Former Journalist Serves as ‘Papal Spin Doctor’ : Media: Some reporters say spokesman makes Vatican more open. Others still compare its secrecy to Kremlin’s.

Joaquin Navarro-Valls has the perfect resume for a job that requires him to deal with aggressive, inquisitive journalists from around the world on behalf of an intellectual, somewhat mystical religious leader. Navarro is Catholic, multilingual, a former foreign correspondent--and a psychiatrist.

He is the first professional newsman to be the director of the Vatican press office--in effect, Pope John Paul II’s public relations man, the “papal spin doctor,” in the words of Matthias Frei of the BBC. His predecessors were all priests who “really didn’t have a clue about what we were,” says Wilton Wynn, who was based in Rome for Time magazine for 17 years, the last six as bureau chief, before his retirement in 1985.

Navarro, who worked eight years for a Spanish newspaper, understands the skeptical mind-set, as well as the headlines, deadlines and other imperatives that drive journalists, although his news management techniques and the traditional secrecy of the Vatican sometimes frustrate reporters.

Fluent in five languages, Navarro is able to speak with many correspondents in their native tongue--and to turn Pope-ese into journalese.

E. J. Dionne, a Washington Post columnist, remembers flying to Africa with the Pope a decade ago as the New York Times correspondent in Rome. The Pope’s speeches that day were heavily religious, Dionne says, and reporters, “accustomed to covering the Pope in terms of what his message is on politics or sex, especially . . . didn’t know what to make of them.”

Dionne says he and the late Don A. Schanche, then the Los Angeles Times correspondent in Rome, asked Navarro, “What do you make of these speeches?”

“Well,” he answered, “I believe that if you read them carefully, what you will see is that the Pope is offering the leaders of these countries an implicit pact, that if they respect human rights . . . and freedom of religion, the Vatican is prepared to work with them to ensure that Third World countries get the help they need.”

Navarro’s “implicit pact” appeared in the first paragraph of the next day’s stories in both papers.

Having served two terms as president of the Foreign Press Assn. in Rome, Navarro is as respected journalistically as he is knowledgeable in the Byzantine ways of the Vatican. He also has a dry sense of humor. When asked if his 14 years as a psychiatrist are helpful in dealing with the media, he deadpanned, “I don’t see any difference between journalism and psychiatry.”

Navarro, 57, is bespectacled and wavy-haired, compact of build and serious of mien, as befits a man with a “hot line” telephone on his desk, connecting him directly to the 264th successor to the throne of St. Peter, the Supreme Pontiff of the 960-million-member Roman Catholic Church.

Most correspondents say Navarro makes a tough job somewhat easier. He holds media briefings, provides advance texts of important papal statements and answers questions about his boss when he can. These have long been routine activities for press secretaries elsewhere, but they were unprecedented in the Vatican, which did not even have a press office until the middle of this century.

“For the first time in Vatican history, (a press spokesman) . . . is a counselor for the Pope regarding media,” says Bruno Bartoloni, Vatican correspondent since 1963 for Agence France-Presse, the French news service. “Information flows up now, not just down.”

Luigi Accattoli, Vatican correspondent since 1975 for the Italian newspaper Corriere della Sera, says Navarro “interprets what the Pope says, and he’s authorized to give his opinions.”

Navarro says that even he is “surprised . . . by the extreme confidence” the Pope invests in him.

“I never receive any indication from the Pope, ‘Don’t say (this) to the journalists,’ ” Navarro says.

Of course, the Pope probably knows he doesn’t have to give Navarro such directives. Navarro is, by nature, discreet and circumspect, and he belongs to a Catholic sect, Opus Dei, that is well-known for its secretive ways.

Indeed, Navarro does not win unanimous plaudits from the 300 reporters from 50 countries accredited to the Vatican.

Reporters who covered the Pope before Navarro took charge of the press office in 1984 generally think more highly of him than do newer reporters in Rome, especially Americans, who may be accustomed to the more open press operations of U.S. politicians.

Saying that the Vatican’s media relations are better under Navarro is “like saying, ‘Gosh, things sure were better in 1000 AD than they were in the Stone Age,’ ” says John Moody, Rome correspondent for Time from 1992 to 1994.

Even Cardinal Pio Laghi, the Vatican’s first emissary (papal nuncio) to the United States in 1990 and now prefect of the Congregation for Catholic Education, acknowledges that some officials in the church must share the blame for the unfavorable coverage it often receives.

