Vatican visitors’ passes go electronic
Huge crowds and the reality of living in the post-9/11 world have led the Vatican to take several steps over the years to increase security for the pope and for all who work within the Vatican walls.
The latest step is an electronic one: Visitors seeking access to the 109-acre state through the St. Anne Gate, the principal business entrance to the Vatican, now have their names registered on a computer and are given a visitor’s pass with a magnetic strip on the back.
By waving the card in front of a scanner, a little gate opens and the pass-bearer enters into Vatican City State. At the same time, a little signal is sent to the computer, registering the time. When the pass is returned, the computer logs the time again.
One type of pass is good only for access to the Vatican pharmacy and is given only if the person presents a prescription from a doctor.
The other pass is used for people who have an appointment at any other Vatican office, but it is accompanied by the same square slip of paper the Vatican used for passes before it entered the electronic age. The paper says precisely which office the guest is allowed to visit.
Vatican police officers and – once you approach the Apostolic Palace – Swiss Guards stationed throughout Vatican City ask to see the paper pass to ensure the visitor gets directly to the right office. Arriving very early, then taking a wander through the Vatican gardens is frowned upon, especially on sunny afternoons when Pope Benedict XVI may be out taking a stroll.
Jesuit General Congregation set to end Thursday
After two months of work, the Jesuit General Congregation will end Thursday evening with a Mass of Thanksgiving at Rome’s Church of the Gesu, where Jesuit founder St. Ignatius of Loyola is buried.
Before then, the 200+ delegates expect to debate and finalize two documents: one on collaboration with others and another on Jesuit identity. A document on the internal governance of the Society of Jesus was approved Friday and another on the meaning of obedience was adopted Monday. While the General Congregation Web site has provided brief introductions to the documents, they were not made public immediately.
On the same site, members of the General Congregation communications team have posted the complete transcript of their long interview with Father Adolfo Nicolas, who was elected superior general of the Society of Jesus Jan. 19. The Jesuit communicators even asked him about being elected to such a big job at the age of 71. Father Nicolas said that on Day Three of the four-day, one-on-one conversations that precede the election of a Jesuit superior, his confreres starting asking him about his health. “I have never been in any community where Jesuits were so concerned with it,” he said. That’s when he started realizing people were considering him a serious candidate.
The General Congregation began with the delegates voting to accept the resignation of Father Peter-Hans Kolvenbach as superior general. Father Nicolas and the other members of the General Congregation formally thanked him for his service Saturday, presenting him with a long ovation and an icon. Before the end of March, Father Kolvenbach will return to Lebanon where he worked for many years.
Inside the latest Israeli-Vatican meeting
The papal nuncio to Israel, Archbishop Antonio Franco, has shed more light on the Vatican-Israeli meeting last December, which examined taxation and legal issues for the church in the Holy Land.
In his interview with the online edition of Terra Santa magazine, Archbishop Franco sounded optimistic about reaching an agreement with Israel — someday — but let it be known the church cannot lock the minority Christian community into an untenable position.
He also cautioned that a papal trip to Israel is unlikely before there is some progress on these questions and at least some movement in Israeli-Palestinian negotiations.
Terra Santa, a Italian-based publication of the Franciscan Custody of the Holy Land, is now running an English-language page with translations of some of its articles.
PHOTO: Archbishop Antonio Franco, center, the Vatican’s ambassador to Israel, attends the opening ceremony of the annual Holocaust Remembrance Day at the Yad Vashem Holocaust Memorial in Jerusalem last April. (CNS/Reuters)
Naming a Vatican courtyard after Armenia’s patron saint
Under a beautifully sunny sky Friday, Pope Benedict XVI presided over the formal naming of the St. Gregory the Illuminator Courtyard on the north side of St. Peter’s Basilica.
The courtyard, between the basilica’s exterior wall and a booth selling tickets to reach St. Peter’s famous dome, is named after the patron saint of Armenia, the evangelizer who brought Christianity to the country in 301.
St. Gregory is no stranger to the courtyard now named after him. In January 2005, Pope John Paul II presided over the unveiling of a statue of the bearded and mitered saint in a niche of the basilica facing the courtyard.
