Michael KellyReal reform of Vatican strategy is needed
The Vatican has announced that former Tory minister and Catholic grandee Chris Patten will chair a new committee advising on communications (a Rome-based Dublin priest Msgr Paul Tighe will act as secretary to the new committee). Lord Patten has been described as the classic bien pensant which probably doesn’t best qualify him for a role in reforming the Vatican’s creaking communications operation.
And creaking it is.
Sitting atop the Vatican communication apparatus is the Pontifical Council for Social Communications. This council has its origins in the Vatican II document Inter mirifica which, 50 years after the council, is an embarrassingly dated text and a document that, even at the time, was seen as hugely naïve.
According to the Vatican the “chief task of this Council is to encourage and support in a timely and suitable way the action of the Church and her members in the many forms of social communication.
“It takes care to see that newspapers and periodicals, as well as films and radio or television broadcasts, are more and more imbued with a human and Christian spirit,” Pope John Paul II wrote in the Apostolic Constitution clarifying the role of the body.
Relevance
It’s all very worthy, and the council has published a few interesting documents on ethics in advertising, cinema etc. But, one can’t help getting the feeling that there is little by way of overall vision. Does the Church really need a Pontifical Council to reflect on communications?
Might the reform agenda of Pope Francis better focus on streamlining the Vatican’s vast communications apparatus in to one centrally-coordinated practical operation to put all the theory to the test?
Vatican Radio, for example (an institution for which I worked for a few years) costs the Holy See more than €20million a year. The station broadcasts in 47 languages including in Esperanto (an attempt at a transnational language spoken as a second language by about 100,000 people). While there is little doubt that Vatican Radio played an important role broadcasting in to Eastern Europe during the Cold War, there has been little – if any – thought given to whether or not the station represents value for money in the 21st Century.
The Vatican also has a newspaper – L’Osservatore Romano – which has been quite successful in recent years at running stories about The Beatles, Harry Potter and Lord of the Rings which are picked up in the secular press as “The Vatican says…” It’s a good strategy to attract attention, but, again, little thought is given as to whether the paper serves any useful benefit.
The paper publishes every day in Italian and has weekly editions in French, English, Spanish, Portuguese, German, Polish and Malayalam. The weekly editions carry little more than summaries of the Pope’s homilies.
Is a weekly newspaper of this kind really relevant at a time when all the homilies are instantly available on the internet?
Awareness
Under the Pontificate of Benedict XVI, the Vatican’s Secretariat of State showed some awareness that they had to work harder to prioritise public relations. Greg Burke, a Rome-based journalist, was hired as a senior media adviser. He has been credited, at least by some, as a PR genius who is key to Pope Francis’ popularity in the press.
However, the Vatican would be mistaken if it thought that its pubic image problems have been solved by the election of a Pope who is widely-popular outside the Church.
Let’s hope that Lord Patten’s committee can resist the temptation to leave things as they are or to simply publish more lofty theoretical documents.
What is needed is a real root-and-branch reform. Apps, Facebook, YouTube and even the Pope’s Twitter presence are a vital conduit to the modern world.
But, without an overall strategy, it runs the risk of seeming a bit gimmicky.