The Vatican Diaries by John Thavis was just released. I actually pre-ordered it on my Kindle and waited with baited breath for it to arrive. Well sort of. I forgot about until I happened to go to my home page on the Kindle and see that it had arrived. Anyway, with the abdication of Pope Benedict XVI and now being in the interregnum period waiting for the Elector Cardinals to convene the conclave, I was really primed to read an in depth analysis of the Vatican. And this book was heralded as being really good so I dug in with relish!
John Thavis was the bureau chief for the Catholic News Service for many years, so he really knows the Vatican. He writes really well and tells lots of interesting and humorous and eye-opening anecdotes about the goings on in the Vatican. He writes fairly objectively, though I think he was better at this in the first half of the book. The second half takes on the issues of homosexuality, the sex abuse scandals, the condom/AIDS controversy, etc. There I think he shows that he tends to be like many in the media and he can't quite restrain his own bias. At one point, for instance, he is talking about how Pope Benedict translated the new CCC into Latin (it wasn't originally written in Latin) and changed the wording when talking about homosexuality as being an intrinsic disorder to objectively disordered. Then Thavis comes up with the line that this makes it seem like the person is defective in God's eyes. I thought that was a really unfair and overreaching jump there. There were occasional digs like that throughout this portion of the book. For the most he is pretty dispassionate in his reporting.
The Vatican is a truly complex place. Centuries old customs along with the huge, inevitable gap between the spiritual and moral focus and having to interact with a decidedly unspiritual and immoral world, makes for a lot of disconnects. From dealing with its own employees and trying to create parking space to grappling with homosexual scandals within the Roman Curiae, the Vatican will always be in the business of damage control. It is a huge organization and it is a wonder it can function at all at times! Lots and lots of politics at play and suddenly shifting scenarios on issues that have moved at a glacial pace for years, make things very cumbersome. While Thavis travelled with both Pope John Paul II and Benedict XVI, and was privy to a lot of information, neither pope seems especially coherent as Thavis describes them. And Thavis is pretty critical of Pope Benedict. He doesn't seemed to have warmed to him at all, finding fault with his quiet reserve and introverted ways of handling things.
One impression I got from this book is how a reporters' job actually skews his ability to report what is going on. For instance Thavis talks about how wildly popular JPII was and how much of a show he put on all the time, so aware of how to play the media. You get the impression that Thavis thought JPII liked it a little too much. But then he complains bitterly about Pope Benedict being too quiet and scholarly and 'afraid of the world' because he is an intellectual, moral theology professor and not Mr. Media-friendly. I guess you can't win for losing. Thavis is always looking for a sound bite, a story, a hook so he can get people's attention. This leads to oversimplifying and downright just misunderstanding the subtleties at play when talking about some topic that is complex and profound. You simply can't cover things adequately and get it into a short article to file with your newspaper. As much as we need reporters to disseminate information, they are also a huge part of the problem because they often are long on repeating canards and platitudes and short on intelligent analysis. I am not condemning Thavis, he seems to really know his stuff, but as he recounts how the press covered different events, you can see the media's shortcomings illustrated. And you can see how his need for a story is at odds with what is really important to the Church.
I read this book in a couple of days. I did find it really quite interesting, especially when Thavis talks about Puis XII or when he tells stories of Father Reginald Foster the Latinist.
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