Confounding the press

Benedict has an exquisite thought process and writing style, and his message is simple yet complex. Just look at Deus Caritas Est.

But he also has a rather elegant knack for confounding those who try to manage his message.

Struggling newspaper that it is, with a market of a few hundred copies and a loss of 4.6 million euros in 2005, it passed almost unnoticed that “L’Osservatore Romano” didn’t show up on the newsstands in Rome on the afternoon of Tuesday, November 7.

The copies were printed. But at the last minute, the order came from the Vatican secretariat of state to toss them back into the pulper. Because they were wrong straight from the title placed on the front page. It was dedicated to an address by the pope to the Swiss bishops, which in reality was never delivered.

But a great many people realized what happened that day by consulting the Vatican’s online bulletin, which is visited by millions throughout the world.

At midday, there appeared on the Holy See’s website a speech presented as having been delivered, in French, by Benedict XVI. By mid-afternoon, the speech wasn’t there anymore. And that evening, a communiqué appeared stating that the text had not been read out loud, but was a draft going back to the beginning of 2005 and to the previous pope, and that Benedict XVI had made other remarks to the Swiss bishops, improvising in German. The transcript of the actual address would be released the following day.

What happened here?

Pope Joseph Ratzinger doesn’t use a computer – he writes in his miniscule handwriting the addresses and homilies most important to him, or dictates them, or improvises without providing anything written ahead of time. To transcribe, translate, and bring his words to an audience as vast as the world is not easy, but it is what Benedict XVI expects from the Vatican communication apparatus. It is an essential objective for a pope who is a “doctor of the Church.”

But with John Paul II, the office for papal addresses mostly worked the other way around, especially during his last years. They provided the pope with massive doses of ready-made addresses, which Karol Wojtyla sent back with just a few handwritten adjustments.

The address was ready for the Swiss bishops, received on their “ad limina” visit in February of 2005, when the pope was already in very poor health. But it remained in the drawer on account of the circumstances.

So, when Benedict XVI was preparing to meet these same bishops again in Rome, between November 7 and 9 of this year, to cap off the visit that had been delayed until then, the team responsible for papal addresses fished the old text out of the drawer and sent it back up to the pope’s residence.

This was done on Sunday, November 5. But Benedict XVI wasn’t happy with the document. “It was too much of an imposition, too much of an ultimatum, and it presupposed a discussion that hadn’t yet taken place,” bishop Pier Giacomo Grampa of the Swiss diocese of Lugano explained later. The pope sent the address back without corrections: it was to be scrapped.

But the team that received it understood the contrary, that it had been approved. And they sent it along to the press office and to “L’Osservatore Romano.”

It was the Swiss bishops, on the afternoon of November 7, who were startled when they compared the words they heard in person from the pope with the ones that had been disseminated by the Vatican offices. They asked for, and obtained, the immediate withdrawal of the bogus text.

Benedict XVI met with them again two days later, on the 9th, again speaking spontaneously in German, and confessed to them that he had “not found the time to write.” He added: “I present myself to you in this poverty”.

The paradox of Ratzinger is that the richness and profundity of his addresses are striking even in comparison with the high standards of the popes of the past century, but at the same time he is left “poor”– and alone – precisely by those who should be gathering and amplifying his message.

They’d better polish up their skills. He’s about to go to Turkey, and the world’s media are still grappling with what he said in Regensburg.