Vatican Spokesman, Deputy Resign Suddenly
December 31, 2018 9:31 AM
FILE - Vatican spokesman Greg Burke (R) and his deputy, Paloma Garcia Ovejero, talk with Pope Francis during a meeting at the Vatican July 11, 2016. (Osservatore Romano/Handout via Reuters)
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VATICAN CITY —
The Vatican spokesman, Greg Burke, and
his deputy resigned suddenly Monday amid an overhaul of the Vatican's
communications operations that coincides with a troubled period in Pope
Francis' papacy.
In a tweet, Burke said he and his deputy, Paloma Garcia Ovejero, had resigned
effective Jan. 1. Francis accepted the resignation Monday, the Vatican said in
a statement.
gAt this time of transition in Vatican communications, we think it's best the
Holy Father is completely free to assemble a new team,h Burke wrote.
He and Garcia both thanked the pope. gA stage is ending. Thank you for these
two and a half years,h Garcia tweeted.
Francis named a longtime member of the Vatican's communications operations,
Alessandro Gisotti, as an interim replacement.
The pope has recently overhauled the Vatican's media operations for the second
time by ousting the longtime editor of the Vatican newspaper L'Osservatore
Romano and naming a new director of editorial content for all Vatican
media, the Italian journalist Andrea Tornielli.
The resignations clearly took the new team by surprise.
The head of Vatican communications, Paolo Ruffini, said he had learned of the
decision by Burke and Garcia and respected it. He praised their professionalism
and said he had full confidence in Gisotti, who had been a longtime journalist
with Vatican Radio and more recently had been head of social media for the
Vatican.
gThe year ahead is full of important appointments that will require maximum
communications efforts,h Ruffini said in a statement.
It was perhaps a reference to Francis' high-stakes summit on preventing clergy
sex abuse in February, as well as his multiple foreign trips planned for 2019:
Panama, United Arab Emirates, Morocco, Bulgaria and Macedonia in the first half
of the year, and rumored trips to Madagascar and Japan in the second half.
Francis also has to deal with continued fallout from the clergy abuse scandal,
in Chile, the U.S. and beyond. The next year will likely see the outcome of a
canonical investigation into ex-Cardinal Theodore McCarrick, accused of
sexually abusing minors and adult seminarians, as well as the results of a
Vatican investigation into McCarrick's rise through church ranks.
Burke, then a Fox TV correspondent in Rome, was hired as a communications
adviser for the Vatican's secretariat of state in 2012. At the time, the papacy
of Pope Benedict XVI had suffered a series of communications blunders, and it
was thought that Burke could provide guidance.
In 2015, Burke was named deputy spokesman under the Rev. Federico Lombardi, an
Italian Jesuit.
When Lombardi retired in 2016, Burke became main spokesman and was joined by
Garcia, the first woman to ever hold the position of deputy. Garcia had been
the Vatican correspondent for the Cadena Cope, the Spanish broadcaster.
Associated Press