Viganò, the Failed Reformer. With All the Vatican Media Against Him. (Changes in Vatican Media)

L'Espresso ^ | February 20, 2017 | Sandro Magister

[BlessedBeGod]

One week ago Monsignor Dario Edoardo Viganò, prefect of the secretariat for communication, reported to Pope Francis and the nine cardinals who are helping him with the reform of the curia on the progress of the Vatican media reorganization entrusted to him.

The latest news is the consolidation of Vatican Radio and the Vatican Television Center into the dicastery headed by Viganò.

In effect, as of January 1, 2017 the name “Vatican Radio” no longer has any legal value and has disappeared from the paychecks of its 350 employees. But this is not all there is to it. As of December 1, the AM broadcasts have ceased, and the shortwave - an historical channel of communication for Catholics in countries devoid of freedom, defended to the end by Fr. Federico Lombardi - also have their days numbered. They are still operating for Africa and part of Asia, but their broadcast station in Santa Maria di Galeria is about to be closed.

Cost-cutting and technological advancement are the justifications that Viganò presents. The FM broadcasts will also be gradually replaced by digital audio casting. Viganò has given up the ex-Vatican and Roman frequency 93.3 to RTL, the most listened-to radio network in Italy, in exchange for using the digital signal throughout the country. And for Africa, he has announced an agreement with Facebook by which in 44 countries the pope’s messages will be available by cellphone, through an app.

Although when it comes to costs it is true that Vatican Radio has a deficit of about 26 million euro per year and it is beyond a doubt that shutting down the shortwave broadcasts constitutes a savings, 70 percent of the deficit actually comes from the costs of the journalistic and technical personnel, who by orders from above cannot be fired but at the most can be transferred in part to other Vatican offices.

But there are other changes underway that are more worrying for the journalists of Vatican Radio. And they concern the content of their work.

The Italian radio news programs at 12 and 5 PM have been suppressed, replaced with flash editions imported from the national Catholic network InBlu. Also suppressed is the evening news magazine by the French program, which went on the air every day at 9:30 PM. Both decisions that go against the grain for a radio network whose news broadcasts were for decades required listening in the chanceries and embassies.

But especially worrying is the change concerning SeDoc, the Servizio Documentazione, which is the office that collects and selects from the various Vatican dicasteries and from the whole world the documentation concerning the future acts of the pope and the Church, assembling it into dossiers that are sent to a confidential circuit of official recipients and only in small part to the press accredited to the Holy See.

Viganò has transferred SeDoc from the Vatican Radio building to the offices of the Vatican press center and has reinforced it with three prominent journalists from Vatican Radio itself, whom he has ordered to dedicate themselves from now on exclusively to this new task.

The impression is that Viganò wants to make this new version of SeDoc the task force of the future “content hub” that he has announced a number of times, a multilingual and multimedia portal for all the Vatican communication media, in the various forms of text, audio, video, photos, on the model - he has said - of the Walt Disney Company.

To train them for “teamwork in an omnimedia logic,” Viganò has signed up fifty of his employees in a course at the LUISS business school in Rome, the university of the Italian confraternity of industry.

The absolute protagonist of the future “content hub,” according to Viganò, will naturally have to be Francis, who “always pulls very hard.” And all the Vatican media will have to take a side seat to the pope, from the radio to the TV, from the official bulletins to “L'Osservatore Romano,” from the photographic service to the publishing house.

All of this under the command of a sole editorial direction that will be responsible, by statute, for “the orientation and coordination of all the editorial lines.”

An editorial direction that is held by none other than Viganò. But this is where the trouble starts.

Above all because the same statute of the newly created secretariat for communication assigns not to the editorial director but to to the secretariat of state the management of official communications and therefore, among others, of the press office as well.

And then because not only what remains of Vatican Radio but even more “L'Osservatore Romano” are doing all they can not to be absorbed into and annihilated by the “content hub” that is the dream of Viganò.

Who had predicted for the newspaper of the Holy See its reduction to an internal “bulletin.” While instead exactly the opposite is happening. "L'Osservatore Romano” has relaunched to great fanfare both its monthly supplement “Donne Chiesa Mondo” and the weekly edition in Italian, in the first case with cardinal secretary of state Pietro Parolin and in the second case with substitute secretary of state Angelo Becciu making the presentations, with Viganò sitting silently in the audience.

Without counting the launch of a new weekly edition of “L'Osservatore Romano” for Argentina, directed by the Protestant Marcelo Figueroa, a longstanding friend of Jorge Mario Bergoglio.

Nor does there seem to be any obstacle to this expansion in the roughly 6 million euro deficit that weighs every year on the Vatican newspaper. For its women’s supplement it has found a generous contributor in the Poste Italiane.

In short, the secretariat of state does not at all want to give Viganò and the secretariat for communication control over the Vatican media.

And then there is a third center of power, which is at home at Santa Marta.

Francis and his entourage are in fact the focal point of a strange website, called “Il Sismografo,” which is not officially part of the Vatican media but navigates it with great ease. It is directed by the Chilean Luis Badilla, a former journalist of Vatican Radio, who not only selects and reposts every day a large number of articles concerning the Church that have come out in the media all over the world, often alternating them with his polemical commentaries against the real or presumed opponents of the pope, but also furnishes exclusive previews and documents clearly fished out of confidential material from SeDoc.

And finally there is “La Civiltà Cattolica,” the historic magazine of the Rome Jesuits, which has a statutory connection with the Holy See and has become the most authoritative spokesman for Pope Francis.

In celebrating at the beginning of this month its 4000th issue, “La Civiltà Cattolica” has created four new monthly editions, in English, French, Spanish, and Korean.

So the Jesuits may indeed have lost control of Vatican Radio, of which Lombardi was the last historic director. But with the twinning of Bergoglio and “La Civiltà Cattolica” directed by Fr. Antonio Spadaro they continue to be more than ever at the summit of Church communication.