It was the ultimate baptism by fire. Just two months after taking over as official press spokesman for the Vatican, in September 2006, Father Federico Lombardi was thrust into an unwelcome spotlight when he found himself explaining a controversial speech delivered by Pope Benedict XVI at the University of Regensburg in Germany. A passage of that speech, perceived as saying that Islam was an intrinsically violent religion, sparked outrage and rioting in the Muslim world.
The episode demonstrates that “selling” God is not always easy and selling the politics of God can be trickier still. But this is what the Vatican faces every day, as spokesmen for the headquarters of the 1.1bn-member Roman Catholic Church try to explain its policies and politics to the outside world.
Vatican officials often cringe when reporters suggest that the Holy See is a political power. And yet it has full diplomatic relations with more than 170 countries, as well as formal missions to the United Nations and representations to a host of other world institutions. Every head of state – with the exception of Chinese and North Korean leaders – beats a path to Pope Benedict’s door for a private audience of the type Italians like to call “a quattro occhi” (only four eyes in the room). Even before the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, leaders of what Ronald Reagan branded the “evil empire” – albeit lower ranking ones – came to Rome, smiled and had their picture taken with the man in white, the man Stalin had dismissed decades earlier with the notorious question “How many divisions has the Pope?”
While veteran Vatican reporters have their own sources in many departments – even though Vatican regulations frown on employees talking to the media – the official task of “selling” what is still a notoriously centralised institution falls essentially to one person – the Vatican spokes-man or, to give him his official title, the Director of the Press Office of the Holy See.
None of the individual departments of the Vatican such as the Secretariat of State (the equivalent of the State Department or Foreign Office), the Pontifical Council for Justice and Peace (Justice Ministry) or the Health Ministry, has its own spokespeople. No regular briefings are held anywhere in the Vatican, not daily, weekly, monthly or even yearly. Press conferences take place on an ad hoc basis, usually to present a new document or in an emergency, and the questions addressed are usually confined to the issue at hand.
With the transition three years ago from the papacy of John Paul II to that of Benedict XVI, a quiet revolution also took place in the Vatican’s relations with the media. In the process, the job passed from a layman who had become a celebrity in his own right, to a priest known mostly in Vatican and Jesuit circles. Joaquin Navarro-Valls, the previous incumbent who stayed in the job for a year to help with the handover before quietly stepping aside in 2006, is a suave Spaniard who was John Paul’s spokesman for more than 20 years. A little-known journalist before he moved to the Vatican, he was the classic “outside” appointment (appropriately enough, given that he was hired by the first non-Italian pope for more than 450 years).