ROME The Vatican named former Fox News reporter Greg Burke as its new spokesman on Monday, the first time a US citizen has been entrusted with leading the pope’s communications team.
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Greg Burke, 56, will replace the Rev. Federico Lombardi, an Italian Jesuit who for 10 years has dealt with various papal dramas with a refined but distant style.
Burke was Fox News’s Rome correspondent before being hired by the Vatican in 2012 as special communications adviser in the Secretariat before he was named by Pope Francis as the vice-director of the press office last December.
And commenting on the appointment of Spanish journalist, Paloma Garcia Ovejero as Press Office Vice-Director, Burke pointed out that half the Catholic world speaks Spanish. Burke has spent over two decades in Rome as a journalist with National Catholic Register, Fox News and TIME.
Although the appointment was not unexpected, the Missouri native later told CNA it was “an honor to have been given this trust of the Pope”.
“The Church, therefore, feels the responsibility to pay maximum attention to the administration of their economic resources is always at the service of these purposes”, the document said.
Father Lombardi has had to deal with many communication crises as Vatican spokesman during an age of instantaneous news, the first being the media fallout from Pope Benedict XVI’s Regensburg lecture in September 2006.
While he was spokesman, Father Lombardi also headed both Vatican Television and Vatican Radio, the former until 2013, and the latter until February this year.
Francis says he was restoring these administrative functions to the APSA office because he realised there needed to be an “unequivocable and full separation” between those who manage Vatican assets (APSA) and those who supervise them (Cardinal Pell).
As vice-director of the Holy See press office under the pontificate of Pope Francis, the task is to “try to transmit exactly what he wants to say”, García said. He began working for the prestigious Time magazine in 1990, and was a correspondent when John Paul II was named the magazine’s “person of the year” in 1994.
“Obviously Italian is the internal language of the Vatican”, Burke said in an interview with the Associated Press. “The fact that Paloma also comes from the working press corps – up until yesterday she was still doing radio reports – is a really good sign”.
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The Vatican announced that Garcia Ovejero, a native of Madrid, and Burke will begin their respective roles August 1.
