In the newest issue of Foreign Policy, there’s a profile of Sandro Magister, known to us through his articles on this website. It’s fairly short, not available online, and written, interestingly enough by Stacey Meichtry, who works with John Allen in Rome. What’s interesting about that is that Meichtry highlights the irony of Magister (A professor of contemporary church history at the University of Urbino), whom, as he describes it, advocates a "muscular papacy" writing for a very liberal journal.  The comparison is not exact, of course, but the phenomenon of liberal publications hosting Vaticanisti who are willing to be fair (or even, in the case of Magister, implicitly supportive) to Benedict and even the Curial way of doing things, even as they dig for insight, is something to think about. Just one snippet:

Among the most reliable and revered vaticanisti is Sandro Magister, who covers the Vatican for L’espresso, an influential Italian newsweekly magazine with more than 600,000 readers. Magister is well regarded for both his acuity and his prolificacy. In addition to his print coverage, he writes a daily blog and a biweekly column for his Web site, www.chiesa.espressonline.it. Although L’espresso is generally regarded as an organ of Italy’s churchwary left (its rival is Panorama, a newsweekly owned by Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi’s media empire), Magister stands out because he typically leans more to the right in his editorial musings. His columns consistently advocate a muscular papacythat practices realpolitik abroad. He defends Catholicism’s identity from precisely the same cultural and political influences that define L’espresso: support for abortion rights, stem-cell research, religious pluralism, and a strict separation between church and state.

Big old head’s up and hat tip to Vatican Watcher on this one.