VATICAN CITY
Wanted in Rome
In the continuing absence of any date for the start of the conclave to elect the new pope the spotlight has turned to a quiet and unassuming Jesuit. Father Federico Lombardi is the head of the Vatican’s press office and Vatican Radio. It is through him that all official news of what is happening behind the closed doors in the Vatican is now being filtered.
Unlike his predecessor, the dynamic and charismatic Joaquín Navarro Valls who was one of the men closest to Pope John Paul II in or out of the Vatican, Lombardi has never had a direct relationship with either Pope Benedict XVI or with the powers in the Vatican curia. Paradoxically this may now be his very strength.
For years he has managed to mediate, often with considerable difficulty, between the angry and ever investigating media and the Vatican. Questions over sex abuse scandals, upsets over inter-faith relations, Vatileaks, the incarceration without trial of the pope’s butler, the Vatican banking investigations, all these have passed over his desk.
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