“Sometimes we are . . . not open enough to the press,” Laghi says. Just as reporters sometimes don’t have “enough knowledge . . . the real background,” so the Vatican sometimes suffers from . . . “I don’t want to say ‘mistrust’ but not enough confidence” to give reporters all they need to write their stories.

Moreover, just as John Paul II is criticized by some for having centralized church authority more than ever in the Vatican, so Navarro is criticized for having tried to “channel all news about the Vatican through his office,” in the words of David Willey, Rome correspondent for the BBC.

Reporters say that some Vatican officials who used to speak directly to them now refer all questions to Navarro. That pleases Navarro, who says he conducted a study of coverage of “activities of the Holy See and the Pope” shortly after he took over and found that only 20% of the stories were “based on information released by my office.”

It was “complete chaos,” he says; stories were too reliant on unnamed or uninformed sources.

When Navarro repeated the study in 1991, after he had been running the press office for seven years, he says he found that 83% of the Vatican stories worldwide were “based on information released by this office.”

Press secretaries everywhere would envy that degree of control.

“As in any institution, Navarro is doing the job he’s paid to do, putting the corporate spin on stories,” says Philip Pullella, who has covered the Vatican for 10 years for the London-based Reuters news agency.

Other Vatican correspondents are less charitable.

“It seems to me that one of the main functions of the Vatican press office is to prevent undesirable news (from) reaching the outside world, rather than to actually inform the world about what is happening,” Willey says.

Just as British reporters are generally more critical than most others in their stories on the Pope, so they tend to be more critical in their evaluation of Navarro.

“There is a strong current of anti-Pope feeling that runs very strongly in Britain,” Willey says. This hostility dates at least to 1532, when King Henry VIII broke Britain’s ties to the Roman Catholic Church and founded the Church of England.

A story by Robert Graham and Paul Betts in the Financial Times of London last December was a typical example of the sharp-edged papal coverage sometimes found in the British media.

The story, headlined “Twilight Crusade of an Obdurate Pope,” described John Paul as “autocratic,” “reactionary,” “an absolutist” (twice), “uncompromising” (twice) and accused him of “intolerance” and “authoritarianism” and of being “vulnerable to criticism for being obstinately out of touch.”

But many reporters--British or not, Catholic or not--are critical of the Vatican and, at times, of Navarro. Clearly, for all Navarro’s journalistic professionalism and welcome reforms, the Vatican is still by no means as media-friendly as, say, the National Football League during Super Bowl week.

The Vatican has historically been an institution in which mystery and secrecy seem almost as important as faith and charity.

“It’s hard to find a place more labor-intensive for a reporter than the Vatican; it takes four times longer to report a story here than in (Washington) D.C.,” says Greg Burke, who writes for Time and other publications.

It’s especially difficult to cover someone as “remote” as the Pope, who’s “always being filtered to you through a spokesman” and who uses such arcane, abstract language, which is “not easily translated into journalistic articles,” says Graham, Rome bureau chief for the Financial Times of London.

Indeed, after reading the Pope’s recent bestseller, “Crossing the Threshold of Hope,” University of Chicago professor Martin Marty said, “I’ve been in theology for 40 years, and I haven’t the faintest idea what most of these pages mean.”

David Remnick, former Moscow correspondent for the Washington Post and winner of a Pulitzer Prize last year for his book “Lenin’s Tomb: The Last Days of the Soviet Empire,” spent two weeks in Rome last year researching what he hoped would be a profile of the Pope for the New Yorker.

Remnick wound up writing a somewhat different story about the Pope and the papacy because a personal profile “just wasn’t possible.” Not only couldn’t Remnick get an interview with the Pope, “I couldn’t even get to see his flack (Navarro),” he says.

For most reporters, the only opportunity to question the Pope comes when he travels. He and Navarro will wander back to the press section of the papal plane, usually at the beginning of a trip, and the Pope will answer a few questions for 15 or 20 minutes.

Reporters seem to genuinely respect and like John Paul, whatever they may think of his views. They say there is little, if any, of the personal denigration that reporters routinely exchange about virtually any other leader they cover.

Apart from the brief airborne “press conferences,” however, the Pope grants virtually no media interviews (although Tad Szulc, former longtime foreign correspondent for the New York Times, did spend about six hours speaking with John Paul II while preparing the massive papal biography that was just published).

