Why covering the Vatican is a really tough reporting assignment

There was a moment during our live special coverage of Pope Leo's election that I will never forget. Leo, who up until that day was known as Cardinal Robert Provost, was addressing St. Peter's Square in Italian. It had been an open question of whether we would have a live translation. We didn't. So NPR's longtime Rome correspondent, Sylvia Paglioli, leapt into action. Peace be with all of you.

Sylvia Pajoli was a key part of NPR's coverage of the election of the first American pope. She's been a key part of NPR's Vatican coverage since the days of Pope John Paul II. A few days before the conclave began, I took a stroll through St. Peter's Square with someone that listeners have long viewed as one of the most iconic voices in NPR history.

We're about to go into the center of the square to try to have a little art history lesson. Majoli spent decades as NPR's Rome correspondent. In addition to having one of listeners' most beloved and recognizable outros, Sylvia Pajoli, NPR News, Rome. Pajoli helped establish the sound and standard for our news network. This week's reporter's notebook begins with an art history and architecture lesson.

We're standing here in the square, and this is the central visual of the Vatican, but also the setting has played a role in so many big ceremonial events that get international attention, papal funerals. installation masses, and it seems like the setting is as much of a story as what the cardinals and the popes are saying in the setting. Oh, absolutely. I'm not so sure if it would look half as exciting, half as dramatic.

without this incredible square, the basilica, which was partially designed by Michelangelo, then Bramante and many other architects. But most of all, I think it's this colonnade that really gives it this dramatic sort of embrace, this round elliptical shape that's almost like this arms are embracing. Pejoli covered all sorts of different stories over the years, including difficult, challenging ones like the ethnic conflicts in the Balkans in the 1990s.

But she says the Vatican was the most challenging. She wanted to take me to the middle of the square to look at that colonnade from a specific angle to illustrate that point. She guided us a few feet over and had me stand on a marble oval placed in the cobblestones just a few feet from the obelisk in the center of the square. We're here in the center of St. Peter's Square. My father first brought me here when I was about 12.

And he pointed this out to me. We're surrounded by the magnificent colonnade designed by the sculptor Bernini. We see four rows of columns that surround this elliptical square. Right now in the center, right near the ovalist, And from here we see only one column. Now that's a trompe d'oeil, an optical illusion. And optical illusions and shifting perspectives are some of the hallmarks of Baroque architecture. And Baroque is essentially the glorification of the Catholic Church's temporal power.

When I started covering the Vatican, I remembered my father's art history lesson, and I began to see it as a metaphor for the Vatican's opaque, sometimes secretive manner of presenting itself to the outside world, or at least to journalists.

Consider this. The Vatican is one of the oldest and most secretive institutions in the world, and covering the papacy of Pope Leo XIV will be a challenge for reporters. So today for our weekly Reporter's Notebook series, we will hear the tricks of the trade from one of the best to ever do. From NPR, I'm Scott Detrow. At a time of sound bites and short attention our show is all about the deep dive. We do long form interviews with people behind the best in film books. music and journalism.

Here are guests open up about their process and you've never heard before. Listen to the Fresh Air podcast from NPR. This is Fresh Air contributor Anne-Marie Baldonado. I talked with actor Cole Escola about their hit Broadway play, Oh Mary. Cole plays an unhinged alcoholic Mary Todd Lincoln, who's an aspiring cabaret performer. If that makes no sense, that's part of the point. You can find my interview on the Fresh Air podcast. on NPR's through line. Witnesses were ending up

How the hunt for gangster Al Capone launched the IRS to power. Find NPR's ThruLine wherever you get your podcasts. from NPR. So technically you are not supposed to record audio in the middle of the throngs of religious pilgrims in St. Peter's Square.

So after our sneaky art history lesson, Sylvia Pajoli and I headed back to our broadcast booth just off the square. I started our conversation by asking about a crucial part of any journalist's experience covering the Vatican. Sylvia, what was it like walking into the Vatican press office for the first time? Well, it was some 40 years ago, and... It has been renovated since then, but I have to describe to you what it was like in the early 1980s. The first thing you'd see

was a life-size sculpture against the wall of Christ crucified on a TV antenna. And I really didn't feel like that was a very encouraging sign about the... Wow, what a passive-aggressive statement. Or maybe not pass them at all. That's the way I joke at you. Now things have improved a lot over the years. There's been a much greater effort.

by the press office to hold press conferences with prelates and lay officials of the Vatican. But direct access to Vatican officials is not easy, especially for reporters who don't work for Catholic publications, for women reporters. and for reporters who don't work for well-known international publications and broadcast media. Which I guess was the position you found yourself in. NPR was not that very well-known here in Rome at that time.

Now, the best access is for the Vaticanisti. That's Italian for Vaticanists. For them it's a full-time beat, and they're experts at navigating the Vatican's formal and archaic bureaucracy, as well as they're really good at unearthing scoops in homilies and dense official documents.

