Vatican Still Unsure On How To Treat Pope Francis Weekday Mass Homlies

Sandro Magister has a interesting piece up on how   people are trying to deal with the rather new thing called the daily " public " Papal Homily. See The Spell of Pope Francis .

In dealing with recent remarks that the Pope said as to the " Vatican Bank" in his homily Sandro Magister says in part :


.....Pope Jorge Mario Bergoglio delivers these morning homilies completely off-the-cuff. And the passage reproduced above is the literal transcription provided a few hours afterward by Vatican Radio.

But that same day, in reporting on the same homily in another way, "L'Osservatore Romano" left out the aside: “But there are those guys at the IOR. . . Excuse me, eh?”

This disparity between the radio and the newspaper of the Holy See is an indication of the uncertainty that still reigns at the Vatican on what kind of media treatment to give the weekday homilies of the pope, the ones that he delivers at the 7 a.m. Mass, in the chapel of the residence where he is living.

To these Masses are admitted a selection of the public, different each morning. And among those present on April 24 a fair number were employees of the IOR.

These homilies of the pope are recorded in their entirety. But they do not undergo the procedure for his official discourses, when it comes to the parts improvised off-the-cuff.

That is, they are not transcribed from the audio recording, cleaned up in thought and expression, then submitted to the pope and finally made public in the approved text.

The complete texts of the weekday homilies of pope Bergoglio remain secret. Only two partial summaries of it are provided, by Vatican Radio and by "L'Osservatore Romano," redacted independently of one another and therefore with a greater or lesser extent of word-for-word citations.

It is not known whether this practice - aimed both at safeguarding the pope's freedom of speech and at defending it from the risks of improvisation - will be maintained or modified.

The fact is that what becomes known of these semipublic homilies is by now an important part of the oratory typical of Pope Francis.....