ROME — On Feb. 11, the day Benedict XVI stunned the world with the announcement that he would resign from the papacy, Giovanni Maria Vian was at home, getting ready.
It was not surprising that the editor of L’Osservatore Romano, the Vatican’s newspaper, should have been among the handful of people who had advance notice. Sworn to secrecy, Mr. Vian told his staff to listen carefully to Vatican radio that morning.
Since his editors understand Latin, they immediately caught the gist of the pope's speech (so did a reporter for Ansa, the Italian news agency, who broke the story). Within hours, L’Osservatore hit the stands with the news, carefully packaged, and an editorial by Mr. Vian, which said Benedict had made his decision last spring after an exhausting trip to Cuba and Mexico.
“That was a scoop,” Mr. Vian said cheerfully, during an interview in his modest office on a Vatican side street, on a chilly evening after the rest of the staff had gone home.
Since then, Mr. Vian — a scholar whose doctoral thesis was on the writings of early Church leaders — has been calmly navigating the choppy waves of one of the biggest news stories of the year, as it veers from speculation about the next pope to rumors of more scandals in the Roman Catholic Church.
If Mr. Vian remains composed amid all the turmoil, it is because his eight-page newspaper, which comes out in Italian six days a week and weekly in several other languages, is hardly expected to follow the steady drip of slippery stories about gay lobbies, blackmail and dirty Vatican bank accounts.
“There’s nothing new,” he said. “With these articles, one should be very careful. It is normal that they come out now. On the eve of the election of a new pope, there are new dynamics afoot.”
The Vatican, he said, “is a small world, and there are different rumors, different voices. Many times, they are lies. It is very human, all this, but in the end, it all will serve to purify the church — the whole church, not just the Vatican.”
In Mr. Vian’s view, Benedict — who once said he had greeted his election with the dread of someone mounting the steps of the guillotine — had envisioned an early departure right from the start. But the pope, a frail 85, stayed on for almost eight years, Mr. Vian said.
“He doesn’t run away from the wolves,” he said.
So who are the wolves? Mr. Vian was at first surprisingly literal. “The wolves?” he asked. “The most obvious are those who persecute Christians.” There are other wolves, in Christian countries, who are intolerant of believers, he added.
But, he continued, “'there are also wolves within the church, and inside all humans.”
Mr. Vian, ever the scholar, swiveled back and forth between his bookshelf and his computer, pulling out references, from the Roman poet Ovid, and St. Paul’s Letter to the Romans, to the perpetual struggle between good and evil.
Then he dug out, from a pile of newspapers, a lengthy discourse by Benedict himself, made without notes on Feb. 8, in which he spoke of “serious, dangerous omissions,” “errors” and a church that in some places “is dying because of the sins of men and women.”
Mr. Vian, who has run articles on the church's sex abuse scandals, believes that the VatiLeaks scandal, involving the theft of papal documents, was itself a sign that Benedict had succeeded in bringing about greater transparency, prompting a counterreaction. “The papacy of Benedict XVI has been very effective,” he said.
Five years ago, when he was named editor of L’Osservatore, Mr. Vian was hailed as an intellectual journalist, well suited to serve an intellectual pope, who was now his publisher. But his interests range beyond ecclesiastical subjects to include Tintin, the comic-book boy-hero whose posters hang in his office.
Mr. Vian was no stranger to the Vatican. The son of the secretary of the Vatican library, from a family that had ties to previous popes, he grew up within its walls, and played with his brothers in its gardens.
To his father’s dismay, Mr. Vian dabbled in journalism, writing for the Italian Catholic newspaper Avvenire and L’Osservatore, even as he pursued his doctorate and worked on the Italian encyclopedia.
“A rather strange career,” he said, “but it has helped prepare me, to take a critical approach, to respect history and facts. Writing for the encyclopedia is rigorous and sober: You can’t mix in ideology.”
When he took over in the fall of 2007, he wasted no time making changes to the paper. He expanded international news coverage while playing down Italian politics, devoted more attention to economic subjects and widened the cultural scope to include modern phenomena like the Beatles and James Bond. Non-Catholic commentators, including a Jewish columnist, are regularly invited to publish.
He added two women to the paper’s staff — the first in its 152-year history — and started publishing a monthly supplement on “Women, the Church, the World.”
Speaking of Benedict’s resignation, Mr. Vian did not hide his regret. “I am very attached to this pope,” he said. “He’s a real gentleman, a humble, nice man — in other words, a man of God.”
During the last two weeks, Mr. Vian has published a stream of articles on Benedict’s papacy from around the world, including one by a ranking member of the Russian Orthodox Church and one by Shimon Perez, the Israeli president.
The views have been, not surprisingly, uniformly positive. “That’s normal,” said Mr. Vian, asking whether other editors would publish articles critical of their publishers.
Letter from Europe: Observing the Vatican From Within
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Letter from Europe: Observing the Vatican From Within