Jas Gawronski, former longtime foreign correspondent for Italian state television, interviewed the Pope for two hours in late 1993 and wrote about it for La Stampa, the Italian newspaper. But Gawronski, like Szulc, comes from the Pope’s native Poland and speaks fluent Polish. Gawronski is prominent in his own right, having been a member of the European Parliament for 13 years and having served, most recently, as press spokesman for Silvio Berlusconi when Berlusconi was Italy’s prime minister.

But for mere mortals, the Pope is above the mundane give-and-take of an interview.

When Time was about to name John Paul II “Man of the Year” late in 1994, the magazine requested a formal interview.

No.

How about submitting written questions and getting written answers?

No.

Five Time reporters and editors from Rome, Paris and New York finally settled for an informal, 10-minute “audience” (during which time he teased them about the magazine’s having chosen both Adolf Hitler and Joseph Stalin as “Man of the Year” in previous years).

“Some real high-ranking Vatican officials say the Pope is already too accessible,” says Time’s Burke. Even though the Pope is a political leader--the ruler of a tiny, 108-acre city-state--he is primarily a religious leader, and many in the Vatican think he could better preserve his moral and spiritual authority if he maintained a bit more distance . . . and mystery.

Burke says some Vatican officials don’t want him to “come down to the level of a mere American President.”

Most Vatican reporters have never even considered asking for an interview with the Pope.

Pullella of Reuters compares covering the Pope to covering the monarchy in England. In both cases, he says, everyone in the press corps knows the rules and the limits, so he’s never bothered to ask for an interview with the Pope.

Even Accattoli of the Corriere, who for 25 years has covered the Vatican for Italy’s most prestigious newspaper and is described in Szulc’s book as “the best writer on Vatican matters,” says he’s never thought about a papal interview.

“The Pope is unique in journalism,” says David Crumm, religion writer for the Detroit Free Press. “It’s very, very strange to have some figure that we’re all writing about regularly and yet we can never talk to the guy. . . . We’re a bit like Sovietologists or Sinologists during the Cold War . . . trying to figure out what’s going on inside . . . by these obscure references in public documents and little movements you see in public appearances.”

Many reporters with experience in both Rome and Moscow echo Crumm’s analogy.

“In terms of getting reliable, hard inside material, I would say it is every bit as difficult (to cover the Vatican) as the Brezhnev Kremlin,” says Moody of Time.

As a result--and in an effort to impress their editors and get good play for their stories--he says Western reporters increasingly cover the Vatican as if it were strictly a political story, aggressively looking for “the dirty little secrets . . . the financial scam . . . the internal warfare on policy statements.”

But reporters who devote their energies to pursuing such stories “miss the bigger story, which is how policy actually was developed,” Moody says.

Marco Politi, who covered the Vatican for 16 years for the Italian newspaper Il Messaggero and then went to Moscow for the paper for six years, says the Vatican, like the Kremlin during the Cold War, is a “closed institution,” in which the role of the news media is not “fully understood. It is always a concession they make when they tell you something; it is not that you have the right to inform the public.”

Politi, who returned to Rome three years ago to cover the Vatican for La Repubblica, says Vatican officials still indulge in “useless secrecy” about routine things for which secrecy is unnecessary.

He says that after Glasnost, “it’s tougher to cover the Vatican” than the Kremlin.

Or, as Graham of the Financial Times, puts it, after the lifting of the Iron Curtain, “Vaticanology is the last Kremlinology in the world.”

That’s why so much coverage of the Pope is based on unidentified sources or reportorial speculation.

The Boston Globe published a typical example of this in October. In discussing various aspects of John Paul’s papacy, the story quoted “one longtime Vatican observer,” “one priest,” “a Vatican insider,” “close associates” and another “Vatican insider” (or maybe it was the same “Vatican insider”). The story also said, “. . . speculation has mounted that the Pope suffers from colon cancer, Parkinson’s disease or a blood-borne virus.”

A month later, a USA Today Magazine story on the history of priestly celibacy speculated, “So, perhaps, even the Pope is prepared to admit that mandatory celibacy has seen its day.”

The last sentence of the story said, “Only God knows.”

And he doesn’t give interviews either.

Church officials are very protective of the Pope and the Vatican. Time’s Burke says one “important source” in the Vatican refused to speak to him again after he wrote a story for the National Catholic Register in which he said that the Vatican was losing the battle for public opinion on artificial birth control, in part because Planned Parenthood had a “sharp, media-savvy” public relations operation while the Vatican was far less accessible to reporters.

