Free All the Pope's Men by Jr. John L. Allen

succeed John O’Connor as the archbishop of New York. Yet according to Cardinal Jorge Mejia, former secretary of the Congregation for Bishops, between 80 and 90 percent of the time the first candidate on the
terna
prepared by the nuncio ends up getting the job. This makes the nuncio’s role often a decisive one.
    VATICAN COMMUNICATIONS
    Like any major international organization, the Holy See has a variety of communications tools for getting its message out. These include a semiofficial daily newspaper, L’Osservatore Romano, which some wags jokingly compare to the old
Pravda
in the Soviet Union because it is filled with pictures and speeches by the Great Leader and because it muffles criticism. (On August 19, 1914, L’Osservatore published a stinging editorial denouncing unnamed commentators who had suggested the previous day that Pope Pius X had a cold. Less than twenty-four hours later, Pius was dead.) L’Osservatore Romano is published daily in Italian, and weekly in English, Spanish, Portuguese, German, and French, with a monthly edition in Polish.
    The Jesuit order puts out a twice-monthly journal whose pages are reviewed by the Secretariat of State prior to publication, called
La
Civiltà Cattolica
. Vatican Radio is the largest single employer within the Holy See, boasting a workforce of more than four hundred people, including two hundred journalists from sixty-one different countries, producing programs every day in forty languages—including, quixotically enough, Esperanto. It is also a major drain on Vatican finances, since it sells no advertising and accepts no corporate sponsorship as other forms of “commercial-free" radio have learned to do. The Vatican TV Center produces a weekly news program in several languages and provides live television feed of papal events to the world’s networks. The Vatican website has gone from a simple one-page Christmas greeting in 1995 to one of the most-visited sites on the Internet, with offerings from the Vatican museums and access to the full texts of papal documents as well as documents of most dicasteries. Archbishop Claudio Maria Celli, the Vatican official who oversees the site, said in a June 2003 press conference that it makes an attractive target for hackers and is subject to some thirty attacks a week, mostly from the United States. But to date, he said, none have succeeded. The culprits are not always teenage War Games–style prodigies: Celli said using sophisticated cyber-tracking software, the Vatican was once able to establish that a particular would-be hacker was a member of the Franciscan order. They elected not to prosecute: “We thought maybe he was just bored by the heat," Celli said, a joking reference to the torridly hot European summer of 2003.
    The Press Office of the Holy See produces a daily bulletin, along with other documentation for journalists, and holds periodic press conferences in conjunction with the issuance of documents or in anticipation of major Vatican events. The director and vice-director of the press office are frequently called upon to make statements for journalists when stories about the Vatican arise, and Navarro-Valls was thus easily one of the most visible of all Vatican officials during the pontificate of John Paul II. When the Pope traveled, it was Navarro-Valls who spoke on his behalf to the world’s press corps accompanying John Paul on the papal plane. Finally, the Pontifical Council for Social Communications provides a moral and theological perspective on the world of mass communications, as well as coordinating the activities of broadcast media in covering the Vatican.
    The Holy See’s media operation provides it with an impressive range of tools to communicate with the outside world. The trouble is making sure that all these outlets are on the same page, a challenge that will only grow as twenty-four-hours-a-day, seven-days-a-week, or 24/7, instantaneous news cycles become ever more voracious in their appetite for