If L'Osservatore Romano, the Vatican's daily newspaper, were the only source of information about Roman Catholicism, the world might have a rather strange picture of the contemporary church. Students of Christianity would scarcely be aware, for example, that there had been any major differences between liberals and conservatives at the Second Vatican Council. They would assume that Pope Paul's encyclical Humanae Vitae had been almost universally acclaimed by the faithful. They would have no inkling that last month 40 of the church's best-known theologians issued a historic Magna Carta demanding greater intellectual freedom within the church.
Largely because of the widening gulf between the reality of Catholic turmoil and L'Osservatore Romano's version of it, the paper has lately come in for some strong and pointed criticism. The editor of an Australian Catholic paper recently branded L'Osservatore "the Pravda of the Vatican." An editorial in the Tablet, Britain's leading Catholic weekly, complained about L'Osservatore's myopic coverage of the debate over birth control. "It is doing a great disservice to truth and to the health of the church," said the Tablet, "to ignore or gainsay this controversy, or, even worse, to convey the opposite impression that all is well."
In the Drawer. Critics all complain that because L'Osservatore is widely regarded as the "voice of the church" its interpretations give outsiders a distinctly one-sided impression of Catholic opinion. Actually, the "official" journal is the Acta Apostolicae Sedis, a sort of Vatican City Congressional Record in which major papal pronouncements must be printed before they are considered promulgated. Although L'Osservatore is owned by the Holy See and supervised by the Vatican Secretariat of State, it is classed as only "semiofficial." Material in L'Osservatore is deemed official in only three cases: when it is listed under the column "Nostre Informazioni [Our Information]," which reports the Pope's private audiences and appointments, or when it carries the datelines "Holy See" or "Vatican City." The Vatican can disclaim official responsibility for all other stories.
Archbishop Giovanni Benelli, deputy secretary of state, acts as an informal link between L'Osservatore and Pope Paul. Benelli meets twice a week with the current editor in chief, Raimondo Manzini, 67, to plan articles for the paper, and consults the Pope on major points of editorial policy. Paul himself maintains a close personal relationship with L'Osservatore. He occasionally telephones Manzini, and sometimes reads proof on exceptionally important stories. When doing so, the Pope makes corrections in red ink and adds his personal comments, also in red ink, in the margins.
Paul carefully reads L'Osservatore every day, after his usual afternoon prayer in his private chapel. He makes comments on the margins, and afterwards sends the marked copy to Manzini. Paul once caught the misspelling of a curial prelate's name. Wrote the Pope: "These are errors that L'Osservatore should not make. He is one of our own people."