Vatican City — The cardinals who file into the Sistine Chapel for next month’s conclave will check their newspapers, cellphones and iPads at the door. The frescoed chamber will have been swept for bugs. If the last conclave is any guide, the prelates will cast secret ballots on a floor raised to make room for electronic jamming equipment.
As paramount as privacy is to the deliberations for selecting the next pope, sharing information will be critical to that pontiff’s success. When Benedict XVI’s successor is introduced on the balcony of St. Peter’s Basilica with the cry of “Habemus Papam,” his name and message will be liked on Facebook pages, blasted out on a Twitter account that has more than 1.5 million followers, downloaded onto a Vatican YouTube channel, linked in Catholic blogs and introduced across multiple platforms tended to by a small Vatican office off the Via della Conciliazione.
“The important thing for us is that people are sharing,” said Archbishop Claudio Maria Celli, president of the church’s Pontifical Council for Social Communications. Celli oversees News.va, a hub for church news. On Saturday its homepage, designed in the Vatican’s white and yellow colors, featured the pope’s Twitter feed, MP3 audio files of the speeches of popular Cardinal Gianfranco Ravasi during the pope’s Lenten retreat and video of the massive crowd that showed up for one of the pope’s last public appearances. (But no gifs.) The site attracts about 15,000 visitors a day, nearly half of whom are new visitors. The average time they spend on the site, Celli said, is 2 minutes 20 seconds. “They are not there by chance,” he said. “They came to read.”
The Vatican is not the only government eager to promulgate its message directly to its target audience. The Obama administration’s efforts to avoid traditional news filters (something it has openly embraced since MyBarackObama.com, or “MyBO” in the 2008 campaign) is being debated in some Washington circles.
For the Vatican, the benefits of such a strategy are obvious. The church has long viewed the secular press as antagonistic and interested only in scandals and tension. Church officials say they face a nearly universal disinterest in papal speeches and church conferences. Their increased emphasis on making church content shareable not only is consistent with how people increasingly process news and information, but it also fits neatly into the evangelistic mission at the church’s core.
“To us, it seemed an opportunity to be there where people meet, where men communicate and create relationships and search,” Celli, an eloquent archbishop and veteran of the Vatican’s elite diplomatic corps, said in a recent interview.
Lack of understanding
Celli’s the-old-folks-just-don’t-understand spiel wouldn’t be out of place in the sleek white offices of social media hubs such as Buzzfeed. “I don’t even think that there is a force voluntarily against this,” he said of the opposition to social media in the Vatican. “It’s that we have people who belong to another culture. Many people still have an instrument-based view of communication. I have an instrument, an iPhone. There is no understanding that there is another world, a network that we all live in together. There isn’t this understanding.”
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