Goodbye, Jesuits. Vatican Media Get a New Face and New Boss
Goodbye, Jesuits. Vatican Media Get a New Face and New Boss
And this with a Jesuit pope, no less. Vatican Radio will stop
broadcasting on shortwave. And “L'Osservatore Romano” will also be
absorbed into a single “content hub.” Under the command of Monsignor
Dario Viganò
Jorge Mario Bergoglio is the first Jesuit in history to sit on the
throne of Peter. And yet precisely during his reign the Society of Jesus
is at risk of disappearing from the Vatican.
It still has charge
of the astronomical observatory. But it has lost command of the press
office, the radio network, the television station, the heart of the
communication system of the Holy See.
For a few years Fr.
Federico Lombardi was at the head of all three of these installations.
But one after another they have been taken from him, and no other Jesuit
has replaced him.
The new boss of the Vatican media, placed by
Pope Francis at the helm of the newly created secretariat for
communication, is the Lombard monsignor Dario Edoardo Viganò, an expert
on cinema, as far as can be imagined from the vision of his predecessor.
*
Vatican Radio is the epicenter of the upheaval.
Entrusted since its birth, in 1931, to the Society of Jesus, it has
brought the Church’s message to the farthest corners of the world.
With
shortwave it could and can be listened to even in the most prohibitive
places, in Siberia during the Stalin years as today in North Korea or
Saudi Arabia.
It broadcasts in 40 languages, and if it were up to
Fr. Lombardi it would do so in a few more. He had even been able to
create a program in the Hausa language, for the northern area of Nigeria
where Boko Haram is raging, with an additional cost of just 10,000 euro
per year. But those who held the purse strings in the Vatican forced
him to shut it down for budgetary reasons.
Because in effect
Vatican Radio costs a great deal. It does not run advertising, its
revenues are paltry and its numerous linguistic sections push to about
thirty-five the number of journalists on the payroll. The total
shortfall fluctuates between twenty and thirty million euro per year.
Well
then, Monsignor Viganò doesn’t want to hear about shortwave anymore. He
sees it as antiquated and to be dismantled, because it has been
supplanted by the web. While instead for Fr. Lombardi it continues to
have an essential role “of service to the poor, the oppressed, the
minorities, rather than of subjection to the imperative of the
maximization of the audience.”
They are two antithetical visions.
But the marching route appears to have been marked out already. In
Africa, where internet access is sporadic, Viganò has announced an
agreement with Facebook through which the pope’s messages will be
brought to 44 countries by cell phone, through an app.
By
December, in short, Vatican Radio will cease to exist as a
self-contained reality. It will be incorporated into a single
centralized “content hub,” or in Viganò’s words, into “a single center
of multimedia production of texts, images, audiovisuals and radio
podcasts in multiple languages,” beneath a single editorial leadership
held by Viganò himself today and soon to be handed over to a “task force
of journalists,” many of them drawn from Vatican Radio itself and
adapted to the new role.
Pope Francis too seems to be heading in
this direction, to judge by the audiences that he grants to the stars of
the most modern systems of communication. He has received this year,
one after another, the magnates of Apple, Google, Instagram, Facebook,
Vodafone, none of them empty-handed. And in early December he will
receive the leaders of the editorial giants Fortune and Time Warner, who
will promote from the Vatican a “New Social Compact” in support of the
poor and refugees worldwide, with the participation of firms like IBM,
McKinsey, Siemens, WPP.
*
And even “L'Osservatore Romano,”
in spite of its noble ancestry, will soon end up being gulped down by
the “content hub” of Monsignor Viganò.
In resistance, the Vatican
newspaper has called to its assistance Cardinal Pietro Parolin,
secretary of state, who in effect last May sponsored the relaunching of
its women’s supplement, with money from Poste Italiane.
But
Viganò has already foretold the newspaper’s future. For official news it
will become a minuscule bulletin, for the use of the curia and on sale
only at newsstands around the Vatican, while for the more thoughtful
articles a slim weekly edition will be launched, as is already done for
the languages other than Italian.
____________
In the
photo, Fr. Filippo Soccorsi, a Jesuit and former classmate of Enrico
Fermi and of the young people of Via Panisperna, himself a great expert
in nuclear physics and a man of profound spiritual life. He directed
Vatican Radio from 1934 to 1953, during the pontificates of Pius XI and
Pius XII.
____________
This commentary was published
in "L'Espresso" no. 44 of 2016 on newsstands October 18, on the opinion
page entitled "Settimo cielo" entrusted to Sandro Magister.
Here is the index of all the previous commentaries:
> "L'Espresso" in seventh heaven
__________
The project of restructuring the Vatican media in the words of Monsignor Eduardo Viganò:
> Viganò: "Vi racconto il mio primo anno al dicastero per la comunicazione"
And the opposing vision of Fr. Federico Lombardi:
> Padre Lombardi: "I miei 25 anni alla Radio Vaticana"
More details on the removal of the Jesuits from Vatican Radio:
> Chi caccia via i gesuiti dalla Radio Vaticana? Il primo papa gesuita della storia
On the uncertain present and future of “L'Osservatore Romano”:
> Non c'è più religione. A "L'Osservatore Romano" non piacciono i monoteismi
On the audiences granted this year by Pope Francis to the technocrats of Apple, Google, Instagram:
> Welcome, Wealthy. Francis Receives Them With Open Arms
On the audience last October 5 with the leaders of Vodafone:
> Il papa: "La tecnologia incoraggi al dialogo interreligioso"
And on the audience scheduled for early December with the heads of Fortune and Time Warner:
> Fortune/Time Global Forum in Rome with an Audience with His Holiness Pope Francis
__________
English translation by Matthew Sherry, Ballwin, Missouri, U.S.A.
