New Voice in the Vatican

Shortly after his election in 1958, Pope John XXIII summoned the director (editor) of L'Osservatore Romano, the Vatican's "semiofficial" newspaper, to express mild dismay over L'Osservatore's numerous florid allusions to the "Illuminated Holy Father" and "The Highest Pontiff." Said Pope John: "It would be much better if you simply said 'The Pope has done this' and 'The Pontiff has said that. " But the remonstrance fell on the ears of a man who had headed L'Osservatore for 40 of its 99 years, surviving three Popes, and was pretty much set in his ways. Fortnight ago the Vatican, in an obvious effort to modernize L'Osservatore both in style and viewpoint relieved the paper's longtime editor' Count Giuseppe Dalla Torre di Sanguinetto, 75. Named to replace him: Raimondo Manzini, 59, editor of Bologna's influential Catholic daily, L'Avvenire d'Italia (circ. 80,000).

Mussolini's Thorn. Manzini takes over a paper that has no press parallel. In effect, each issue of L'Osservatore carries the sanction of the Pope and the Roman Catholic Church. L'Osservatore's 15 staffers, two of them priests, all write their stories longhand, care little about being days late with their copy. L'Osservatore is short on subscribers (75,000) but long on world influence: high church officials read it thoroughly, along with heads of state and diplomats around the world. "We do not seek circulation," Pietro" Cardinal Gasparri, Papal Secretary of State from 1914 to 1929, once said. "All we need is a newspaper in which to publish our denials."

That was certainly the spirit in which L'Osservatore was established in 1861, and it matured as an organ militantly eager "to denounce and refute all calumnies against Rome and its pontificate." When Dalla Torre, a brilliant and fiery young Catholic journalist from Padua, accepted the call to L'Osservatore in 1920, he gave the paper's credo a more positive interpretation. In Fascist Italy, L'Osservatore was Mussolini's thorn. It refused to address him as "Duce"; once, when officials ordered Dalla Torre to commemorate October 28 as the anniversary of the Fascist march on Rome, the editor instead headlined the date as the anniversary of Pope Pius XI's consecration as an archbishop. Despite threats of arrest, Dalla Torre boldly denounced Hitler as an "antichrist."

Days Numbered. But in the postwar years, Dalla Torre often seemed merely to be looking for something to tilt at. While a staunch antiCommunist, he also criticized capitalism as "a social disease and pestilence." He denounced everything from female athletes (in his view, they run the risk of sterility) to Italian males ("Italians have it firmly fixed in their minds that they are formidable seducers of young women"). And ever since Pope John was crowned, Rome has buzzed with the rumor that Dalla Torre's days were numbered.

With Dalla Torre moved by the changeover to the newly created post of L'Osservatore's "director emeritus," his successor is almost his precise opposite. Scholarly Raimondo Manzini, an old friend of Pope John's, is a conservative journalist who is a deputy of the Christian Democratic Party and can be expected to streamline L'Osservatore's style while faithfully reflecting Vatican views.

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