Pope Francis Names Former Fox Correspondent Greg Burke as Spokesman
ROME — Pope Francis on Monday named former Fox News correspondent Greg Burke as his spokesman, marking the first time a U.S. citizen has held the post, which is crucial to shaping and spreading the papal message around the world.
Francis also appointed Spanish radio reporter Paloma Garcia Ovejero as his deputy spokesperson. She is the first woman to hold such a senior position within the Vatican communications hierarchy.
Burke, 56, is a member of the conservative Opus Dei movement. He takes over from the Rev. Federico Lombardi, who is 73 and, like Francis, a Jesuit. Lombardi had been Vatican spokesman for a decade.
Pope John Paul II’s longtime spokesman, Joaquin Navarro-Valls, was also a member of Opus Dei, the organization portrayed in Dan Brown’s bestselling potboiler “The Da Vinci Code” as being at the root of an international Catholic conspiracy.
A native of St. Louis, Missouri, Burke joined Fox in Rome in 2001. He left the conservative network to become a senior communications advisor in the Vatican’s secretariat of state in 2012. Prior to Fox, where he led coverage of the death of John Paul II and the election of Benedict XVI, Burke had been Time magazine’s correspondent in Rome for a decade. He is a graduate of Columbia University’s School of Journalism.
Burke’s appointment as the first American in charge of the pope’s media image comes as Murdoch-owned pay-TV Sky gears up for the launch of Italian director Paolo Sorrentino’s hotly anticipated TV series “The Young Pope,” starring Jude Law as the first American pope, conservative pontiff Pius XIII. The first two episodes of the show are set to world-premiere at the upcoming Venice Film Festival in September, before airing in October in five European countries.
The appointments of Burke and Garcia Ovejero are considered part of a broader overhaul of the Vatican’s communications operations, aimed at centralizing authority under its new Secretariat for Communications, headed by Monsignor Dario Vigano.
Vigano, who also oversees the Vatican TV Center, is a film buff, author of books about movies and TV and their links to the Roman Catholic Church. These include “Gesu e la macchina da presa. Dizionario ragionato del cinema cristologico,” which can be translated as “Jesus and the Movie Camera. A Dictionary of Christological Cinema.”
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