Francis the Communicator. With a Press Office All His Own, at Santa Marta

Bound for Budapest on April 28, Francis will certainly not leave out the two highest profile media moments of every trip he takes: the press conference on the flight back to Rome and the conversation with the local Jesuits, held behind closed doors but then transcribed and published by “La Civiltà Cattolica.”

In both cases, as always, his remarks will be freewheeling, about what he likes and without any constraints, not even with respect to what he has said before, which he will not be afraid to change or contradict if it seems to suit him, as he has repeatedly done. The task of the Vatican offices will be to simply transcribe and register them in that gigantic and disorderly archive of spoken and written words which will constitute for future historians the “magisterium” of pope Jorge Mario Bergoglio.

A “magisterium” that has it all. And too much. To the point that the clerks charged with recording his speeches have for some time found themselves having to trim and remove at least some excesses, scurrilous expressions, gutter talk.

Until a few months ago it was the standard practice of the pontifical archivists to publish everything Francis said. When, receiving persons or groups, he set aside the speech prepared by the offices and spoke offhand, it all went down on record, both the undelivered speech and the words actually spoken.

And this even when publishing everything was hardly elegant, for example last October 24, when in receiving seminarians and priests studying in Rome and in answering an innocent question about the digital world the pope let himself go in an emphatic digression on the vice of looking at pornographic images, as if this were a vice of all the priests and seminarians present and absent, and of nuns and consecrated souls to boot.

The following December 10, however, to some at the Vatican it seemed he’d gone too far, because in giving audience to seminarians and educators in Barcelona, there too setting aside the written text because it was “boring,” Francis stepped over the limit of what can be published, branding careerists and climbers with alleyway insults.

That’s not all. Still speaking off the cuff, the pope allegedly gave order that in sacramental confession absolution should be given always and for everything, “even if we see that there is no purpose of amendment.” Previously, he had referred to the confessor who does not give absolution as a “delinquent.”

The fact is that of this offhand speech by Francis – later reported by the many who were present – nothing has been officially published. And the same has been done on other subsequent occasions, the latest of them last April 17, in the audience the pope gave to the community of the Beatitudes.

Even the secretariat of state has for some time felt duty bound to put up a barrier against Francis’s verbal unrestraint.

Until the summer of 2020 the practice was to provide the journalists accredited to the Vatican press office a few hours ahead of time with the words that the pope would speak at the Sunday Angelus, including the final appendix, often with references to current events and issues of international politics.

They were finely honed lines, and would have been the first Francis had dedicated to Hong Kong’s loss of freedom, on which until then he had always kept silent. Disclosed afterward by various organs of the press, these in fact rendered even more grave the pope’s ongoing silence.

This led to the decision, for the sake of avoiding further incidents, no longer to furnish the press in advance with the final words of the Angelus, but only with the comments on the Gospel of the day.

Reforming the curia in his own way, Francis established a dicastery whose task is supposed to be precisely that of dealing with communication, headed by two accomplished lay journalists, Paolo Ruffini and Andrea Tornielli.

But Bergoglio has never shown a particular predilection for official communication channels.

The very few times he has visited the newspaper “L’Osservatore Romano,” he has humiliated those who write for it, from director Andrea Monda on down, with callous wisecracks about the scanty number of copies sold. And in ten years he has granted the “pope’s newspaper” only one of his innumerable interviews left and right. A toned-down interview at that, clipped from his preface to a book about Saint Joseph, which did not and could not make even a marginal news item.

Nor does Francis gel with the Holy See press office. Last March 29, when the pope was hospitalized, an official telegraphic communiqué limited itself to saying that he had gone there “for some previously scheduled checks.”

When the danger was past, however, it was Francis himself who said something completely different. First to reporters on leaving the hospital: “I’m still alive.” But then with a few extra details in a phone call – the ninetieth in ten years – to a friend of his named Michele Ferri, who reported to a newspaper these very words of the pope: “I had an ugly time of it. I arrived unconscious at the hospital. A few hours more and I don’t know if I’d have lived to tell about it.”

So it comes as no surprise that at the Vatican not one but two press offices should be considered present and active: that of the Holy See and the other of Santa Marta, the latter managed personally by the pope.

In effect, the boundless quantity of interviews that Francis grants to the most varied newspapers does not in any way pass through the filter of the dicastery for communication. At the most this is handled by those of the pope’s select personal inner circle, from Monsignor Dario Viganò to Fr. Marco Pozza. Or the pope simply takes care of it himself.

“L’Osservatore Romano” and other official channels like Vatican News can only intervene after the fact. For example, with an account of Francis’s 83-minute conversation with a dozen young people from all over the world that aired on April 5 on the Disney Plus streaming platform, recorded months earlier at a film studio in the outlying Roman quarter of Pietralata. A surreal conversation, riddled with brazen and often hostile questions, with one participant who says that making and selling pornographic videos has allowed her to “take ownership of my body and personality” and given her “an incredible freedom at home. I’m very present as a mom.” The pope plays along, and at one point brings up the advice he once gave about asking someone at the Vatican for aid: “You ask him, I say, because in here everybody steals! So I know where to steal, and I’ll send you the money.”

Francis has also created a bizarre personal communication channel of his own with Russia, through someone in the trust of both Moscow patriarch Kirill and Vladimir Putin, by the name of Leonid Sevastyanov. He is the one who makes public the words of the pope that he has gathered from meetings or correspondence. With nary a denial, not even when he revealed that Francis, on his return from the trip to Mongolia planned for September, wanted to stop in the far east of Russia, in Vladivostok, to visit the National Park for the protection of leopards, to one of which he has already given the name of Martín Fierro, the “gaucho” protagonist of the Argentine poem of the same name…

Francis also uses Twitter, with 53 million readers. As of a few days ago, however, his account has fallen under the ax of Elon Musk, the network’s owner, who has removed its certificate of authenticity. Unless he pays and brings himself into line. It is a punishment also brought down upon other famous figures, from Patriarch Kirill to Ayatollah Khamenei to Donald Trump.

“While waiting to learn of the platform’s new policies, the Holy See trusts that these may include the certificate of authenticity for accounts”: this was the comment of the Vatican, it is not clear whether from the press office or from Santa Marta.

On July 5 of that year, however, it happened that a few minutes before noon the journalists were advised that the pope would not be reading the last fifteen lines of the text distributed to them, as aftwerward turned out to be the case.
They were finely honed lines, and would have been the first Francis had dedicated to Hong Kong’s loss of freedom, on which until then he had always kept silent. Disclosed afterward by various organs of the press, these in fact rendered even more grave the pope’s ongoing silence.

It's gotten to the point now where the pope's own press is having to muzzle the heretic.

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