The Vatican press office is irate. It had hyped the publication of Pope Francis’s encyclical on the future of the planet, named - in Italian (actually medieval Umbrian) rather than the much more usual Latin - Laudato si’, the opening words of a canticle by St Francis of Assisi. Then its efforts, conducted in a manner that the most efficient PR firm might have been proud of, were undermined.
The underminer-in-chief was the veteran Vatican correspondent of the Italian newspaper L’Espresso, Sandro Magister. Four days before formal publication of the encyclical, presented to the world by an unusual line-up of a cardinal, an atheist and a Greek Orthodox metropolitan bishop, Magister published what he claimed was a draft, but which appears to have been an uncorrected proof copy. The errant journalist has had his credentials withdrawn by the Vatican press office. The punishment has divided his colleague Vaticanologists.
Whatever the rights and wrongs of such a draconian action, it seems certain that Magister’s publication was part of an ongoing campaign against the Bishop of Rome, as Francis likes to present himself. Much has been written about how dysfunctional the papal civil service, the Curia, appeared to be during the pontificate of Francis’s predecessor. Now the battle-lines are different, but the Curia still appears to be at war within itself, and Magister has openly espoused the side of those who are more resistant to the changes which, it is widely believed, the pope is hoping to introduce.
