Circular Firing Squad

Diogenes has a good analysis of the (continuing) Public Relations mess at the Vatican. See: The Circular Firing Squad. As he says:
May I offer a word of advice, to any beleaguered Vatican official who might be ready to chip in with his own opinion?

Don't.

This mess was the result of a communications plan that was badly conceived, badly designed, and badly executed. It won't be solved by ad hoc announcements that have all those same characteristics.

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The minefield of clerical titles in modern Britain

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Yesterday, the BBC website carried an article headed "Catholic cardinals urge end of 'homosexual agenda'" reporting on the open letter of Cardinals Burke and Brandmüller in advance of the “Protection of Minors in the Church” Meeting. (The full text of the excellent open letter can be found at the National Catholic Register "Cardinals Burke and Brandmüller: ‘End the Conspiracy of Silence’".)

The BBC article is typical of the soft, understated and deniable, but unmistakable spin which makes our licence-fee-favoured national broadcaster so irritating. There is also a gaffe in which one paragraph refers to Cardinal Burke as "Mr Burke", leading to this exchange on Twitter this afternoon:
Doubt it’s a deliberate insult. The average @bbc reporter probably has no idea that a cardinal is a Catholic priest. https://t.co/jXDxthVSQF — Damian Thompson (@holysmoke) February 21, 2019I agree with Damian - although the BBC chose to run the article, it is fairly …
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The "McCarrick Test" and its implications for the papacy

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The intervention of CNN's Delia Gallagher at the Vatican Press Conference last Friday has been circulated widely on social media. There were other good, challenging questions asked during the summit, notably by Sandro Magister, Philip Pullella, Inés San Martín, and Diane Montagna, but Gallagher's seemed to me the most devastating (at 2'10" in the above video). She recalled the meeting of US Cardinals in Rome in 2002 concerning child abuse and pointed out that the reassuring face of the crisis at that time, promising that there would be zero tolerance and an end to cover-up, was Cardinal Theodore McCarrick, whom we now know to have been an abuser himself, and who has recently been dismissed from the clerical state as a result. Gallagher asked Cardinals Cupich and O'Malley how the Cardinals were now holding each other accountable and how they would assure the American people that what happened then is now going to change.

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"Celebration" and the pitfalls of language

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The value of learning by heart

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