A Vatican watcher’s hour of fame

Even for most of the world’s estimated 1 billion Catholics, the monthly magazine Inside the Vatican could easily be considered a little too inside baseball.

But with the recent death of Pope John Paul II, the magazine’s editor has suddenly been vaulted from obscure scribe without a TV to internationally televised expert. Over the past week, U.S.-born but Rome-based Robert Moynihan has been anointed an official talking head, helping viewers understand papal succession and the funeral rituals of the Catholic Church.

Like other media experts of the minute on abstruse or specialized topics (tsunamis, for example), Moynihan marvels at the power of the tube over the pen. His reach has grown from about 13,000 readers, primarily in the United States and Canada, to untold millions around the world. His intense two-week period of fame will culminate today with the pope’s funeral.

“When you get on TV and they start firing questions at you and you have to sit looking into a camera where there is nothing at all -- it’s like looking into the abyss of nothingness,” Moynihan said during a phone interview from Rome. “I’m just a writer. I’m really not that used to it.

“All these other guys on television are tanned, with perfect white teeth,” he continued. “I feel like the guy who goes home at night, looks in the mirror and sees a piece of spinach in his teeth and realizes he’s been walking around like that all day. I wish I could go on radio.”

Since the pontiff’s death, Moynihan said, he’s been getting about two hours of sleep a night. The days and nights have been consumed with putting together a special issue of the magazine -- due out in about a week -- and his many television appearances, particularly on CNN, but also on Fox News and the CBC, Canada’s national public TV station.

“There’s a lot of crap out there about the church,” said Moynihan, whose magazine takes pride in its editorial independence from the church. “I’m trying to offer something authentic and something that isn’t trite.”

Last week, Moynihan told CNN audiences: “What struck me is the pope was reaching out toward that level that all of us hope is there, that kind of level of dignity, we call it transcendent, we call it divine, we call it God, something that makes us different from animals, something that makes us different from what we can be at our worst. And the pope was living that, was preaching that, and he died preaching that.”

The magazine, which has a small editorial staff and enjoys regular contributions from religious scholars, church officials and even the pope, confronts a wide range of topics of particular interest to Roman Catholics, Moynihan said. Among other things, the March issue of Inside the Vatican helped break the story about the pope’s declining health, reexamined the controversy around the Shroud of Turin and featured a Talmudic scholar’s thoughts about the trial of Jesus.

The upcoming special issue, however, a “sober retrospective” of the pope’s life, will be mostly photographs.

“We have the sense people want to meditate on this,” said Moynihan, who founded the magazine in 1993 and was once banned by the Vatican press office for six months for publishing an article questioning the timing of an honor for a church figure. “Part of the idea of the magazine is to get away from the sound bites and rapid-fire imagery of our day, which I think contribute to the overall spiritual problems of our times.”