Vatican City - Monday 13 July 2026 will be remembered in the annals of the Dicastery for Communication as a day of remarkable consistency. That day’s edition of L’Osservatore Romano devoted a double-page spread to cryptocurrencies, offering readers a catalogue of errors on which we have already reported. Then, at 12.22 p.m., a farewell email signed “Paolo e P. Lucio” arrived in employees’ inboxes. Its authors were Paolo Ruffini, the outgoing Prefect, and Monsignor Lucio Adrián Ruiz, the outgoing Secretary.
In just a few lines, the message managed to distil almost everything that has gone wrong in recent years: shaky Italian, the spiritualisation of every conceivable circumstance and the now proverbial inability to proofread a text before pressing “Send”. It was an uneasy mixture of the Focolare-inflected language so dear to “Paolo” and Lucio’s uncertain command of Italian.
The background, for those coming to the story now
Leo XIV has decided to turn the page at the top of Vatican communications. Ruffini has been shown the door after years of institutional delirium at Palazzo Pio. Ruiz is moving to the Dicastery for the Service of Charity: an appointment which, as we have explained, provides a technical solution for someone who has not yet reached retirement age and therefore cannot simply be thanked and escorted to the exit.
Montserrat Alvarado takes over as the new Prefect. While awaiting the formal handover, the two outgoing officials have therefore hurried to offer employees their own interpretation of events. It is an interpretation, as we shall see, wrapped from beginning to end in the language of Providence.
In the corridors of Piazza Pia, meanwhile, more than one bottle of sparkling wine has already been put on ice - and not in anticipation of a toast to the arrival of “fruitful times”.
A farewell written in shaky Italian
The email opens with “il nomale scorrere della vita”. Even the most basic spellchecker would have objected: nomale is a typo for normale.
It continues with “Ma, per che viviamo nelle mani di Dio”. This is not correct Italian. The expression per che is a direct calque of the Spanish porque; in Italian it should be perché, written as one word and with an accent.
Then come the graces which “chiedono, specialmente dentro della Chiesa, da essere vissuti”. There are two errors in a single line. Dentro della Chiesa is incorrect: standard Italian requires dentro la Chiesa. Meanwhile, da essere vissutishould be di essere vissute, with the feminine plural vissute agreeing with grazie.
There is also “la missione che Lui ci da”, with the accent apparently left behind on the iPhone keyboard. The verb requires dà, with an accent, rather than the preposition da.
The closing formula, “Sperando trovarci presto”, has lost its preposition as well. Correct Italian would require Sperando di trovarci presto. Over all this reigns the random distribution of capital letters, scattered across the text like holy water: “la Volontà di Dio”, “le Mani di Dio”, “rendere Grazie”. It is as though the devotional orthography associated with Chiara Lubich might somehow compensate for defective syntax.
The real masterpiece, however, lies elsewhere. Employees are invited to a “Santa Mesa” at the Altar of the Chair. Mesa. The Dicastery that is supposed to communicate the Gospel “to the ends of the earth” in more than thirty languages has summoned its employees to a “Holy Table”. The word mesa means nothing in Italian; in Spanish, it means “table”. Add a kneeler and the set of liturgical furniture would be complete.
Neither the Prefect nor the Secretary appears to have reread the most important word in the entire email: the very reason for the invitation.
Tuesday 28 August - a date that does not exist
Then there is the date. The email says that the celebration will take place “prima di agosto” - before August - and, two lines later, schedules it for “martedì 28 agosto alle 9:00”: Tuesday 28 August at 9 a.m.
Before August, on 28 August. It would have to be one or the other, but in fact it is neither. In 2026, 28 August falls on a Friday. The date that falls on a Tuesday is 28 July.
The celebration will therefore take place on 28 July, and whoever wrote the email got the month wrong.
A minor detail, some may say. It is not. This is the official farewell invitation issued by the Prefect and Secretary of a dicastery of the Roman Curia - the Dicastery for Communication, no less - and it gives an impossible date. The same dicastery that has spent years proving unable to communicate the Pope’s words is now unable even to produce an accurate farewell email.
The theology of reassignment
The substance of the message, meanwhile, comes close to a treatise on mysticism applied to human resources. A change imposed from above, involving a Prefect who has been removed and a Secretary who has been reassigned, becomes “il tempo che il normale scorrere della vita va presentando a tutti”: “the time that the normal course of life goes on presenting to everyone”.
The replacement of the leadership is transfigured into a “chiamata e invio” - a “calling and sending forth”. Their departure is experienced “nella Volontà di Dio” - “in the Will of God” - amid “tempi fecondi”, “momenti di Grazia”, “nuove porte e nuove sfide”: “fruitful times”, “moments of Grace”, “new doors and new challenges”.
There is not a word about results. There is no assessment of their record and no concrete expression of thanks to those who have worked there over the years. There is only a layer of devotional language spread over a departure that many inside the Dicastery had been awaiting for some time.
The spiritualisation of the inevitable is an old literary genre in the Roman Curia. These lay officials have learnt it extremely well from a certain kind of cleric. When one cannot write, “we have been removed”, one writes, “God is sending us elsewhere”.
With respect: Providence governs history, but it is the Pope who signs the letters of dismissal.
A question of method
Some will object that an internal email is not an encyclical and that mistakes happen. That is true. But this is not an isolated typo. These are the Prefect and Secretary of the Dicastery for Communication: the two people who, for years, have borne responsibility for every word published by the Holy See. They are taking leave of their employees with a text that no editor would allow an intern to send out.
It is exactly the same failing that was on display in L’Osservatore Romano: nobody proofreads, nobody corrects and nobody checks. This is not bad luck. It is a method.
Care for language, in a dicastery created to communicate through language, has been the last of its concerns. What mattered were organisational charts, festivals and conferences on artificial intelligence. Spelling, evidently, did not.
When secret work is required to secure promotions and higher grades for loyalists, the attention to detail is obsessive. When it comes to written texts, everything is simply rushed through.
Montserrat Alvarado, who is now taking charge of this machine, will have a great deal to do. Her first task will be to resist the lenses through which someone at Palazzo Pio will try to make her view the Dicastery the moment she walks through the entrance, past the QR codes prominently displayed at the door - one of Andrea Tornielli’s many expensive and useless fetishes.
Fr.D.V. and M.P.
Silere non possum