The Pope is clearly very aware of what the media say about him.

The Vatican secretary of state’s office prepares a thick package of news summaries and clippings from the international media, delivered to the papal apartments about 9 a.m. every day. Navarro’s office provides a “press review” for its own use, and that, too, goes to the Pope every morning.

Other Vatican offices prepare their own press briefings for the Pope, dealing with specialized areas of coverage, Navarro says, so “It is not unusual that I . . . say, ‘Holy Father, there is this piece of news I think is relevant’ (and he says) ‘Oh, yes, I read it already.’ ”

The Pope is probably far better informed, in fact, than are most of the reporters who cover him.

Amid all the cutbacks in the recent recession, many news organizations significantly reduced their foreign press corps. The Associated Press, Cable News Network, the Los Angeles Times and the New York Times are the only U.S. general-interest news organizations that still have full-time reporters based in Rome, covering the Vatican.

Most reporters who write about the Vatican are free-lancers who “don’t know the background,” says Father Andrew Greeley, an author and sociologist at the University of Chicago.

Paid by the story, these writers rarely do thorough jobs on complex subjects; they want to finish each story quickly and go on to the next assignment--and the next paycheck. There are usually plenty of both; the Pope is a figure of worldwide interest, and--like another Italian institution, the Mafia--he is a “cottage industry” for Vatican-based free-lancers.

“There’s a lot of people who want to claim expertise on the Vatican who are one step above gossip columnists--and maybe in some cases, one step below gossip columnists,” says Msgr. Francis Maniscalco, director of the office of media relations for the United States Catholic Conference.

But even full-time reporters in Rome don’t always have a lot of time to spend on the Vatican. William Montalbano of the Los Angeles Times, for example, also covers Italy, Spain, Portugal, Greece and Turkey.

Moreover, newspapers tend to move their correspondents every three or four years--usually just when they acquire enough expertise and sources to do their job well.

That’s a problem for reporters in every foreign country, but it’s especially acute in the Vatican, given its secretive nature and the lack of knowledge most reporters have about religion.

“The first two or three years, you run the risk of being stupid every day,” says Marco Tosati, who’s covered the Vatican for La Stampa since 1982.

Reporters who get high marks from their colleagues and Vatican officials alike tend to be the few who have been in Rome awhile--Victor Simpson of Associated Press (22 years), Pullella of Reuters (10 years), Montalbano (eight years).

Interestingly, unlike Simpson and Pullella, Montalbano says he’s found “no appetite whatever on the working editor level at the Los Angeles Times for Vatican copy” (a charge that Times editors deny). But Montalbano personally finds the Pope an interesting story, and given the freedom that The Times traditionally allows its better reporters, he has written more than 200 papal stories.

Montalbano and Pullella are both Catholic. Does that help them do a better job? Probably, although as Montalbano says, a good reporter would acquire the necessary knowledge and insight independently if he didn’t already have it.

On the other hand, Willey of the BBC says the AP’s Simpson does a good job reporting on the Vatican, in part because he’s Jewish and, hence, an outsider. Simpson agrees.

Theoretically, a reporter’s religion--like his or her race--should be irrelevant. But theory and reality are not always the same. Indeed, Dionne of the Post, who describes himself as a “relatively liberal Catholic” in disagreement with John Paul on most major sexual issues, says that when he covered the Vatican for the New York Times from 1984 to 1986, “the more Catholic I felt . . . the more likely I was to be critical” of the Pope.

The more he approached the Vatican story “not as a Catholic,” the easier it was to cover it dispassionately, Dionne says. “I thought that within the analysis that the Pope had of the church, there was a very rational case for proceeding as he was proceeding.”

As a result, Dionne says, he’s “ended up more sympathetic to this Pope than (most) people of my general disposition.”

Whether critical or sympathetic--or, most often, neither--Dionne did a superb job in the Vatican, where his coverage is still praised by journalists and church officials alike as the best of any American reporter in at least the last two decades.

A few longtime Vatican correspondents for Italian newspapers are also highly regarded by their peers and sources, but at least one of them--Politi of La Repubblica--thinks some reporters stay on the Vatican beat too long.

This is especially true of those reporters who are actually based in the Vatican press office and cover the Vatican full-time, as opposed to those based elsewhere in Rome, who cover the Vatican as part of broader responsibilities.