Unveiling the stone tablet with the courtyard’s new name on it, Pope Benedict was joined by officials from St. Peter’s Basilica, from Vatican City’s central government and Armenian Catholic Patriarch Nerses Bedros XIX Tarmouni of Cilicia.
The pope told the group, “More than 17 centuries ago, this great saint made the Armenians a Christian people,” the first nation to declare itself officially Christian.
By calling the saint “the illuminator,” Pope Benedict said, Armenians recognize that he led the people from darkness to the light of Christ, but also that through his teaching and preaching he shed light on the truth about human life.
PHOTO: Pope John Paul II blesses the statue of St. Gregory the Illuminator which was placed in a niche on the northern exterior wall of St. Peter’s Basilica in this January 2005 file photo. Pope Benedict XVI officially named the little courtyard which the statue faces after the saint Feb. 22. (CNS/Catholic Press Photo)
Vatican phone book slims down
An updated Vatican phone book was finally released this month. Strangely enough, it looked thinner than the last one.
In fact, the 2008 elenco telefonico lost 61 pages, almost 30 percent, from its previous edition. What did they cut out? The answer was apparent to anyone who opened it: most of the names were gone from the listing of Roman Curia offices.
Instead, the phone book now provides names and numbers only for the top three officials of each department. The rest of the Curia did a disappearing act.
Naturally, journalists were upset. We spend a lot of time thumbing through the phone book when we need to contact potential sources, and this seemed to be saying: Don’t bother.
And what about Vatican employees who need to exchange information with other departments? In a world not known for cross-communication, the change made it even harder to navigate the labyrinthine Vatican bureaucracy.
It also meant the six nuns at the Vatican switchboard are going to be busier, as more and more callers go through the Vatican’s main +39.06.6982 telephone number.
I phoned the head of the Vatican telephone office, Brother Andrea Mellini (who is listed in the new book) and asked him why the change. He said it was a decision of superiors who wanted the phone book to be “more anonymous.”
Brother Mellini pointed out that numbers for most Vatican personnel continue to be listed in an alphabetical name-only section. So if you know precisely who you’re looking for, it’s still possible to reach him or her. But the phone book will no longer serve as a workforce directory for the Roman Curia.
If there are a lot of complaints, maybe they’ll return to the old format, Brother Mellini said. But he thinks the simplification could be a good thing, because it will make it easier to produce a new phone book each year.
That would be nice. Before this year’s edition, the last time a Vatican phone book came out was in 2004.
Grand Master R.I.P.
The grand master of the Knights of Malta, Fra Andrew Willoughby Ninian Bertie, died in Rome on Thursday. His passing means that Rome will host a new election — the Knights call it a conclave — sometime soon.
For those who met him, Bertie seemed one of a kind. Like all the Knights’ grand masters, he could trace back at least 200 years a noble bloodline on both sides of his family. But he didn’t lord it over anyone; he spent some of his afternoons helping out at Rome clinics, emptying bedpans and doing other volunteer tasks.
When Bertie was elected in 1988, Greg Erlandson — now publisher of Our Sunday Visitor — covered the event for the CNS Rome bureau. Greg’s lead described Bertie as a “58-year-old blue-blooded celibate judo expert,” which was somehow fitting. The man could not be easily categorized.
In 2002, I did a piece on the Knights and their headquarters in downtown Rome. The building had a prime location on Via Condotti but the décor inside was definitely faded grandeur. I later figured out that instead of spending money to refurbish their own offices, they had financed a state-of-the-art public clinic in the lower part of the building.
Bertie was modest and affable, with a dry wit. I began my interview by asking him how one addresses a grand master, and I’ll never forget his almost apologetic answer: “I suppose the easiest is, ‘Your Highness.’”
At that time, Bertie was annoyed — in the way one might be annoyed by flies at a picnic — by the counterfeit orders that were springing up on the Internet, with names and symbols similar to the Sovereign Military Order of the Knights of Malta. Some were selling memberships and titles.
