SCOTT DETROW, HOST:
There was a moment during our live special coverage of Pope Leo's election that I will never forget. Leo, who up until that day was known as Cardinal Robert Prevost, was addressing St. Peter's Square in Italian.
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POPE LEO XIV: (Speaking Italian).
DETROW: It had been an open question of whether we would have a live translation. We didn't. So NPR's longtime Rome correspondent Sylvia Poggioli leapt into action.
SYLVIA POGGIOLI, BYLINE: Peace be with all of you.
DETROW: Sylvia Poggioli was a key part of NPR's coverage of the election of the first American pope. She's been a key part of NPR's Vatican coverage since the days of Pope John Paul II. A few days before the conclave began, I took a stroll through St. Peter's Square with someone that listeners have long viewed as one of the most iconic voices in NPR history.
POGGIOLI: We're about to go into the center of the square to try to have a little art history lesson.
DETROW: Poggioli spent decades as NPR's Rome correspondent. In addition to having one of listeners' most beloved and recognizable outros...
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POGGIOLI: Sylvia Poggioli, NPR News, Rome.
DETROW: Poggioli helped establish the sound and standard for our news network.
POGGIOLI: (Speaking Italian).
UNIDENTIFIED PERSON #1: (Speaking Italian).
POGGIOLI: OK.
DETROW: This week's Reporter's Notebook begins with an art history and architecture lesson.
And we're standing here in the square, and this is the central visual of the Vatican, but it also - the setting has played a role in so many big ceremonial events that get international attention - papal funerals, installation Masses. And it seems like the setting is as much of the story as what the cardinals and the popes are saying in the setting.
POGGIOLI: Oh, absolutely. I'm not so sure if it would look half as exciting, half as dramatic, without this incredible square, this - the basilica, which was partially designed by Michelangelo, then Bramante, many other architects. And - but most of all, I think it's this colonnade that really gives it this dramatic sort of embrace, this round, elliptical shape that's almost like these arms are embracing you.
DETROW: Poggioli covered all sorts of different stories over the years, including difficult, challenging ones like the ethnic conflicts in the Balkans in the 1990s. But she says the Vatican was the most challenging. She wanted to take me to the middle of the square to look at that colonnade from a specific angle to illustrate that point. She guided us a few feet over and had me stand on a marble oval placed in the cobblestones just a few feet from the obelisk in the center of the square.
POGGIOLI: We're here in the center of St. Peter's Square. My father first brought me here when I was about 12, and he pointed this out to me. We're surrounded by the magnificent colonnade designed by the sculptor Bernini. We see four rows of columns that surround this elliptical square. Right now in the center, right near the obelisk, and from here, we see only one column.
DETROW: Yeah.
POGGIOLI: Now, that's a trompe l'oeil - an optical illusion. And it's - and that - optical illusions and shifting perspectives are some of the hallmarks of baroque architecture. And baroque is essentially the glorification of the Catholic Church's temporal power. When I started covering the Vatican, I remembered my father's art history lesson, and I began to see it as a metaphor for the Vatican's opaque, you know, sometimes secretive manner of presenting itself to the outside world, or at least to journalists.
DETROW: This is the point where I should concede that Sylvia and I were not technically supposed to be recording in the middle of the square, where all the religious pilgrims and tourists were milling around. So art history lesson accomplished, we headed back to our broadcast booth just off the square to continue the conversation.
Sylvia, what was it like walking into the Vatican press office for the first time?
POGGIOLI: Well, it was some 40 years ago, and it has been renovated since then, but I have to describe to you what it was like in the early 1980s. The first thing you'd see was a life-size sculpture against the wall of Christ crucified on a TV antenna. And I really didn't feel like that was a very encouraging sign about the...
DETROW: Wow.
POGGIOLI: ...Vatican (laughter).
DETROW: What a passive aggressive statement, or maybe not passive at all.
POGGIOLI: That's the way I took it, yeah (laughter). Now, things have improved a lot over the years. There's been a much greater effort by the press office to hold press conferences with prelates and lay officials of the Vatican. But, you know, direct access to Vatican officials is not easy, especially for reporters who don't work for Catholic publications, for women reporters and for reporters who don't work for well-known international publications and broadcast media.
DETROW: Which I guess was the position you found yourself in.
POGGIOLI: NPR was not that very well known here in Rome at that time. Now, the best access is for the Vaticanisti. That's Italian for Vaticanists. For them, it's a full-time beat, and they're experts at navigating the Vatican's formal and archaic bureaucracy, as well as they're really good at unearthing scoops in homilies and dense official documents. You know, but I found that sometimes the best sources were not prelates but the sort of behind-the-scenes people - secretaries, ushers and people like that.
DETROW: And what about Vatican spokespeople?
POGGIOLI: You mean Vatican spokesmen because they are always men. The first real Vatican spokesman was the Spaniard Joaquin Navarro-Valls. He was a combination spin doctor and a confidant of Pope John Paul II. And this was before the internet and social media, so he was in strong control of the message. For example, in 1998, I attended a press conference that was very hastily organized hours after a member of the Swiss Guards apparently killed Alois Estermann, his commander, and his wife and then also himself.
DETROW: Wow.
POGGIOLI: Navarro-Valls, who was a psychiatrist by training, asserted that the alleged killer was in a state of psychological turmoil.
