Media
“Peace, the poor and mercy are neither social categories nor a political programme: they are topics that shall be approached within their specific semantic relevance, if we want to avoid the risk of heretical communication”. Mgr. Dario Edoardo Viganò, Prefect of the Secretariat for Communications, said this during a conference on “Christianity in Pope Francis’ time”, focussing on Bergoglio’s communication style. The Prefect maintained that today there is a “heretical reading” of the current Pontificate as the headlines of some newspapers show, which depict the Pontiff as the “communist Pope”, or an alleged supporter of liberation theology, or a revolutionary when it comes to banks and migrants, or as being “out of control” in carrying out his Magisterium. In other words, there is always a distance in the media between “what the Pope said and says and what is said about the Pope”. According to Mgr. Viganò, there is always a looming risk of “heretical readings”, which do not take into account the intrinsic “quality” of Pope Francis’ way of communicating: for Pope Francis, quality means “sincerity and no gossiping”. For those who communicate the Pope, Mgr. Viganò concluded, this implies the need “not to say what one believes is false, that is, not to say what is not supported by appropriate evidence, not to talk nonsense”.
