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PEOPLE AROUND THE POPE

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29/05/2009 16:02
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As luck would have it, the second entry on this thread is also on Fr. Lombardi, who is, at the moment, the most 'embattled' of the Pope's men. Nice to know he is handling it all quite equably!


'I try to serve the Pope
with all my heart'

by Andrew Brown

29 May 2009


The thing you immediately notice about the Pope's press officer, Fr Federico Lombardi, is his kindliness. Arriving for our interview, I say I had got into a panic.

"Panic," he inquires, concerned. "Why?" And he really seems relieved that I was only worried that my Dictaphone wasn't working.

Fr Lombardi, born in 1942, is the shrewd and charismatic Jesuit who heads La Sala Stampa della Santa Sede, the Vatican Press Office. He's also relentlessly good-humoured. In fact, the more awkward the question, the more he appears to bubble over with jollity.

What causes this - whether it's just his unflappable nature, or a practised defensive mechanism, or a sign of complacency - I can't say for sure.

I find this good humour, for example, when I ask questions, reluctantly, about rumours that he is soon to be replaced at the Sala Stampa as a result of recent communications hiccups. Far from objecting to my impertinence, he can hardly contain his amusement. It is impossible to ruffle his feathers.

"I understand your question," he laughs. "I am ready to continue my service. I have no personal projects. I have never had. I am a Jesuit. I am always doing what my superiors have said to me."

Then he sums up in good, Italian-accented English his life of obedient service. "[My superiors] have said to me: go to Germany to study theology: I went. Study mathematics in Turin: I have studied. Go to Civiltà Cattolica [the magazine run by Jesuits] to write articles: I went. Now my superiors have said to me, please, be director of the Vatican radio: I do. Please be director of the Vatican Television Centre: I do. If they say [to] me: please go because we have another, I go [laughing]! It is absolutely not a problem!"

They haven't said "please go", have they?

"No, I think, now, no one has said that," he says, again laughing.

Still, there's bound to be the odd slip-up. Whereas his predecessor, the formidable Joaquin Navarro-Valls, who was in the job for 22 years, tended always to sign statements with his name and generally push himself forward confidently as an interpreter of the Pope's thinking, Fr Lombardi has, since his appointment on July 11 2006, tried for a more self-effacing style.

He recently found himself in the uncomfortable vortex of a news story, however, when he blurted out that Pope Benedict had not been a member of the Hitler Youth. "Never, never, never," he insisted, sounding like King Lear.

Within hours John Allen of the National Catholic Reporter and other journalists had dug up the evidence of the Pope's own words, in the book Salt of the Earth (1997), confirming that Joseph Ratzinger had indeed been forced to join the Nazi youth organisation for a time.

['Dug up'? There was no need to 'dig it up', for anyone who purports to report on the Pope regularly. It is part of his biography, and he reported it in his autobiographical memoir MILESTONES years before Salt of the Earth. That is why it was shocking to find out the Vatican's own press director apparently did not know it and made his emphatic denial in Israel, of all places.]

"I know that there was and there is criticism about me," Fr Lombardi says. "This is for me not a particular problem in the sense that I think that everyone has the right to criticise! I am in a situation which it is difficult to do in a perfect way. But I do what my superiors desire. My principle is I do what I can with all my heart in the service of the Church and the Pope, and then if someone comes and is doing this better and my superiors say: 'Please we have a better solution', this is for me no problem."

But what was in his mind when he said the Pope was "never, never, never" a member of the Hitler Youth?

"It was not an important thing. The Pope came to Israel. In the Holy Land there were some contributions... in the local press... which gave the impression that the Pope in his youth was under the influence of the Nazi ideology. Then was named rather often the fact that he was in the Hitlerjugend. My idea was to say the Pope as he was young was never under the influence of or was never formed in a Nazi ideology.

"Someone noted correctly that the Pope himself said in one of his interviews that he was inscripted against his will to the Hitlerjugend because all the youths were inscripted. I have accepted that what I have said was not exact, but the sense of what I had said remains: he was never a young man of a Nazi [ideology]. I had not the books - I was in Israel - to verify. This was a very, very little point of the conversation... I don't feel it is worthy of a long discussion." [No, not a long discussion, but how about a frank "Sorry, I got that wrong! Gee, what a boo-boo of the kind I hope never to make again!" and a self-deprecating chuckle?]

