The shape of religious media communication changed dramatically because of the opportunities given by digital media and by the process of the secularization, structural changes in religious organizations, and the challenge enabled by the huge loss of credibility in the eyes of the world. We can observe certain dynamics in the professional approach of official Catholic media, especially those based in the Vatican. Its on-line project Vatican News has provided news service since 2017, now in almost forty languages. In the spirit of continuing the reform of the Roman curia, for which the founding of Secretary for Communication (now dicastery) was the “pilot” area, Pope Francis appointed the first layperson to lead any office of curia in 2018, and journalist Paolo Ruffini became the prefect. A few months later, one of most famous experts on the Vatican, also a lay person, journalist Andrea Tornielli, became editorial chief of the Dicastery for Communication. Other personal changes continued soon. The goal of this article is to analyse the initiative that Ruffini and Tornielli took in their office during six months after their appointment. The quantitative content analysis of both their Twitter accounts, closely connected with the newscast produced by Vatican News, is the scientific method used in this paper. There were detected new journalistic genres in the social media space (e.g., short video, editorial, story), vast popularity of Pope Francis, and success of his own Twitter activity (he obtained even tens of thousands of followers) or, contrarily, the omission and inconsistency when introducing uneasy themes (abuse crisis in the Catholic Church, ecology or economy) to the public. There was also the surprising realization that Ruffini is more popular in the Twitter milieu than Tornielli.

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Changing the paradigm: Using strategic communications to promote recognition of child sexual abuse as a preventable public health problem.

The Catholic Church (Further referred to as “Church” for shortening) has been facing a number of scandals regarding its priests and religious figures for several decades. Therefore, effective measures, considering legal or pastoral changes, and a working communication strategy are necessary to deal with the sad facts and to regain credibility through means of accountability, transparency, and solidarity. The expectations of what the official Vatican media—which has been undergoing multi-layer reform since 2015—is for are changing quickly and dramatically in the era of abuse crisis, possibly even having a wicked character. Among the initial commitments of the curial Dicastery for Communication included the criteria of paying “special attention to situations of hardship, poverty and difficulty”. We shall necessarily ask whether the employees and servants in Catholic Church communication are aware of all the contemporary risks and possible consequences of being resistant to it. The goal of this contribution is to inquire if and how the character of Vatican communication changed in this direction and whether it reacted to the critique and to the doubts made on the level of credibility and accountability. The time limitation is the second half of 2019—since the appointment of the new Vatican spokesman Matteo Bruni in July 2019 to November 2019. The article takes into account the official Vatican News website data source and asks how flexibly Bruni responded to the critical situation.