Vatican Hires American Journalist For PR Job
Fox News journalist Greg Burke, an Opus Dei member, will work for the Vatican's top administrative office.
| Posted Saturday, June 23, 2012, at 3:41 PM
Photo by Vincenzo Pinto/AFP/Getty Images.
The Vatican will be getting some (much needed) PR help after hiring a Fox News correspondent as a senior communications adviser for the Church's top administrative office, the Associated Press reported on Saturday.
The Fox News staffer, Greg Burke, is also a member of the conservative Catholic Opus Dei group. He will leave his job at Fox, where he is a Rome-based reporter. Before working for Fox, Burke was a Rome-based journalist for Time.
The recent, embarrassing Vatican leaks scandal is only the latest PR disaster to plague the Church since Pope Benedict XVI's election, as the AP notes. Previous blunders include the Vatican's response to the 2010 sex abuse scandal, the Pope's remarks on Muslims and violence, and the rehabilitation of a Holocaust-denying bishop.
So it's perhaps not surprising that, as the AP notes, Burke has been offered the job twice before. He'll be working for the Secretariat of State, the Church's top administrative office.
Looks like he'll have a lot of work to do: on Monday, the Vatican further damaged Church-media relations by blaming the media for the leaks scandal, accusing journalists of trying "to imitate Dan Brown" in their coverage, as the Telegraph explains.
