Vatican Newspaper of Record Best Read for What It Doesn't Record (original) (raw)
Business|Vatican Newspaper of Record Best Read for What It Doesn't Record
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- Dec. 23, 1996
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December 23, 1996
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Section D, Page
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Like Pravda, the Kremlin mouthpiece of old, the Vatican's semiofficial newspaper L'Osservatore Romano is best read for the news it does not print, or buries in a mountain of text, tucks onto a back page or otherwise tries to avoid.
When a Vatican spokesman suggested to reporters last fall that Pope John Paul II would undergo another operation, L'Osservatore simply ignored his comments. When Fidel Castro arrived in Rome to meet the Pope with a motorcade carrying machine guns through St. Peter's Square, L'Osservatore kept its coverage to a discreet photo of the two men seated at a desk, accompanied by the exact text of their statements.
Now that Pravda has lost its role of spokesman for a government, L'Osservatore Romano could probably be better compared to the Congressional Record -- a source of official documents but with a specific purpose. Its pages are filled with articles on culture, religion and Italian and world affairs, and they are kept clean of any dissent. Even controversial pronouncements by the Roman Catholic Church are missing. When the Vatican recently warned a Sri Lankan theologian that his theories had set him on a course toward excommunication, nothing about it appeared in L'Osservatore.
As defined by its editors, L'Osservatore is the Vatican's window on the world, a way to disseminate not only the Pope's official statements and documents but also unofficial church views on a range of issues. The staff includes 25 journalists, editors and reporters, as well as numerous contributors on cultural issues.
L'Osservatore Romano has to live by certain rules. Its front page must carry the Pope's daily schedule. His speeches are given automatic banner headlines, and the date in the top right corner is always the day after publication.
''It is strange,'' conceded a top editor, who insisted on anonymity in discussing the paper's date as well as other quirks, ''but it is tradition. It has always been like that; it was born like that.''
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