Michael KellyMichael Kelly offers thoughts on the Vatican’s public relations
To the outside world, the Vatican often appears to have a slick public relations operation. Papal aides have been quite adept at generating publicity around things like the Pope’s Twitter account and the PopeApp which allows people to follow the daily activities of Pope Francis via a smart phone or tablet app.
Pope Francis now has almost 14.5million followers on Twitter. The Vatican has a very active presence on Facebook and a popular YouTube channel. The Holy See has well-and-truly embraced the digital age.
Yet the Vatican often appears to struggle to get the basics of media relations right. At the weekend, the Italian daily newspaper La Repubblica published the text of an ‘interview’ with Pope Francis. Within a couple of hours, the Vatican Press Office had issued another one of the now-famed ‘clarifications’.
The Repubblica interview quotes the Pope as saying he will find “solutions” around priestly celibacy leading many to believe that he will make the discipline optional.
Francis is also quoted as claiming that 2% of priests are paedophiles. The problem with the interview is that the quotes attributed to Francis are the recollections of a 90-year-old retired journalist who neither takes notes when speaking with the Pope nor records the conversations.
Vatican spokesman Fr Federico Lombardi insisted that one “should not or must not speak in any way, shape or form of an interview in the normal use of the word, as if there had been a series of questions and answers that faithfully and exactly reflect the precise thoughts of the one being interviewed”.
The Pope’s spokesman then goes on to challenge two particular quotations – the one where the Pope is reported as saying he will find ‘solutions’ in relation to priestly celibacy and another where the Pope is reported as claiming that 2% of priests are paedophiles – “clearly attributed to the Pope but curiously, the quotations were opened at the beginning but were not closed at the end”.
Quotations
“We must ask ourselves why the final quotations are not present: is this an omission or explicit acknowledgement that the naive reader is being manipulated?” Fr Lombardi asks.
So what are we to make of all of this? Firstly, it’s a curious approach to interviews where neither notes nor recordings are made. In journalism school it is drilled into would-be reporters that accuracy of quotations is of paramount importance. It’s unthinkable for a reporter not to take notes, but to prepare quotations based on recollection. Secondly, it’s curious to say the least that the Vatican is repeatedly forced to clarify remarks attributed to the Pope in a series of informal chats. Note that Fr Lombardi, while urging caution, does not flat-out deny that the Pope said what has been attributed to him.
The journalist involved, Eugenio Scalfari, is standing by his interview. In a previous article, he was also accused by some in the Vatican of misrepresenting the Pontiff. And yet, he was permitted another unrecorded conversation with Francis which he made it clear he intended to publish.
Is this a case of the Vatican adopting the approach of plausible deniability? Is the Pope floating kites about various issues while allowing his spokesman to give the impression that what the Pope is reported to have said he did not, in fact, say?
One thing is clear: it’s unfair of the Vatican to blame Mr Scalfari. Presumably he didn’t scale the Leonine Wall and sneak in to the Domus Sanctae Marthae to meet with the Pope. The encounter was clearly agreed to by the Pontiff even after the controversy aroused by the original ‘interview’. Nor did Pope Francis ask to see a text before it was published.
I don’t think Pope Francis is naïve when it comes to handling the media. I think the Pope knows exactly what he’s doing. But is there a game going on? Is plausible deniability – famed by the CIA – now the order of the day in the Holy See? If so, it doesn’t strike me as a very honest way to approach communications.
If it is a strategy, it’s also a risky one: institutions that speak out of both sides of their mouths run the risk of contradiction.
To paraphrase the soon-to-be-Blessed Pope Paul VI, if the Church wishes to speak of honesty, she must herself be honest. You must “mean what you say and say what you mean” I was told as a child. It strikes me as very good advice.