Lazy Workers At Vatican Press Office Cut and Paste from WIKIPEDIA !!

Oh Lord I don't know whether to laugh or cry.

Maybe the Holy See can just offer journalist John Allen ,a nice salary , a Holy See apartment , and have him shake things up.


Fr. Lombardi, please vet your assistants and check out their work!

Not to be mean about anyone, but does Fr. Lombardi have incompetent mindless assistants and does he not care? Sandro Magister claims in his blog today that the 'fact sheet' provided by the Vatican Press Office this week about the new cardinals-elect were verbatim cut-and-paste lifts from Wikipedia entries on the persons concerned, the task so taken for granted that apparently no superior checked these handouts before they were passed off to journalists.

And so no one had bothered to edit the cut-and-paste enterprise if only to take out the adjective 'Catholic' that describes each of the cardinals-elect at the start of their respective Wikipedia biodata! This is totally disgraceful and unacceptable.

Sounds like a scene out of an Animal House lampoon except that it is oh-so-regrettably true! It is pathetic that the Vatican Press Office has to rely on Wikipedia for biodata about the Church hierarchy.

Don't they have all these Annuario Pontificio and what-have-you, not to mention a website on the Catholic hierarchy (I think to the level of parish priest) which presents its data in tabular form? Of course, it's not as convenient to refer to as a Wikipedia entry (whose veracity is always a caveat, however).

But with a bit of common sense, let's see what they could have properly done with not too much effort: They could have asked each and every Curial office whose head was on the list for that person's biography - that takes care of ten biographies. Then they could have gone to the diocesan websites of the eight metropolitan bishops named to download their biographies, and that would have taken care of another eight.

Now, all they had to do was research the four octogenarian cardinals-elect and they'd have done their job: Two of them were consultors at the CDF - they could have obtained their biodata easily from the CDF. One was an emeritus professor at the Pontifical Gregorian University - they could have obtained his biodata just as easily.

The fourth, the 92-year-old Belgian scholar from Louvain, had a long distinguished career that surely his biography could also have been accessible from various sources, with not too much effort. (To begin with, Wikipedia entries usually footnote the primary sources for their facts, and one can go to these primary sources for more information and to check the veracity of what Wiki published; Wiki also usually identifies unverified or unestablished claims as such).
[Edited by TERESA BENEDETTA 1/8/2012 8:01 AM]