I found that sometimes the best sources were not prelates, but the sort of behind-the-scenes people, secretaries, ushers, and people like that. And what about Vatican spokespeople? You mean Vatican spokesmen, because they are always men. The first real Vatican spokesman was the Spaniard Joaquin Navarroval. He was a combination spin doctor and a confidant of Pope John Paul II. And this was before the internet and social media, so he was in strong control of the message.

For example, in 1998, I attended a press conference that was very hastily organized hours after A member of the Swiss Guards apparently killed Lois Esterman, his commander, and his wife, and then also himself. Wow. Navarro Valls, who was a psychiatrist by training, asserted that the alleged killer was in a state of psychological turmoil. The investigation is being handled by a Vatican magistrate rather than being handed over to Italian authorities as is the usual practice.

But Navarro-Walls expressed certainty that the current working hypothesis is credible. And most probably the new data coming from the post-mortem will not change at all that reconstruction of the fact. I'm curious, did that final report follow his preview of what it would be? We never knew. We never found out really.

any of the real details of exactly what happened. It's one of the big mysteries surrounding the Vatican. So that's Pope John Paul II. He's followed by Pope Benedict XVI who, in terms of communication styles, was a very different pope. How was that reflected in the press office? Oh, he was very different. He was much less outgoing. Jean-Paul II had had some contact with reporters on the flights, but Benedict much, much, much less so. He would take a few questions prepared in advance.

His spokesman was Father Federico Lombardi, and Lombardi had to tackle many crises, most notably Benedict's remarks that suggested that the early spread of Islam had been accomplished through violence. Those remarks caused intense anger among Muslims and even death. And then there was Benedict's rehabilitation of a Holocaust-denying bishop.

that also caused an awful lot of uproar. Is it true that there were moments in some of these controversies where the reporters covering the Vatican seemed more hyper-aware of, oh, this is going to cause a big global problem than perhaps the Vatican or the Pope himself realized in the moment? Absolutely. In the case of Pope Benedict's remarks at Regensburg in Germany, we had the prepared remarks ahead of time. And the reporters read what he was about to say. He was quoting...

Somebody who had made these remarks centuries earlier, it was not his direct quote, but he was quoting somebody that said, made a statement that was very, very controversial in modern times in the Islamic world. And a bunch of reporters did go to the spokesman, Father Federico Lombardi, and suggested that maybe he might want to say something to the Pope.

And Lombardi said he could not, he would not approach him on that. And that caused a massive, massive scandal that in many ways Pope Benedict never fully recovered from. Not at all. There was that and there were others. He was really afflicted by many, many scandals of his time. So that brings us to Pope Francis, who you've noted was really his own spokesman in so many ways. Totally. He was absolutely his own spokesman. He often caught the Vatican press office off guard.

announcing reforms, appointments. He even set up his own interviews. And he gave a lot of interviews to Spanish reporters, but also to many others. He did TV interviews. Now one of the most interesting things Francis did was he engaged over several years in a public dialogue with a leading Italian newspaper editor. It was a fascinating intellectual exchange between the leader of the Catholic Church and a very staunch secular journalist.

Going back to that optical illusion that we saw a few minutes ago, you're taking me through the ways that the Vatican press office changed. I'm curious, Over the years, were there ways that you changed the way that you tried to cover this institution? I had to learn a lot about theology and religion. Yeah, I had to do a lot of research. Yeah, it was dense.

Sometimes it was very difficult. And you had to really learn how to interpret these very obscure language and dense theological statements. Did you enjoy the challenge of covering this, or was it at times frustrating, or both? Well, I think I had, there were some really great moments. I think when John Paul II went to Israel and it was in front of the Wailing Wall.

and he put a prayer in the crack. That was a very big event. As his motorcade wound through the narrow streets, Pope John Paul was welcomed to Nazareth by singing, drumming, and cheers. but the town was also filled with Israeli police and border guards, some in full riot gear. Another similar Before that was when Pope John Paul II visited the Rome synagogue. stood together in front of the Ark of the Torah at the beginning of the ceremony as the choir sang the Hallelujah.

There were tears in the eyes of many of the... It was the very first time in history that a Pope had entered a synagogue. That was a very... To be in these historical moments is very big. The other time was with Pope Francis. on the plain of Ur in Iraq. And the Pope sat there with Muslim, Christian, and Yazidi religious leaders. It started with recitations from the Gospel and from the Quran.

to be there you know we're in the land of abraham and to see catholic and islamic and religious leaders it was uh yeah it was pretty That is NPR's Sylvia Pedroly. Thank you so much for telling us about this. This episode was produced by Tyler Bartlom, Noah Caldwell, and Rick Rivers. by Courtney Dorning and Adam Rainey. Our executive producer is Sammy Yadigan. It's Consider This from NPR. I'm Scott Detrow.

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