“They’re an absolute pain,” he said.
The Knights — the real ones — have since upgraded their own U.S. and international Web sites, and they’re a good place to check for news about the upcoming choice of a new grand master.
PHOTO: Knights of Malta Grand Master Fra Andrew W.N. Bertie stands next to a painting of himself in more traditional costume at the Knights’ headquarters in Rome in this 2002 file photo. The lay Catholic religious organization is the world’s oldest chivalric order, existing for 900 years. (CNS/Nancy Wiechec)
Using ‘Big Brother’ to explain the Jesuit election process
Father Carlo Casalone, an Italian delegate to the Jesuit General Congregation, said it was interesting that “Grande Fratello,” the Italian version of the televison program “Big Brother,” had its season premiere Jan. 21, just two days after the Jesuits elected their new superior general, Father Adolfo Nicolas.
The Jesuit election was preceded by four days of prayer and “murmuratio,” private one-on-one conversations in which one voting delegate could ask another voting delegate concrete questions about the practical abilities and spiritual gifts of a third Jesuit. There were no candidates and no campaigning. A Jesuit could not volunteer to speak to others on behalf of his favorite. Each delegate could only ask concrete questions about another or respond to concrete questions about another.
Father Casalone told reporters Friday that the election process ”was the opposite of the communication style used by ‘Grande Fratello.’ If you go to the ‘Grande Fratello’ Web site, you can spy on the house 24 hours a day. The private sphere is placed in the public sphere indiscriminately.”
The Jesuit election process, on the other hand, takes a large group of men (217 voting delegates) from around the world and tries to help them identify the one person who can best lead almost 20,000 Jesuits working in universities, parishes, schools, social centers, refugee camps and literally hundreds of other settings.
The Jesuit method, he said, “involves getting to know a person profoundly while maintaining discretion and privacy,” the very thing “Big Brother” and its clones is designed to destroy.
And although the entire General Congregation is surrounded by a bit of that same discretion, the Jesuits recognize that their members around the world, their collaborators and their friends want to know something about what is going on inside. So, Jesuit Fathers Daniel Villanueva and Pierre Belanger have come to the rescue. The two recently revamped the General Congregation Web site and keep it updated, including with comments from those watching from the outside. Father Villanueva, a Spaniard, is finishing his degree at the Weston School of Theology in Massachusetts and Father Belanger is based in Montreal where he directs JESCOM-Canada.
A makeover and a scoop
The Vatican newspaper is sporting a cleaner, more dynamic look, and it’s getting positive reviews.
L’Osservatore Romano’s new editor, Giovanni Maria Vian, promised changes when Pope Benedict appointed him last fall. The newspaper was badly in need of a makeover, and its circulation had fallen to life-support levels. The new layout features more photos, more color and less debris floating around the pages. (Some are reporting that color is appearing in the paper “for the first time ever,” which simply is not true.)
Not that L’Osservatore has turned into a tabloid. It’s still six columns wide, and unfolding it on a bus or train remains a challenge. The newspaper’s age is indicated in Roman numerals, and as always the masthead carries its mottos in Latin: “Unicuique suum” and “Non praevalebunt.”
How’s that again? The first, which means “To each his own,” refers to a principle of civil justice. The second, “They will not prevail,” comes from the Gospel and “they” refers to the powers of evil.
As for content, L’Osservatore readers have also noticed a change. There’s more international news, fewer evergreen pieces about the church and even some scoops.
Its pages also feature many more articles written by women — a specific request of Pope Benedict, according to Vian.
The newspaper continues the weird practice of dating each issue one day ahead. That used to lead Vatican officials to joke that with the Osservatore you could get “yesterday’s news tomorrow.”
But that’s no longer true. Just today, for example, L’Osservatore was the first Vatican news outlet to carry the pope’s reformulated text of the 1962 Missal’s Good Friday prayer for Jews. For the first time in memory, Vatican employees rushed out to buy the newspaper.
PHOTO: Two men read L’Osservatore Romano at a newspaper stand outside St. Peter’s Square at the Vatican Feb. 2. (CNS/Reuters)