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POGGIOLI: The investigation is being handled by a Vatican magistrate rather than being handed over to Italian authorities, as is the usual practice. But Navarro-Valls expressed certainty that the current working hypothesis is credible.
JOAQUIN NAVARRO-VALLS: And most probably the new data coming from the postmortem will not change at all that reconstruction of the fact.
POGGIOLI: Navarro-Valls ruled out...
DETROW: So I'm curious. Did that final report follow his preview of what it would be?
POGGIOLI: We never knew.
DETROW: Really?
POGGIOLI: We never found out really any of the real details of exactly what happened. It's one of the big mysteries surrounding the Vatican.
DETROW: So that's Pope John Paul II. He's followed by Pope Benedict XVI, who, in terms of communication styles, was a very different pope. How was that reflected in the press office?
POGGIOLI: Oh, he was very different. He was much less outgoing. John Paul II had had some contact with reporters on the flights, but Benedict, much, much, much less so. He would take a few questions prepared in advance. His spokesman was Father Federico Lombardi, and Lombardi had to tackle many crises, most notably Benedict's remarks that suggested that the early spread of Islam had been accomplished through violence. Those remarks caused intense anger among Muslims and even death. And then there was Benedict's rehabilitation of a Holocaust-denying bishop. That also caused an awful lot of uproar.
DETROW: Is it true that there were moments in some of these controversies where the reporters covering the Vatican seemed more hyperaware of, oh, this is going to cause a big global problem than perhaps the Vatican or the pope himself realized in the moment?
POGGIOLI: Absolutely. In the case of Pope Benedict's remarks at Regensburg in Germany, we had the prepared remarks ahead of time, and the reporters read what he was about to say. He was quoting somebody who had made these remarks centuries earlier. It was not his direct quote, but he was quoting somebody that said - made a statement that was very, very controversial in modern times, in the...
DETROW: Yeah.
POGGIOLI: ...Islamic world. And a bunch of reporters did go to the spokesman, Father Federico Lombardi, and suggested that maybe he might want to say something that this - to the pope, and Lombardi said he could not, he would not approach him on that.
DETROW: And that caused a massive, massive scandal that, in many ways, Pope Benedict never fully recovered from.
POGGIOLI: Not at all. There was that, and there were others. He was really afflicted by many, many scandals of this kind.
DETROW: So that brings us to Pope Francis, who you've noted was really his own spokesman in so many ways.
POGGIOLI: Totally. He was absolutely his own spokesman. He often caught the Vatican press office off-guard, announcing reforms, appointments. He even set up his own interviews. And he gave a lot of interviews to Spanish reporters but also to many others. He did TV interviews. Now, one of the most interesting things Francis did was he engaged over several years in a public dialogue with a leading Italian newspaper editor. It was a fascinating intellectual exchange between the leader of the Catholic Church and a very staunch secular journalist.
DETROW: Going back to that optical illusion that we saw a few minutes ago, you're taking me through the ways that the Vatican press office changed. I'm curious, over the years, were there ways that you changed the way that you tried to cover this institution?
POGGIOLI: I had to learn a lot about theology..
(LAUGHTER)
POGGIOLI: ...And religion.
DETROW: Yeah.
POGGIOLI: Yeah. I had to do a lot of research, yeah.
DETROW: Yeah.
POGGIOLI: Yeah. It was dense, sometimes. It was very difficult. And you had to really learn how to interpret these very obscure language and dense theological statements.
DETROW: Did you enjoy the challenge of covering this, or was it at times frustrating, or both?
POGGIOLI: Well, I think I had - there were some really great moments. I think when John Paul II went to Israel and - it was in front of the Wailing Wall - and he, you know, put a prayer in the crack, that was a very big event.
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POGGIOLI: As his motorcade wound through the narrow streets, Pope John Paul was welcomed to Nazareth by singing, drumming and cheers. But the town was also filled with Israeli police and border guards, some in full riot gear.
Another similar before that was when Pope John Paul II visited the Rome synagogue.
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POGGIOLI: Applause broke out when the pope and Rome's chief rabbi, Elio Toaff, stood together in front of the ark of the Torah at the beginning of the ceremony as the choir sang the "Hallelujah." There were tears in the eyes of many of the...
It was the very first time in history that a pope had entered a synagogue. That was a very - to be in these historical moments was very big. The other time was with Pope Francis on the plain of Ur in Iraq.
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POGGIOLI: And the Pope sat there with Muslim, Christian and Yazidi religious leaders. It started with recitations from the gospel and from the Quran.
UNIDENTIFIED PERSON #2: (Singing in non-English language).
POGGIOLI: To be there, you know, where - the Land of Abraham and to see Catholic and Islamic and religious leaders, it was - yeah, it was pretty moving.
DETROW: That is NPR's Sylvia Poggioli. Thank you so much for telling us about this.
POGGIOLI: Thank you.
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DETROW: And for Saturday, that is ALL THINGS CONSIDERED from NPR News. I'm Scott Detrow in Rome. Thank you to editor Courtney Dorning, producer Tyler Bartlam, as well as producer Erika Ryan for all of their work on our stories, bringing you the news of the first American pope. And also thanks to producer Kat Lonsdorf. It's her last weekend on ALL THINGS CONSIDERED before she heads off to an exciting new assignment, and we will miss her. And thanks to you for listening. We will talk to you again tomorrow. Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
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