The Holy See, the Catholic Church’s insular governing body, has hired Fox News correspondent Greg Burke as a senior communications advisor as it copes with ongoing crises and other PR issues.
The move comes after a simmering Vatican scandal involving leaked church documents – dubbed "Vatileaks" by the European press – reached a boiling point last month with the arrest of Pope Benedict XVI’s personal butler
Burke, who covers Europe and the Middle East for Fox News based in Rome and was a Time correspondent in the city for 10 years, is a member of the church’s conservative lay group Opus Dei. He told Reuters, which he worked for earlier in his career, that he turned down overtures from the Vatican twice before agreeing to take the post last week.
Burke reporting from Madrid June 7 for Fox News.
“Anything that can show an openness and willingness to meet the press is a step in the right direction,” Burke told the Daily Beast. “But more than an attempt to humanize it, I would say it’s an attempt to modernize it. It’s going to be a slow process. The Vatican is not going to change in a day.”
He reports to Vatican deputy secretary of state, Archbishop Angelo Beccui.
Father Federico Lombardi is the Vatican’s on-the-record spokesman. He told a press conference May 27 that, “it is painful to see such a negative image” of the Holy See, adding the scandal “put trust in the church and the Holy See to the test.”
On Burke, Lombardi told the Associated Press in Vatican City that the correspondent will "integrate communications issues within the Vatican's top administrative office, the secretariat of state, and will help handle its relations with the Holy See press office and other Vatican communications offices."
The pope's butler, Paolo Gabriele, meanwhile, faces up to 30 years in prison, charged with aggravated theft for allegedly passing Vatican documents to an Italian journalist. But some Vatican watchers and media have speculated that Gabriele is a fall guy and likely did not act alone.
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Responses:
Bill Huey, Strategic Communications (6/25):
No, Greg, the Vatican is not going to change in a day, or in a thousand years, for that matter. But this is proof positive that only old people watch Fox News.