarter century I have reported on the activities of the Holy See, and now I will have the chance to see the action from the inside.
Do you have a plan of action?
No plans, and no illusions, but I hope to be able to lend a hand so that an antiquated communications machinery can move forward. I consider the fact that I was hired as one such step objectively, not because I happened to be the one chosen. I think it shows that the people who decide these things have finally seen the need
to pay attention to the media not just at the moment when something is communicated to them, but even earlier, when preparing what is to be communicated.
I am not a PR expert, but I know what newsmen look for, I have become accustomed to monitoring what goes on in the information world, and I have some competence in understanding how the words used in a statement will be received or the news itself that one provides. So I can say beforehand, Let’s be careful about this, or let us not forget such-and-such.
A layman among priests - would that not be like a lamb among wolves?
I hope not, but I am well aware that I am entering that world as a layman, and even, that I am relatively young compared to those I will work with. I can foresee that there will be some who may not care to listen to a ‘young layman’. But I see it simply in these terms: I can give some advice but I will not be making the decisions.
It will be said that you were ‘imposed’ by the US bishops who are fed up by the terrible media image of the Vatican…
And they are wrong. The only American aspect in this is that I am American by origin, and this is important mostly because the Anglophones dominate the Internet. It would be incorrect and even false to say the Americans know something that the people in the Curia do not know, so let an American handle this. But it is true that whatever the Curia says, in whatever language, gets disseminated throughout the world which speaks the English of the Internet. I can help to keep this audience in mind at all times.
[Modificato da TERESA BENEDETTA 26/06/2012 10:25]