And there was the affair of the lifting of the excommunication of the Holocaust-denying Bishop Williamson. Couldn't someone in the Vatican have looked up Williamson on Google and discovered his poisonous opinions?

"I don't know if it was so easy because, do you know Joan Lewis? [Rome Bureau Chief for Eternal Word Television Network]. Joan Lewis is a sympathetic lady. She said to me: people say it was enough to Google, and I have tried, she says to me, but all the Williamson stories are after [the lifting of the excommunications]. I have found absolutely nothing before."

[Thank you, Joan Lewis. I have been saying that all along, in my comments on the post-January 21 fracas. But how is it that no other major journalist - even among the Vaticanistas - who has glibly written sanctimonious accusations against the Vatican, has bothered to check out the Web for himself/herself?

The one great advantage of the Internet is that it date-stamps every entry, so it is easy enough to show when any Williamson negationist statement was first reported on the Web. I found only one - a 2008 Catholic Herald report, to which there was virtually (and literally) no reaction at all from the media-and-liberal-Catholic lynch mob who would pop out fullblown like Jack-in-the-box after January 21!]


In any case, Fr Lombardi recommends reading the Pope's letter to the bishops. In it the Pope expresses how, as Fr Lombardi explains it, he was "touched" and "suffered much" that he should receive so much hostile criticism when he had personally worked so hard for reconciliation among Christians and Jews.

Fr Lombardi insists that he can manage the three jobs - Vatican radio, television and Press departments. "It is rather easy for me to do every day," he says breezily. He has "very good collaborators" and name-checks his assistant Fr Ciro Benedettini several times.

He spends only one or two hours at the television centre and then attends the press office from 10 in the morning "until 13.30 or 14". The office closes, according to long custom, at 2.30 in the afternoon.

But he denies that journalists find it hard to reach a spokesman after that time: "The journalists can call us, me and my substitute. All the journalists have my telephone. It is not difficult to talk with me - if I am not at another telephone!" He mimes answering two telephones at the same time.

Fr Lombardi thanks me for a compliment on the quality of his English speaking, but he concedes that "there is a real problem" with language in the Vatican.

I wonder if the Vatican is ever slow to grasp the meaning of statements written or spoken in English. Not really, is the gist of his reply: most of his staff have perfectly good English and a selection of other languages too.

Still, "the problem with languages is one of the important issues that we have to see in the Vatican" and "a real problem" is translating Italian documents, with all their last-minute adjustments, into English quickly enough for the world's media.

[Tsk-tsk, Fr. Lombardi. You know better than that. Someone like me, who never had to translate anything outside my exercises in language classes before joining a forum on the Pope, have found it fairly easy to translate from the languages I know, as promptly as I can, despite having to do it irregularly in between my real job and my personal chores!

As for last-minute adjustments to prepared texts, all secular press offices get around that by releasing teh translation promptly but adding a standard caveat that the translation is 'unofficial' until after the text has been delivered and the Press Office determines that no substantive changes were made, and if so, the final 'official' translation of the text will carry those changes.]


He aims "to organise better our resources" for rapid translation both in the press office and the radio department, which translated the texts for the Holy Land visit into Arabic.

He doesn't favour a return to Latin as the language of the Church. "Latin is interesting and important," he says, "but it is not a working language."

Fr Lombardi had to prepare to address "media professionals" later that evening at Allen Hall seminary in London.

With only a few minutes of our interview remaining I ask Fr Lombardi to describe the Pope's character. He points to his humility.

"He is a person that listens to the other very much. If you personally speak with him, you see that he looks to you with interest to understand what you are saying because he feels he has something to learn from you."


For himself, Fr Lombardi cherishes this humble reminder: "The Pope says: 'I am the servant of the servants of God.' I say: I am the servant of the servant of the servants of God."


[Modificato da TERESA BENEDETTA 04/06/2009 17:38]
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