This morning, for Leo XIV’s birthday, Vatican News and the latest social media geniuses recruited by Massimiliano Menichetti decided to treat us to yet another demonstration of what now passes for institutional communication at Palazzo Pio.
People finally began to notice the damage Emanuela Campanile was doing when she managed to publish the false news of the white smoke. She had been given that role despite a fairly obvious lack of professional competence, but this is precisely the sort of profile that seems to reassure figures such as Andrea Tornielli and Massimiliano Menichetti: people who do not cause trouble, question nothing and, above all, never threaten to outshine anyone.
Then, of course, when Campanile published that tweet, Tornielli gave her a proper dressing-down. The only problem was that the tweet was simply the predictable product of a system he himself had helped to build and promote. But consistency has never exactly been a core competency at Palazzo Pio.
Apparently, we have now moved on to Plus++.
To celebrate Leo XIV’s seventy-first birthday, several posts appeared this morning across the various Instagram accounts linked to Vatican News. They differed not only in format, but also in graphic style, language and quality. The result is something that has become increasingly familiar under the social media operation coordinated by Massimiliano Menichetti: a flood of content from which it is remarkably difficult to detect anything resembling a coherent editorial line.
In theory, that editorial line should be guaranteed by editorial director Andrea Tornielli. In practice, looking through the accounts, one gets the impression that everyone simply does whatever takes their fancy, rather like a parish media team in which someone has just discovered Canva. Then again, Tornielli appears to be far too busy playing the shrew with priests driven out of their dioceses, condemned to spend their unhappy lives wandering around Rome while being buried under lawsuits, rather than getting on with his job.
Among the material published for the Pope’s birthday, one post is particularly impressive — at least if the aim was to show just how little effort is required to produce something destined for the official accounts of the Vatican media. A photograph, a pink gradient bearing little relation either to the occasion or to the visual identity of the “brand”, a few bits of text scattered around it, and that is apparently job done. With the tools available today, including artificial intelligence, a reasonably curious twelve-year-old could probably have produced something tidier during morning break.
The most interesting part is that, on those very same accounts, other graphics dedicated to Leo XIV’s birthday were also published: cleaner, more coherent and simply more professional. Which makes the comparison all the more brutal.
So one very simple question remains: who comes up with this stuff? Who approves it? Because the problem is not merely that someone can cobble together an awkward graphic from Canva elements in five minutes. The real problem begins when that graphic makes it through every internal stage, is deemed suitable for the communications of the Holy See, and ends up online alongside work that is plainly better.
At that point, the real masterpiece is something else altogether: the incompetence of people who are paid very handsomely to produce work of this standard and who today, with a certain unintended irony, are even celebrating the restoration of a system that will allow them to earn even more.
Fr.A.L.
Silere non possum
