Sandro Magister looks at some communications problems:
Context:
Pope Joseph Ratzinger doesn’t use a computer – he writes in his miniscule handwriting the addresses and homilies most important to him, or dictates them, or improvises without providing anything written ahead of time. To transcribe, translate, and bring his words to an audience as vast as the world is not easy, but it is what Benedict XVI expects from the Vatican communication apparatus. It is an essential objective for a pope who is a “doctor of the Church.”
But with John Paul II, the office for papal addresses mostly worked the other way around, especially during his last years. They provided the pope with massive doses of ready-made addresses, which Karol Wojtyla sent back with just a few handwritten adjustments.
He then looks at the Swiss bishops mishap, and then turns to the translation issue, and then to the apparent ever-present conflicts between State and the Press Office, which were, according to him, qute bad with Sodano and Navarro-Valles, and only slightly better under Bertone and Lombardi.
Not even the basic work of translation is functioning, even in a state as multilingual as the Vatican is.
For example, the French and Portuguese translations of the papal lecture in Regensburg on September 12 (4) – the most famous and extensively discussed document of this pontificate – appeared on the Vatican’s website 35 days later. The Spanish translation came after 43 days. The Arabic version, prepared by the secretariat of state in mid-September and immediately distributed in the chancelleries of Muslim countries, is still not available to the general public. There are still a few steps left before it can be brought to the online desk.
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