UNITED STATES
Christian Catholicism
Jerry Slevin
Pope Francis may be spinning around St. Peter’s in his old Ford sedan, but the wheels seem to be coming off the Vatican’s media spin machine. Informed Vatican journalists seem to be signaling that Francis’ media honeymoon may be ending. The focus has been until now often on engineered photo ops and slick sound bites orchestrated by the papal media handlers. More frequent substantive reporting may be returning, it appears.
A major current challenge for the Vatican appears to be to advance favorably the April canonization of the Polish Pope, John Paul II, while containing two significant controversies relevant to the Polish Pope. One involves the unresolved scandals of John Paul’s protected contributor, Fr. Maciel, and Maciel’s yet unreformed, and perhaps unreformable, money machine, the Legion of Christ; and the other involves two Polish clerics accused of child abuse in the Dominican Republic .
Francis’ approach to these scandals is quite important because they cannot be handled merely by spin tactics and pious platitudes. They require Francis to show his hand, especially on clerical child abuse, which he has seemingly endeavored mostly to sidestep so far.
The papal spin machine is, of course, still trying to focus more on diversionary and ”children friendly” stories like Francis’ recent endorsement of breast feeding in the Sistine Chapel. This likely would have shocked Michelangelo, but would have been well appreciated by his politically more informed contemporary, Machiavelli. The almost always supportive Catholic News Service carried the mothers’ milk story, unadulterated; see:
The generally more substantive AP reporters, including Rome based Nicole Winfield, has instead honed in more on the apparent efforts of the Vatican to try to avoid stories that may cast a shadow over the soon to be canonized John Paul II, namely, the Maciel scandal and the alleged Polish clerical child abusers.
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