Like beat reporters everywhere, the “Vaticanisti”--as they’re known in Rome--risk losing their critical distance, becoming “part of a sort of journalistic priesthood,” Politi says.

That clearly hasn’t happened to him. He has often been critical of the Pope, and in a recent commentary, he wrote that John Paul’s latest encyclical is too “negative” and places Catholicism on a path that “does not seem to have many chances to build a relationship with the modern world.”

Politi says newspapers should have “specialists” assigned to the Vatican. But some non-Italian reporters, lacking Politi’s expertise and his experience, rely too heavily on local news media, a common failing among foreign correspondents everywhere.

In Italy, especially, that can be a big mistake.

Italian television avoids controversial issues involving the Pope and takes a “generally obsequious approach,” Politi says.

Father Jose de Vera, director of the press and information office for the Jesuit Curia in Rome, says that in his year in Rome, he’s been “surprised . . . by how much the Pope is pampered by the (Italian) media.”

Other Church officials say some Italian newspapers are overly critical of the Pope.

Both may be right.

Italian newspapers--like their counterparts elsewhere in Europe--are more partisan and opinionated in their news columns than are mainstream U.S. newspapers.

Moreover, because the Pope is such a big story in Italy, reporters assigned to the Vatican are often expected to write a story virtually every day, and that leads them to “stretch things, distort reality,” says Simpson of the Associated Press.

As in the United States, even the best Italian newspapers are increasingly prone to printing rumors, gossip and other presumably entertaining “news” in an effort to attract and keep readers in a competitive media environment.

Italian journalists “should do less color, less entertainment, and use more facts,” says the Corriere’s Accattoli, but editors want “more colorful things.”

Stories based on no identifiable sources are a particular problem in the Italian press. So are quotations.

“We have this very bad habit of putting between quotation marks things that were never said, especially in headlines,” says Rodolfo Brancoli, a columnist for the Corriere della Sera and the author of a book on differences between the press in Italy and the United States.

Gawronski says direct quotations in Italian newspapers “don’t mean someone actually said what’s between the quotation marks, only that there is a general feeling he might have said it.

“If a foreign reporter doesn’t know that and steals a quotation from an Italian newspaper, he might be pretty wrong,” Gawronski says.

That’s just what happened two years ago, when John Paul II wrote a letter to Archbishop Vinko Puljic of Sarajevo, urging that the church help care for and find homes for children born to women raped in war-torn Bosnia.

One Italian newspaper began its story about the letter by quoting the Pope as having urged the women of Bosnia, “Don’t Abort!” That may have been a legitimate interpretation of part of what the Pope said, but the word abort (or abortion ) didn’t appear in the letter.

Foreign reporters based in Rome--especially those from other European countries--sometimes mistakenly disseminate the errors of the Italian press, as happened with the Pope’s letter to Puljic.

The better reporters learn to avoid that trap.

As on any beat, good reporters try to develop their own sources, what Politi calls their own “personal window” on the Vatican.

For many reporters that “personal window” is often a cardinal or other Vatican official who came to Rome from the reporter’s native country and may be prevailed upon to help a countryman.

But a cardinal has much less incentive to confide in a hometown reporter than does, say, a congressman in Washington. The cardinal doesn’t have to curry favor with journalists or voters; his job is his for life, unless he does something truly terrible.

Next: Media savvy in the Vatican, ignorance and indifference in the media.

Jacci Cenacveira of The Times editorial library assisted with the research for this series.

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About This Series

The Times today presents the second in a four-part series examining how the media cover the Pope.

* Sunday: A propensity for sensationalism, conflict and oversimplification and an ignorance of (and often hostility toward) religion in general and Catholicism in particular have skewed media coverage of the 16-year papacy of John Paul II.

* TODAY: The Pope’s spin doctor is a former foreign correspondent and a psychiatrist who has made things much easier for reporters. But many say the Vatican still is as closed and secretive as the Cold War Kremlin, and journalists assigned there cannot interview the Pope himself.

* Tuesday: Religion gets short shrift in the mainstream U.S. media, but Catholicism gets a disproportionate share of that small pie, in part because it’s great theater and in part because it has a single, controversial leader who knows how to use (and manipulate) the media.

* Wednesday: Many in the media thought the Pope was dying when he began to look frail and sickly last year. Now he has resumed his global travels, determined to live at least until 2000. Why were the media so quick to assume the worst?