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VATICAN CITY — The Vatican has brought in the Fox News correspondent in Rome to help improve its communications strategy as it tries to cope with years of communications blunders and one of its most serious scandals in decades, The Associated Press learned Saturday.
Greg Burke, 52, will leave Fox to become a senior communications adviser in the Vatican's secretariat of state, the Vatican and Burke told the AP.
"I'm a bit nervous but very excited. Let's just say it's a challenge," Burke said in a phone interview.
He defined his job, which he said he had been offered twice before, as: "You're shaping the message, you're molding the message, and you're trying to make sure everyone remains on-message. And that's tough."
The Vatican spokesman, the Rev. Federico Lombardi, confirmed the move to the AP, saying Burke will help integrate communications issues within the Vatican's top administrative office, the secretariat of state, and will help handle its relations with the Holy See press office and other Vatican communications offices.
Burke, a native of St. Louis, Missouri, is a member of the conservative Opus Dei movement. Pope John Paul II's longtime spokesman, Joaquin Navarro-Valls, was also a member of Opus Dei.
The Vatican has been bedeviled by communications blunders ever since Pope Benedict XVI's 2005 election, and is currently dealing with a scandal over Vatican documents that were leaked to Italian journalists. While the scandal is serious — Benedict himself convened a special meeting of cardinals Saturday to try to cope with it — the Vatican's communications problems long predate it.
Benedict's now-infamous speech about Muslims and violence, his 2009 decision to rehabilitate a schismatic bishop who denied the Holocaust, and the Vatican's response to the 2010 explosion of the sex abuse scandal are just a few of the blunders that have tarnished Benedict's papacy.
Even the Vatican's response to the leaks from within the Vatican of sensitive papal documents hasn't involved a terribly sophisticated public relations strategy. Just last week the Vatican No. 2, Cardinal Tarcisio Bertone, blamed the media and the devil for fueling the scandal and accused journalists of "pretending to be Dan Brown."
Altar boys with sore bungers not in the discussion......
