Vatican City: With Pope Benedict XVI’s impending resignation creating shockwaves around the world, the Vatican’s official daily L’Osservatore Romano is now the most closely watched newspaper in Rome - with its blend of an official Vatican line and a modern outlook.
The paper flew off the shelves with a scoop within hours of the pope’s historic announcement last week - a report revealing the 85-year-old made his mind up during a tiring trip to Mexico and Cuba last year.
The article was signed simply “gmv” - the initials of Giovanni Maria Vian, a cheerful 60-year-old historian who has been editor at the paper since 2007 and is one of Benedict’s biggest admirers.
While it contains plenty of reports on contemporary culture and social issues, the paper more or less remains the mouthpiece of the Vatican - updated for the 21st century and an intellectual pope.
This unique newspaper, which has survived Italian unification in the 19th century, and a fascist dictatorship and two World Wars in the 20th, celebrated its 150th anniversary in 2011.
Since Vian took over in 2007, it has been undergoing a discreet modernisation, encouraged by a pope with a strong interest in mass communication.
“Every day we aim to protect our peculiarity while getting closer to normal standards for a newspaper like using a simple language so that everyone can understand,” Vian said in an interview.
The editor spoke in an office decorated with illustrations from the Tintin comic books “The Black Island” and “King Ottokar’s Sceptre”.
Tintin was “a Catholic hero,” Vian said.
The famously quiffed fictional reporter followed the same “clear line” of Joseph Ratzinger’s theological thought and Vian said he set an example he wants to follow at his newspaper.
In a somewhat drab building within the Vatican walls, Osservatore Romano’s offices are made up of a series of grey corridors leading to newsrooms bristling with brand-new computers.
As well as the Italian daily edition, the newspaper is published in weekly editions in eight languages including Malayalam, the language used by Christians living in the state of Kerala in southern India.
Starting last year, it also has a monthly women’s insert entitled “Women, Church, World”.
Italian news reports, which used to be extensive, have been cut and mixed with other foreign news.
The paper also publishes somewhat unconventional reviews of books and films, as well as weighty historical treatises drawing on 2,000 years of Christianity.
One the paper’s favourite debates is the role of pope Pius XII during World War II and his attitude towards Jews being persecuted by Nazi Germany.
